Puppet Interviews - Dove Deeper

Obama Ads

Lists of Twittering journalists - good people to Follow

Applause: Blaine Cook

I'm clapping for Blaine Cook, x lead architect for Twitter, and I'd like to thank Blaine for all the hard work he put into making Twitter what it is today. Twitter may be experiencing some growing pains but I think Blaine is catching more flack for the problems this week than he deserves. Throw out a Tweet for Blain and thank him for all of his hard work - attach the hash tag #thankyoublainecook. Blain's website - includes phone number and email address if you're looking for his contact info.

Related: Silicon Alley Insider: Lead Architect Blaine Cook Out at Twitter

Breaking: palmit.commentary acquired by New York Times

I'm pleased to announce that palmit.commentary has been acquired by the New York Times for an undisclosed amount of (love that smell) cash.

The New York Times, smartly, rushed palmit.commentary to the top of their list of blogs to acquire. As many of you know, they just acquired the blog Freakonomics. More blog acquisitions are expected as part of the recently updated New York Times "stay relevant" business strategy. The acquisition was quick and painless - the whole transaction happened via PayPal and IM.

We're working on integrating palmit.commmentary into the New York Times design template for acquired blogs. They said something about needing to spell-check my blog and make it look more like a newspaper but I expect to see my content on The New York Times soon. It will probably look a lot like this [[blogs.nytimes.com acquired blog template]]

comScore Releases Facebook Metrics

comScore recently released updated Facebook metrics. The 25-34 age group is growing faster than any other group - 181% year-over-year. Obviously, open registration and a very developer friendly platform are contributing to this growth. The Facebook crew has managed to almost double their unique visitors year-over-year - 26.6 million visitors in May 2007. I've started building my Facebook profile. Have you?

Name Our Baby

We have kids and we're fortunate to have another one on the way. I don't talk about my family here on palmit.commentary and I intend to keep it that way - no, you can't name our baby. I go a kick out of this Blaugh comic though - not too far from reality for some blogging parents. Don't let your community name your baby and don't optimize your baby name for Google search ranking.

Techmeme vs. Scoble's Link Blog

Google buys Feedburner for $100M

Valleywag - Arrington = Mickey Mouse

Arrington is like Mickey Mouse, in Fantasia: as did the cartoon character in the Disney movie, the Techcrunch founder has cast a spell that's gone wrong; and it's too late to put the magic back in the bottle.

Matt Mullenweg Interview - Webware

Is my blog boring? The cute kittens don't think so.

Hi, originally uploaded by Cale Bruckner.

According to Scoble your blog is boring if you resort to posting cute pictures of cats for traffic. Is he right?

This is a picture of a couple kittens I took at the Green Hill Humane Society.

Cute? Or, boring?

Cory Doctorow writes about dealing with jerks in your community

How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community by Cory Doctorow

Related to my previous post, Death Threat Shutters "Creating Passionate Users" Blog, that discussed Kathy Sierra's unfortunate decision to leave blogging because hostile jerks invaded her community. A good read for any blogger.

In extreme cases, you end up with the kind of notorious mess that Kathy Sierra found herself in, in which trolls directed such bilious, threatening noise towards a harmless advocate for "passionate users" in web-applications that she withdrew from speaking at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference. - Cory Doctorow

Related Posts: 

Seth's Blog: The Troll Whisperer 

Death Threat Shutters "Creating Passionate Users" Blog

Conversation: Value of the Long Tail

High School 2.0 - Calacanis / Denton Style

Dave, a Techcrunch commenter, has it right - the cat fighting between Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton is High School 2.0 and the related Techcrunch post by Michael Arrington reads like an article out of the student-run school paper. On the other hand we're all reading it so doesn't that just make us a bunch of High School students? I appreciate Mike's coverage of the spat and enjoy reading about the more colorful side of the business sometimes. The comments associated with Mike's post are even more colorful ; ) - locker talk.

Messing around with Jason, IMO, isn't smart. He's well connected, visible, smart, and rich. Andrew Baron crossed him (listen to this TWit podcast) once and I think that might have marked the beginning of RocketBoom's trouble. RocketBoom.com Flame-out.

Related:
Nick's post "Netscape: The Calacanis Effect" gets it started
Jason starts firing back with "My favorite blogger/blog of the moment..."

Scoble Style

Blinkx Walls Rock - Here's my "Bush Terror" wall

The Power Blogging Business Travelers Have

Technorati Unplugged

VOX

I recently started using VOX, Six Apart's new blogging product, as a sort of personal journal - a private blog where my family is the only audience. So far I'm having fun with it. I'll update this post as I go. I use Six Apart's Movable Type product to power this blog.

More thoughts on VOX. Blogging is evolving. If you're not an A List blogger the masses aren't going to tune into your blog with any real frequency. It's hard to attract a sizeable audience so regular folks are focusing their conversations on the people they want to talk to and for the masses that's friends and family. More and more private blogs are going private. There are lots of business blogs out there and bloggers blogging for cash or career but private bloggers aren't trying to cast their nets wide anymore - they're dropping individual lines. Products like VOX are going to be very popular because they're giving the new blogger the tools they need to focus the conversation. Go VOX go.

TemplateMonster.com

Wow, TemplateMonster.com is sporting a very slick collection of templates for websites, flash applications, and a lot more. Pimp your WordPress powered site. Didn't see any templates for MovableType powered sites. I like how every template has a "Unique Price" - a price, that if paid, yanks the template off the site.

coComment

I registered at coComment tonight. coComment, short story, is designed to help you track the comments you post in the blogosphere. Sounds useful. I've lost track of most of the comments I've posted in the blogosphere and typically I loose track of any conversations I was following within a day or two. Maybe coComment can help me do a better job of staying involved in the conversation. We'll see.

I added a coComment widget over in the right-side column. Comments I make in the blogosphere, from this point forward, should start showing up.

Conversations are an important part of blogging. I'm glad to see the recent activity in this space. coComment has some competition - co.mments and Commentful.

Ted Stevens' - Tubes

It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. - Ted Steven's - Internet famous.

Transcript of his now historical Internet "Tubes" speach.

and it continues ...

and it continues ... Flickr's Error Page

RocketBoom.com Flame-out

I'm not going to say a whole lot about the RocketBoom.com soap opera (he said, she said) that's unfolding in front of the entire blogoshere because everybody else (scoble, techcrunch) has more interesting things to say about it. The part that interests me the most about it are Jason Calcanis' efforts to get Amanda Congdon (RocketBoom.com hostess) signed on to the Netscape employee list. Interesting because I thought Jason and Andrew Baron (owns 51% of RocketBoom.com) really went after each other during a recent TWIT (#57) session. Jason has got to be loving the way this is playing out.

Update: and it keeps getting better - now with cool comic from blaugh.com

Gnomdex6 Live

Gnomedex6 (July 29th - July 1st) - I'm not at the conference but I'm listening to the live stream. Props to Chris for streaming the conference live - video included through the keynote. Chris' blog is is updating with conference content as it progresses.

Prediction: Scoble Launches Vlogging Craze

Scoble is going to launch vlogging (and podtech.com) into orbit. I spent some time with my surfboard tonight - surfing the vlog waves - there's a lot of crap out there but there's also some really good stuff flying around. Pioneers like Amanda Congdon (Rocketboom) are doing pretty good for themselves already - we're talking about 85K a week in advertising revenue and 300,000 visitors a day. I'm looking forward to watching this space as it develops.

Scoble - IMO

Scoble, the uber blogger, is leaving Microsoft for Silicon Valley start-up podtech.com. News of Scoble's decision to leave Microsoft rocked the blogosphere over the weekend and it will continue to monopolize the conversation through the week. In fact, the jolt and the resulting traffic was significant enough to knock podtech.com off-line for a while. IMO, Microsoft should have done a lot more (there's a price) to keep him around. Seriously, Scoble is Microsoft in the blogosphere and I can't see how they're going to fill the void - Channel9 was just a small part of what he did for them. Big mistake Microsoft - you can't afford to loose guys like Robert. Best wishes Robert!

Related: Scoble is Leaving Microsoft - Chris Pirillo (good "buzz" outline/link list

Comments Enabled

The palmit.com commenting system is back up - I pulled it down because I was getting burried in comment SPAM. Please try not to hit the server all at once ; )

Actually, I re-enabled the system over the weekend. I've been watching the comment SPAM traffic for the last 24 hours to see if my work made a difference. I think it did.

What did I do to reduce the SPAM volume? I spent some time further customizing and configuring the already powerful SPAM blocking features included with MovableType 3.2. Additionally, I installed Brad Choate's free MT-DSBL plugin. MT-DSBL uses real-time DNS lookups to determine if the commenter's IP address is listed as an open proxy. I configured it to automatically "junk" any comments coming from an open proxy and this seems to be helping. I also spent some time reviewing my collection of junk for popular keywords - which I added to my keywords filter.

For the moment, my comment SPAM volume has been reduced to a manageable level. 

Comments Disabled (Again)

Comments Enabled

State of the Blogosphere Posted

Impressive growth (chart: cumulative weblogs) in the blogosphere. Are MySpace blogs included in these stats? And I thought it was slowing down.

State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

Summary: (Quoted from original article)

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Winer To Quit Blogging - Maybe?

Dave Winer - why I will stop blogging - is causing a lot of commotion in the blogosphere. No Dave, No! Mike Arrington (Crunch Notes) but it looks like this isn't the 1st time he's talked about shutting down his blog. Maybe he'll keep the Wordpress version of Scripting News going or maybe he's just crying out for more appreciation.

Related: Too much blogging? The noisy tragedy of the blog commons (Seth), Overwhelmed ... (Scobleizer)

ValleyWag

Gossip rag for the tech industry - Valleywag. Stuff only Geeks will laugh at.

• "Valleywag is a tech gossip rag. You people in Silicon Valley are far too busy changing the world to care about sex, greed and hypocrisy. But if you ever need a break, come visit us at Valleywag. - Valleywag"

Update:

ValleyWag launch party pictures.

-- photos by Jackson West

RSS 2.0 Template for MovableType

Clean RSS 2.0 template for MovableType via Aardvark Speaks - I the PalmIt.com RSS 2.0 feed.

Adding your Podcast to iTunes

The PalmIT podcast is now available as a subscription via the iTunes Music Store. Getting an RSS feed configured to meet Apple's schema was the hardest part about making the podcast available in the iTunes Music Store. Here are the resources I used to make it happen. Become the 3rd person to subscribe to the PalmIT podcast now.

Podcasting and iTunes: Technical Specifications
iTunes Podcast - Jake Ludington
Brandon Fuller - MT-Enclosure - added support for ENCLOSURE element to MovableType

Commenting and Blogs

Commenting on blog pos