Posting from a lovely friend’s lent laptop, thanks to my Compaq Evo N600c, an utter piece of shit less useful than a Spell-n-Speak, being sent, again, to the repair shop. Note to Steve Jobs: I will personally pleasure you if I can have an iBook.
Joho whips up a wrapup of the white men, mostly about tech, with a little politics thrown in.
Dave Winer has dancing bigheads. Would you trust this man with your college-aged sons and daughters?
I should have covered Rebecca Blood’s interview of Heather Armstrong days ago. It’s not about getting dooced. It’s about Armstrong’s baby daughter and ADD and hatemail. Heather Armstrong is a very funny woman, and when her kid’s 18 she’ll be totally hot. So keep an eye out.
Oh dear lord, Mrs. Armstrong, please don’t hit me with that shovel.
Singapore’s Education Ministry co-organized an interschool blogging contest.
Meanwhile, blogs start a Malaysian-Singaporean War, yielding some lovely bites: “Really, stop being so anal, it’s 2005, being called incestuous is not so bad.”
A rare Blog Herald blind item: Which leading website continues to steal content ideas without credit? My guess is Google. Every time I visit that site they’re reprinting some other guy’s headlines.
Drew Krucoff gets harsh about the Sploid redesign. People, this is Web 3.0! You cannot stop the future! It is here and its name is GRID! Alert Jeff Jarvis!
Tags: quickies
The Blog Business Summit offered Blogebrity a press pass, but none of us could make it to San Fran. So all my questions for the speakers will go unanswered:
Rebecca Blood: Your profile says you’re “widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on blogging.” It also calls you a “thought-leader.” Why have I not heard your name in three years?
DL Byron: Can I get a Clip-n-Seal? I ate a bag of potato chips for breakfast but there are some left and I have no baggies in which to seal them fresh for dinner.
Anil Dash: When Six Apart bought LiveJournal, were you excited at the prospects of sharing ideas between two rich communities of bloggers? Or did you just think, “Oh damn, for the rest of my life everyone will tell me their ‘mood: depressed’ jokes.”
Shawn Gold, who, by the way, opened comment threads up about Autoblog advertisers and is thereby pretty cool, but also claims he invented interstitials, when he should try to pin those on al Qaeda: How long before News Corp’s buyout did you leave Intermix Media? Did you hold on to some of your stock? I bet you did. I bet you’re happy for yourself now.
Chris Pirillo: Could you speed up your podcast? Maybe lay down some music beds?
Robert Scoble: Just between us, whenever you say “evangelist on the Windows team,” inside you’re snorting, right? And make the speech again about reading 1200 RSS feeds daily, cause I can’t download the recording of it, and I’m dying at 205 feeds.
Biz Stone: How you be so sexy? Nice job launching “flag as objectionable” at Blogspot today. Seriously, this could be the spam killer that saves Blogger.
Organizer Steve Broback: Did someone run your speakers page through Firefox? Did they notice the crazy misplaced mug shots?
Open question: LINKSPLZKTHXBYE!
It’s for the best that I couldn’t attend.
UPDATE: I guess eight is the new ten.
Tags: blogbusinesssummit, silly
Jason Kottke can steal links from 2 feet away, armed only with his shades.
Boing Boing riffs on its reader survey (far cooler than anything from Comscore) when it reports the CBS podcasting call. They link to Rick Ellis, who “meh”s CBS’s terms.
Merlin Mann abuses cheese with a hotdish.
It wasn’t until I read it in the NYT that I bristled at Denton’s quote, “As the blogs gain scale, they lose the demographic purity that made them special to begin with.” I think the young rich male demo is satisfied. Let’s see more ad-based blogs targeted to other demos. Surely everyone else is spending money too.
The Blog Business Summit offered Blogebrity a press pass – that’s admission to a $795 conference – free, if I understand them. If you can cover this San Fran event on August 17-19, please e-mail popsnap@gmail.com with a link to your blog or writing portfolio. Include your IM name if you can. Speakers include Corante’s Stowe Boyd, Six Apart’s Anil Dash, WIN’s Shawn Gold, Weblog Handbook author Rebecca Blood, 9rules executive Matthew Oliphant, LockerGnome founder Chris Pirillo, MS blog king Robert Scoble, and Xanga and Blogger developer Biz Stone. Sources haven’t confirmed, but I believe Jesus is making an appearance.
If you can’t make the summit, entertain yourself with the BBS bookcast. Listen to them type!
Mark Frauenfelder has a cute nerdy voice, so I’m excited to hear him on the RU Sirius podcast.
Less exciting: Cinematical’s podcast review, which shows promise but reveals the roughness of this beginning ‘caster. Karina Longworth writes eloquently, but her strongly structured syntax feels forced. Also, Karina, I love you, but step away from the mic a bit. Little too close for comfort.
Boing Boing secretly wants to bring back comment threads.
An LJ story about punking Creed’s Scott Stapp makes it to Defamer and Whole Lotta Nothing.
Not sure why Jason Calacanis wants the stats for BuzzMachine. Nor am I sure why he posted about his nephew and godchild but took the post down. If he doesn’t repost by Sunday, we’ll show you the cuteness.
Las Vegas and Poker Blog studies the evolution of poker blogs, name-dropping triple-threat actor/writer/pokerer Wil Wheaton and Texas Hold ‘Em blogger Dan Michalski. No love lost on gambling blog Oddjack, covered by LVaPB with a link to Bill’s Blog. Sez Bill:
OddJack is slipping into an abyss of meaninglessness with every passing day. The posts don’t even seem as if any attempt is being made to provide value. It’s just a constant stream of cries for help.
Please, please, please Josh Arieh notice us!!!!! If we could just get one poker pro to pay attention to us, even if it’s to hate us, we would feel validated. Damn!!! Give it a rest guys.
He tells Oddjack to cut the smarm and calls it out for “an obvious attempt to cash in on a trend without taking the time to understand it.” Commenters, even those who love GM, agree: Oddjack is a bust.
Gawker calls Blottered’s “Must Love Scams” post anti-Semitic. Is it? Is Gawker serious? Why am I asking that? Gawker’s irony and honesty are in permanent quantum flux.
Today in blog poetry, a Daniel Maurer limerick:
There once was a writer from Nashville
Who moved to New York with but a satchel.
Now his bar buzz is genius
And he has a large penis
And still he remains very bashful.
Rule 1 of limericks: Always include a penis. And our final Gawker item: “Half of us once had a big fight with an editor…” Okay, that’s just silly. Jesse, Jessica, either get engaged or stick your names on these posts.
I hoped Political Dogs would have entries on Checkers and a vidcast of Spot’s death. Sadly, no.
Technorati stays in its own hands. Damn, I wanted a shake-up.
Blogebrity will gladly take any junket you hand it, but we’ll still bite you in the ass. We have no scruples.
I like “the next Google” speculation, but Whole Foods Market is a stretch.
Have a good weekend, whether in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, or Rome. I’m gonna drink enough to make a beer bottle organ.