To the right, you can see the identification photo I attempted to submit for SXSW 2006. Below you can see SXSW’s reply:
The photograph you uploaded to the SXSW Online Registrant Directory was unnacceptable for the following reason:
Your badge photo is for identification purposes. Hasselhoff is sexy and all, but we need a photo of YOUR face. Thanks.
Michael Arrington’s company, Edgeio, officially launched. Web 2.0 Playbook: Step 1 (Featured on TechCrunch) is already complete; all that’s left is Step 2, then mountains of profits.
As our friend Nick reported this morning, (MC) Hammer is blogging. Heck, he’s even figured out moblogging. Note to aspiring blog networks: sign this guy up; heaven knows he’ll work on the cheap.
BoingBoing gets banned by UAE, Qatar–tells them to get bent. Someday people will write songs about Team BoingBoing; in the meantime, we’ll have to settle for some remixed Kraftwerk.
Apple’s announcing something tomorrow, and Microsoft will bow the Origami Project on Thursday. By Friday morning, we will have officially have reached “the future”. Have you ordered your jet pants yet?
Further evidence that the life of an A-lister is just better than yours — Dr. Tobias Funke/Ronnie Dobbs himself, David Cross, shows up at Jessica Coen’s birthday.
Peter Rojas launched a personal blog, complete with a delicious URL (peter.roj.as). I guess he finally “gets” this whole blogging thing.
Pirillo continued his Googlefast past the midway point. In other news, Ted Ferguson, Bud Light Daredevil just successfully stayed 2 minutes past 5pm — ON A FRIDAY!
After an earlier sale got derailed, the Blog Herald has officially been sold to BlogMedia, Inc. (yes, they actually have a .biz URL). Duncan Riley — you’re free of the curse. No more blogging about blogging….congrats, you lucky bastard.
And finally, Amanda Congdon beware — you’ve got some new competition on the Pod. Classic School House Rock! videos are now available on iTunes. (via Rubel)
Gadgetopia and Om Malik are officially gone….still waiting for a full manifest of the departed from 9rules, who first delivered news of the 9rules weight loss plan just over a week ago.
More on this as it develops (i.e. we compile a complete list of the sites stripped of their leafy 9r logo).
Sorry, rant coming…
Unless someone held a meeting without me, BLOGS = SITES. On these websites we call blogs, we make blog posts, blog entries, post stories, log posts, ramble, scribble, or just about anything….
We do not, however, publish blogs on our blogs. I make this point today b/c of the Office Pirates launch, brought to us by TimeWarner. On the shiny new Office Pirates site, individual blog posts are referred to as ‘Today’s Blog’, and the archive of old posts is called All Blogs.
See where this starts to get confusing?
To the Office Pirates team at TimeWarner…I like what you’re trying to do with the site. I always wondered what would happen if Something Awful relaunched on a million-dollar budget. But in your attempts to cash in on some blogging cool, can you at least try to follow the existing lexicon? Let’s try not to complicate this already crazy world of blogging, RSS, podcasting, vodcasting, vlogging, moblogging, etc. any further.
Makes me think somebody needs a Blogging 101 session from their corporate cousin Calacanis.
Tristan Louis (the blogosphere’s Steven Levitt) has favored us with a detailed then-and-now comparison of Technorati rankings from May 2005 to February 2006, appropriately titled Technorati 100: Here Today Gone Tomorrow.
There’s all sorts of data to be had–we were most interested in the difficulty that most of May 2005’s Top 100 had maintaining or gaining ground. A few (Engadget, Gawker, Defamer) managed to move up the charts, but as Tristan notes:
a total of 90 blogs (25 dropping within the list and another 65 dropping off the list completely) ended up with a lower position in 9 months
Interpretation: Turnover on the A-list may be rather high in the coming months. Stay tuned.
I believe it was just 2 days ago when I decided to IM Nick Denton to ask him what was going on in his world. I was going to start putting out an article every Monday that featured A-listers and what they have been up to. I often wonder what some of them are up to from time to time. Nick basically told me that he was trying to keep a “low profile.” I agreed that keeping a low profile was a good thing.
After Nick told me something that pointed me in the direction of talking to Andrew Krucoff, (which I didn’t do) I left Nick alone and wished him a warm and good day, (because I am so nice and polite.)
Much to my surprise this morning, I was reading my daily cup of Page Six in the New York Post. Well if the Gossip fairy didn’t just slap me in the face, wouldn’t you know I see Nick Denton in there. Now, I’m not saying that Nick wasn’t honest with me when he told me he was trying to keep a ‘low profile’, but come on, Page Six? Nick, you live in New York, keeping a low profile does not include Page Six knowing your business.
So as I am reading I find out some very interesting news about what Mr. Denton has been up to! From the [source]:
JUST in time for the blogger backlash from articles in New York magazine and the Financial Times, the mastermind behind New York-based Gawker and L.A.-based Defamer is shopping proposals for two new guidebooks flaunting the Web sites’ names.
A reliable source says that Nick Denton, who owns all the Gawker-linked sites, is peddling a two-book proposal for “Gawker’s Guide to New York” and “Defamer’s Guide to Los Angeles,” and asking for an “astronomical sum.” True to form, Denton intends to contract out the writing to cheap freelancers instead of using his overworked editorial slaves
HA! That’s all I have to say about that…..
On the first anniversary of “going pro”, Jason Kottke reflects on a year as a full-time problogger. And let’s just say, he isn’t exactly chomping at the bit for Year Two to begin.
After collecting almost $40,000 from “micropatrons” (in lieu of accepting ads on Kottke.org), Jason spent the past year basically doing what he’s done for the previous seven–blogging away. From his account, it sounds like Kottke experienced something that many a blogger has observed — rising to the top of the A-list (and staying there) would be so damn easy….if only life didn’t intervene.
As it were, Jason spent the last year traveling, doing Blogebrity interviews, getting engaged, and just all around living a 9-5 life, as opposed to treating Kottke.org like the startup company he envisioned it as one year ago today. Because of this (and the rigors of running a Micropatron system) he’s announced that he won’t accept donations for the site again this year, opting instead to work on other projects and continuing to blog when time permits.
What does this mean for professional bloggers? Very little. Considering the novel (e.g. ZERO ads) approach that Kottke took, his experience doesn’t directly mirror that of many professional bloggers, virtually all of whom still rely on advertising dollars as their primary source of bloggy income.
At least there is one thing Jason doesn’t need to worry about — his List status. Once he marries Meg, he’s guaranteed to be an A-lister for life.
Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo have been busy–and this weekend they revealed the latest fruits of their labor: new templates for all the Metroblogging properties.
The new look is a centered 3-column grey number that looks nice and classy–you can see it for yourself on Blogging.la or Metroblogging Dublin. Site navigation has moved from the left to the right side, just to the immediate left of the ad space. And our favorite–a sweet map at the top of the page, showing your current Metroblogging location.
Just one request–can you guys make the map at the top right interactive? I’d love to play Indiana Jones-style explorer, mousing-over Metroblogging locations and navigating to them with only a click.
Inspired by his own brrreeeport experiment–Robert Scoble attempts to become the top search for topless blogger in under a week.
Google, Technorati, Yahoo — who will track it fastest?
(via Winer, TechCrunch, Susan Mernit, Scott Beale, and the hundred other geeks talking about this party)
UPDATE: Nick says this is a trend, and supports his claims with more pictures. I’m gonna go ahead and say NSFW, b/c looking at pictures of bears at work can get you in as much trouble as an oversized fake breast, I assure you.
UPDATE (2/22/06): Robert Scoble, topless is now the number one result on a Google search for topless blogger.
It is a bit of old news for me, but a lot of you maybe have not seen the article printed in the Sunday, January 29, 2006 issue of The Washington Post.
As a lot of you know the Bloggies are a pretty big deal in this wonderful blogsphere. Although some of us don’t share the same feelings on who wins, we can all still vote on who we want to win in each of the categories.
The article was “When It Comes to Blogs, There Aren’t Enough Words” by Leslie Walker. Ms. Walker gives praise to some of the blogs nominated and totally rips on some of the others.
In a recent IM interview with Nikolai Nolan (the man behind the bloggie magic,) I asked him if he was aware of this article being printed, he was very unaware of it and said the reason behind some of the things she was saying was because he does what people ask for.
I can certainly agree with Leslie and wonder why there are a few blogs in one category that should be in another. Or even why some of the categories exist at all. Being a finalist this year in the Bloggies I also asked Mr. Nolan if he plans on changing the website at all. He said no, he liked the design. For something as big as the Bloggies I would just assume they would look a bit more high profiled. Make it a little more snazzy so people actually enjoy being on the page while they take the time out of their day to vote!
I sent Mr. Nolan an email the first day nominees were posted and asked about the error message voters were recieving. I had friends that were trying to vote for me but they were getting a message that was preventing them from voting.
Mr. Nolan replied with:
I’m waiting for a response from my Web host right now, because I don’t
know either. Last year it was bandwidth issues, but I upgraded last
month to avoid that happening again. Maybe the Weblog Awards are even
more popular than I thought. :\ Keep checking back, it should be fixed
soon.
Well since you know your “little Weblog awards” aren’t so little, maybe you can think about making a more professional site to host them? He was late posting the finalists and had bandwidth issues. The Bloggies are nationally known, treat them as if they are something instead of nothing. The idea of having these awards is to give awards to the BEST of blogs every year, maybe your site should be ONE OF THE BEST out there as well? If you are listening to what people want, then surely this won’t be hard for 2007…right?
This is two weeks old, so many of you may have seen it already….but it’s Friday, and we figured you’re better off looking at Amanda Congdon and Die Hard 2 bad guy William Sadler all weekend, as opposed to this morning’s Grossness:
This morning on Slate, Daniel Gross uses powerful deductive reasoning to try and stir up some easy blogger traffic for his less-than-widely-read pieces explain why blogs are “over as a business”.
His rationale? Well, blogging was on the cover of New York Magazine, and Google is on the cover of Time Magazine–and their stock is falling. Obviously, everyone on the cover of a magazine this month is done for.
Applying Mr. Gross’ logic, we’re issuing the following warnings to some other February ‘06 covers:
Businesses Going Private
BusinessWeek dooms all businessmen attempting to leap out of fishbowls take their public companies private again.
If you were planning to take your company private, thank BusinessWeek for blowing it.
The Women of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
Sorry ladies, I know the issue’s been a bestseller from the days of Cheryl Tiegs to Elle MacPherson to Heidi Klum, but the fun had to end sometime.
Dammit SI — why’d you have to go and put ALL of the models on the cover?
Ashlee Simpson
She’s survived mountains of bad press about her music and movies, not to mention an all-time embarrassing SNL appearance. But can she survive this month’s ELLE cover?
Actually, come to think of it….this one might be proof that Gross is on to something.
Adorable Cat Fancy cover cat
Sorry, I don’t even know your name. But your career is over kitty. Didn’t anybody tell you the damage cover stories can do?
With a Cease & Desist Monday, apparently:
A source at YouTube informs BoingBoing that NBC recently sent the user-submitted video hosting site a nastygram over the Saturday Night Live “Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia” video.
That’s right — NBC’s lawyers are beating YouTube with a DMCA stick because the viral content distributor helped facilitate NBC’s biggest viral hit, ever.
Memo to Lorne Michaels — NBC lawyers are about to turn your latest golden goose into a symbol of corporate “wedontgetitness” — stop this before your 6th comeback comes to a screeching halt. If you don’t, we’re sending Anthony Michael Hall back for a second stint on SNL.
(via Boing Boing)
Yesterday’s virgin Blogebrity video effort was so much fun, we had to go back for more. So today we proudly introduce Access Blogebrity–where we provide a face and a voice for the blogebrities you’ve come to know and love.
In this installment, we present the esteemed Marc Canter, supplying his definition of the word ‘blog’:
Got other videos of Blogebrities? Post ‘em to YouTube or Google Video and send links to tips@blogebrity.com.
