Jason Clarke

I got my beta invite to Odeo tonight. Checked it out some, be checking it out even further tomorrow.

Via a commenter on Radio Equalizer, I just found a neat site that tracks national radio ratings by market. Here’s the latest local rankings for my location.

Two new blogs to keep an eye on, both of them written by my office mates:

Alex

Jerome

Hearfelt congratulations to Jay Rosen for winning the Reporters Without Borders Freedom Blog Award for sites “defending freedom of expression” for his blog, PressThink. A much deserved honor for one of the best blogs (and most thoughtful people) out there.

I’m busy working at my new job.

So, it appears that Nick Denton has reached into my brain, plucked out another idea, and slapped a semi-realized site design around it: The other day, his Gawker Media empire launched Oddjack, a gambling blog.

One notable element of the too-grey-heavy-site is the two choices of RSS feed: If you scroll allllll the way to the bottom, you’ll notice the site offers two RSS feeds: a full-text feed with ads, and a summaries feed with no ads. Choices are good.

In looking at my stats, it appears that I’m getting a huge amount of my traffic from search engines. So…does this mean that my site is either:

* Excellently positioned to gain reasonable-to-high rankings on a wide variety of keywords, or…

* Valuless, in that visitors from search engines are only interested in one thing and will click past me once they realize I don’t have it?

So that second one brings me to a thought: which type of visitor has more value, the one who comes in from pure search results or the one who follows a link from another site? At first instinct I’d say the latter, by a wide margin, but why? Aren’t those who click thru to me from a blog following a topic-based path, just as those from search engines?

I’m adding a new personal tag to my del.icio.us habit/space: “toread”. It’s, obviously, stuff I want to read later on. So then I’ll use the automagically generated del.iciou.us feed of that tag to dump back into my RSS reader (making sure to set the feed *not* to expire after I open it) so that I have a one-stop place to return to read stuff that I don’t have time to dive into when I first happen upon it.

Taking it back to the social angle (although del.icio.us is primarily a social tool, I think it’s myriad personal uses are equally huge and vastly undervalued - or at least vastly un-discussed), I can then add a new section to this site called “what I’m reading” and use BigBold’s RSS Digest to output the feed dynamically onto this site.

The web is pretty cool right now, huh?

Gmail Notifier hasn’t been working for me of late…for the past couple of days, it can’t seem to ever connect or stay connected. So is it down, or is it just me? I wonder…

An awesome new website for KUTV Channel 2 in SLC.