Technology

Congrats to the Award-Winning PressThink

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.
Oddjack: insert gambling pun headline here

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…
Rambling thoughts on my stats

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…
Just one of the personal uses of del.icio.us

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…
Gmail Notifier

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…
New website watch

An awesome new website for KUTV Channel 2 in SLC.
Mark Glaser on search engine spam

OJR has just posted a fascinating article by Mark Glaser examining how some companies, under pressure from the increasing importance of search engine rankings, are resorting to unethical search engine manipulation tactics to improve their “organic” search results.
Tales from The Long Tail: an interview with the co-founder of Peerflix

Today’s Tales from The Long Tail link is an interview with Peerflix co-founder Billy McNair by my closest-in-geography-blogger, F-Stop Blues‘ Tim Coyle. In the interview, Peerflix is explained (if you don’t know what it is, read the interview!), and its founder talks about the service’s bright future: Currently people mail DVD’s to one another. Do…
Hammersley’s new RSS book

Thanks to my affiliation with the Media Bloggers Association (disclosure: I am a board member and web developer) and the organization’s book review copy distribution program, I came home the other day to find a free copy of Ben Hammersley’s new book, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, waiting for me. I’ve only glanced at…
Congrats, Jeff

One of the media/tech gurus I look up to, Jeff Jarvis, has quit his big-media job at Advance.net to strike out on his own as Buzzmachine, LLC. Among other things, Jeff will consult for The NY Times Company and is working on a “stealth-mode” citizen’s media startup. I first became a fan of Jeff’s when…