kid's allright

the blip.tv blog » Twitter is a great idea

Mike Hudack is right about Twitter, so I’m giving it a second chance. But anyone I follow will get a warning and three strikes (according to Mike’s rules) and then I will remove them.

Optimizing for Relevancy, Part III from YPN Blog

Cross-posting my recent article on the YPN Blog about content optimization…

MySpace: Why We Block Widgets

Sounds straightforward enough. Right…?

Six cool things you can build with OpenID

I think Open ID is conceptually fascinating but it seems incredibly too tech-oriented in the current implementation for it to gain mass adoption. I’ll be heading to SXSW in a few weeks and look forward to engaging with folks on this topic.

The Great Media Industry Schism » Publishing 2.0

With quotes like "content creation is no longer an easily scalable business" and "content creation is asymptotically approaching commodity status", it looks like Scott Karp has a very definite point of view on recent trends.

The movie magic is gone – Los Angeles Times

Reading this a few minutes after the Oscars end, I’m struck by the fact that Jennifer Hudson, arguably a "user generated content" success story like no other (if you consider American Idol as v1.0 of user content) won an Oscar.

Just finished a weekend-long WordPress migration, and boy are my arms tired!

As such, this post will be very short.

But (I think) that everything is working — RSS feeds, old TypePad link structures, search referring links, my own links to myself…

I am still having some DNS rendering issues though…I’m hoping that will resolve itself over the next day or so…

Please let me know if you find ANYTHING broken via by commenting below.

For now, the site’s hanging in there in the default WP Theme. I’ll slowly add some design elements to it. I wanted to send out a note to (1) apologize to anyone who has had difficulty reading my blog this weekend during the migration and (2) let you know that a new design is on its way…but I’ve got to get away from the computer for a little while!

And to my friends and acquaintences at SixApart…please forgive me for the migration. But as I’ve set up a number of WordPress blogs recently for friends and family members, I’ve fallen in love with the interface and ease-of-use of wordpress.

Cheers! And stay tuned for many more updates to come…

-c

I spent part of my day yesterday getting my mom set up with her own blog. It’s still in development a bit — much if it is still pretty out of the box — but she’s up and live with two posts already! Drop by and say hi at Fifty and Femme. You can also add her as a contact on her MyBlogLog page.

Her blog falls on the heels of having set up a business site for my mother-in-law a few months ago at yarn. Looks like I’ve nearly cornered the market on personal mom-blog development (though my step mother hasn’t put her toe in the water yet so I’d better be on the lookout for competition…but 67% marketshare isn’t bad either!)

I normally don’t advertise conferences I’ll be attending…I’m more apt to write a short review afterward.  But since this event is being organized by a friend-of-a-friend (how apropos for a "community" conference!), I thought I’d put out the word about CommunityNext which is this Saturday (February 10) in Palo Alto, CA, on Stanford University campus.

The lineup of presenters looks great.  Let me know if you’ll be there!

One truly great thing about real friends in the real world is that they inject a joyful happenstance of anywhereness into your daily life.  A random phone call to say hi.  An unexpected email asking you to meet up for coffee.  An IM with a funny link.  Even a surprise running-into at the grocery store.  In the real world, you don’t contact your friends in one set location or way…you could potentially interact with them anywhere.  MyBlogLog brings this "joyful happenstance" or "anywhereness" equivalent to our online lives. 

Just as last.fm is revolutionizing how we listen to music by enabling us to externalize our listening habits, MyBlogLog is externalizing our reading habits by allowing us to lay some claim to sites as we frequent them.  Sort of a like a dog marking its territory or a street artist throwing up a sticker, when I have MyBlogLog turned on, I get to stamp my face (or Rivers Cuomo’s face in the case of my personal avatar) across each site that I encounter. 

To take the street artist metaphor further (for your benefit, I’ll forsake the doggy calling card metaphor), each time a street artist throws up a sticker or tags a wall, her notoriety (and brand) increases.  It’s the definition of guerrilla marketing and self-promotion.  Well, MyBlogLog enables that for online publishers.  Each time I read an article by other MyBlogLog users like Chad, Bradley, Scott, Eric, Matt, Jeremy, Marc, Susan, Yahoo!, Michael, or Richard, my "notrivers" avatar appears on the page instantly…and when people click on it they can make their way to my MyBlogLog profile page and eventually to my site.  And traffic is to a publisher what notoriety is to a street artist. 

MyBlogLog also appeals to the media junkie that lives inside most of us online publishers.  For example, once someone comes to my site via my avatar, they end up leaving their calling card on my site.  I can see that they’ve been there.  If it is someone influential, I might get all giddy and bubbly from personal pride ("wow, I attracted THAT person to my site?").  If it is a friend, I might be reminded to see what they’ve been publishing lately.  If I don’t recognize the latest smiling face in my sidebar, I might click on it to check them out and in the process end up discovering a great new source of content to follow.

Since I’ve been making lists, lists, lists for the last week or so, I’ll list my Top 5 Reasons Why I Love MyBlogLog and am Thrilled to See Them Join Yahoo!:

1. They are, first and foremost, a publishing tool.  And they have quite a twofer: they get ya traffic and help you analyze it too.
2. They are 100% distribution minded.  No bones about it, they are a service specifically designed to be portable.  They live and die by the way people integrate MyBlogLog services into their own sites.  It’s the growth of the service out on the open web that really matters.
3. They help me discover stuff too.  Not only do they drive traffic to my site and fulfill my publisher-minded dependency on traffic and stats, they fulfill my other primordial media need — the need to consume.  Lots of bad powerpoint presentations have pontificated the rise of the "pro-sumer" or the "virtuous circle" of consumer-publishers — I know I’ve created many of them — but MyBlogLog creates a tangible use case for this trend.  As I noted above, I love to use MyBlogLog to see who has been on my site and to go check out their sites, too.
4. They make me feel really cool when someone well known has stopped by.  As a publisher who is, shall we say, less than an "A"-lister, I love to see when a truly big name publisher has somehow stumbled onto my site.  Before MyBlogLog exploded onto the scene, I wouldn’t know if someone big-time came by unless they left a comment or linked back to me (like that’s going to happen).
5. They aren’t just for bloggers.  Name be d@mned, they also work on MySpace and most other sites that allow you to embed content.  This means that anyone looking to build an identity or gauge their "coolness" on MySpace (here’s mine) or other sites have a really powerful arrow in their quiver: they can see who’s reading their page.  We have a fun "product marketing" challenge ahead of ourselves here in terms of introducing this notion to this other (very massive) crowd, but the platform has done a pretty good job of marketing itself so far…

BONUS: The team is really great!  I’ve gotten the chance to meet various members of the team over the past few months and I’m thrilled to welcome them to Yahoo!  Congratulations guys!  And congrats to the teams at Yahoo! that made this happen.  MyBlogLog is such a fun and sticky service that I have to say it: Yahoo! and MyBlogLog is now peanut butter and jelly!

P.S., Sticker art photo by me.  Make sure you check it out on Flickr directly.  Lots of cool notes and comments on it.