Microsoft Office solved the problem of having incompatible products to do the standard office functions.  There was one “look and feel” and data could be easily moved from one product to the next.

There is now some excitement about having web-based products to replace office.  We need web-based central data storage more than web-based systems.

I have a dozen link blogs on Blogger.  Link blogs are blogs where each entry is a link to other material.

I started the link blogs as a substitute for bookmarks / favorites.  Instead of setting an IE Favorite or a Firefox Bookmark, I used the “Blog This” button and created a blog post.  It gathered the links that I wanted to save in a convenient, searchable way.  Unlike using Favorites or Bookmarks, I was able to select a quote from the source or add a comment about the site that I was linking to.

I created a dozen link blogs on various topics that I was interested in, including Web Design, Web Based Learning, and Computer Support.  Every now and again, I would write a post myself.

The blogs are not popular, and do not get much traffic, but they started to get some spam comments.  I policed the comments, actually kept a few, and was delighted when Blogger added some sophistication to policing comments.

I added the code to display any links to my posts.

I considered adding a tag cloud feature, but it did not make that much sense in an organized link blog.

I could have used del.icio.us to save the links, and I do use del.icio.us to save links, creating the normal plethora of tags.  If the link is to be gathered into the dozen topics that I have selected, I use “Blog This” and add them to a link blog.  If the link is on another topic, I add it to del.icio.us.  Sometimes it is a gray area, and I add it to both.

I tweaked the blogs, changed the templates, added Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate ads, added links to my website, and added links so that each blog linked to every other blog.  It could have helped my search engine results.  I made enough money to take a friend for a cup of coffee.

I added the Feeds, and then downloaded a Feed reader to read my feeds.  My reader would not read Atom feeds, so I signed up for FeedBurner to convert to RSS Feeds.  I added ads to my feeds. I changed to partial feeds, and then changed back to full feeds.  It did not make much different because the posts were so small.  Several people subscribed to the feeds.

Once I had a Feed Reader, I subscribed to lots of other feeds. I learned about OPML and used it to add groups of feeds.

The other day I used “Blog This” to add a blog post, but Google had marked one of my blogs as a possible Splog, a dreaded “Spam Blog”.  I had to request that a Google human look at the blog to evaluate it.  The Google human was very prompt and ruled that the blog was legitimate.

It is an ongoing object lesson on Blogging, blog comments, splogs, spam, track backs, blog templates, taxonomies, folksonomies, tagging, social tagging, tag clouds, search engine optimization, ads, affiliations, RSS, Atom, OPML, feeds, full and partial feeds, and aggregators.

I saved some links I wanted to remember, I learned a great deal, I had a nice cup of coffee with a friend, and I did not spend any money.

Once again I am working with Twitter and trying to grok it. I am following some of the people whose blogs I read. I need to keep an open mind – which of course means that so far I do not “get it”.

What happens to your blog, your profiles, your website, your entire Internet presence when you die? What do you want to happen?

There are bloggers and others who would like it maintained for perpetuity and are looking for a service to provide that functionality. Some suggestions are banks or insurance companies. No fly-by-night companies need apply for obvious reasons.

The reasons usually given are for a family legacy, for historical record, or just for egoistical satisfaction.

I have not decided whether I want that or not.

There are times I would like to have the destruct button. At time of death, hit the destruct button to delete everything, start auto responding to emails, and remove all traces.

This is certainly not original, but if Hillary Clinton is elected as President and serves 8 years, a Bush or Clinton will have been in the white house as President or Vice President for 36 consecutive years.

• 8 – George Bush Sr. as Vice President
• 4 – George Bush Sr. as President
• 8 – Bill Clinton as President
• 8 – George W. Bush as President
• 8 – Hillary Clinton as President (possibility)
• 36 years

And then there is always Jeb Bush.

The campaign is underway.  My wishes:

• There would be coverage of other party candidates: Libertarian, Green, Socialist, etc.
• There would be debates on one topic: immigration, education, or health care.
• Each candidate would have to publish a vision statement for America for the next 10 years.

I wrote an RSS Tutorial.  It was great fun to research and write.  There is no better way to learn a topic than to teach it.  It is the one thing that brings the most traffic to my website.  I want to write another tutorial.  I think I will write it on how to improve your overall Internet Presence.

On the weekends, C-Span2 does 24 hour book events. What a treat. People discussing ideas and concepts. Authors with expertise. I often listen all weekend to this channel. The topics move with ease from the History of Starbucks, to the state of privacy, to the medical profession. Most enjoyable.

Many bloggers post inconsistently.  Some are understandable.

• Students do not post as much toward the end of the semester.
• People do not post regularly when they are ill.
• Holidays seem to cause a drop in posts across the board.
• Vacation time usually causes a major drop in posts, but not for everyone.  Some post pictures of their vacation.

I post very erratically, but sometimes I am not sure why.  Sometime I come back to post and notice that I have not posted for several months, and I am not sure why.

For me it has something to do with moods, or feelings, or emotions.  I go through manic periods when I post, then down periods when I do not.

I subscribe to a cable TV service.  I am an information junkie.

• There are 4 or 5 news channels  including CNN and Fox.
• There are 4 or 5 information channels including C-Span, and the History, Science, and Military Channels.

It is so interesting to move from the news channels to the information channels.  The news channels are so focused on the immediate, and the other channels are focused on the overall story.  It makes me wish I could scramble the two together.

I am going to do a series of podcasts on Personal Information Management. I will discuss the major pieces of Personal Information Management (Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Calendar), how to make them all work together, and how they are the basis for many other systems within the enterprise.

I maintain a number of link blogs on different topics.  I use them instead of del.icio.us to save links of interest.  One blog = one topic.  I have link blogs about RSS, blogging, website planning, website design, website construction, website promotion, and website planning.  I use the same template for all the blogs.  I can also add links to sites in all the blogs.

Bill O’Reilly and others now have Internet News segments on their national programs.

I am surprised about two things this time of year.

1. How little business gets done
2. How much time the it takes to celebrate the holidays

I received my newsletter from Lucy Grace Yaldezian today with the following quote: “Researchers have found that for older people and others, writing about events in your life that are causing you anxiety can lead to fewer doctor visits, better sleep and an enhanced immune system. The concept is called expressive writing.”

OK OK, I am going to start blogging again. I certainly need better sleep and an enhanced immune system.

Today is One Web Day.  “The mission of OneWebDay is to create, maintain, advance and promote a global day to celebrate online life: September 22″.  The website is www.onewebday.org.

Office is Dead. Steve Gillmor.

TV is Dead. Bill Gates.

Google is Dead. Robert Scoble.

Internet is Dead. Mark Cuban.

Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis had a disagreement. There was apparently yelling, raised voices, a ruined friendship, and multiple blog posts (this one included).

Blogging about this (me included) is the blogosphere version of newspapers writing about Paris Hilton.

Many of the B and C list bloggers are trying to be A list bloggers so they too can complain about personal attacks (Winer and Calacanis).

When was the last time anyone said “well meaning people disagree”.

Thoughts on Iraq

II. WAGING WAR

3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.

I cut my RSS feeds way down.  Now, I find myself reading more posts and thinking about what I am reading, as opposed to seeing how fast I can scan hundreds of posts.

For now, I am finding it is better to read several posts than to scan many posts.

I cleaned up my RSS Feed subscriptions tonight. I do not like the River of News approach. I like my feeds in groups by general topic. I made sure each feed was assigned to the appropriate group. It looks good so far. I took the time to delete many of the subscriptions that are no longer interesting.

I love the new feature on Google Local Search.  When you get directions from one place to another it shows as the blue line on the map.

The new feature allows you to drag and drop that blue line to change the directions to take a back road, avoid traffic, or to go by the coffee shop.  It is very cool.

Gadgets and Widgets are light-weight single-purpose applications that can sit on the user’s computer desktop, or are hosted on a web page.   The two words describe the same thing.  That seems redundant.

We should have one word – maybe Gidgets or Wadgets.

Shopping Carts vs. Stores is a blog entry written by James S. Huggins.  James has posted this in Yahoo groups and perhaps other places.  It is an astute description of the differences between Shopping Carts and Stores.  It is helpful to think about when picking software in these categories.

I use this information when I talk to clients, so I am happy to give James some credit.

I add two things.  I separate the checkout from the shopping cart.  So in the analogy, I talk to clients about the grocery store and what the store does, the shopping cart and what the shopping cart does, and the checkout and what it does.

And just to make it more interesting, I also have girl scouts sitting outside at a table selling cookies to give a contrasting transaction.  The transaction at the girl scout table blends everything into one transaction.

Does this happen to everyone else?

I will be reading a blog post that discusses a video. The blog post will have lots of links, but it will not be clear which link is for the video.

Text links are usually clearly marked with color and/or underline. I think audio / video links should have a clear designation.

HONC stands for hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon

Life depends mainly on molecules formed from four types of atoms: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon.

Honc if you live.

1) It started out as the War with Iraq.  We won that war.  We defeated the Iraq army and toppled the government.

2) The Iraqis elected a new government.  We are allied with the new Irag government.   The Iraqis are now our allies.  It is no long a war with Iraq.  It is the war in Iraq.

3) If the Iraqis are our allies, who are we fighting.  There are various groups in Iraq.  Each one wants to control Iraq.  They are fighting each other for the right to control Iraq.  It is called sectarian violence.

4) Controlling civil unrest is not a war.  It is a police action or a military action.  We are using our soldiers to control civil violence.  I do not think that should be called a war.

Others thought it was brilliant:

“In our popular culture, we’ve come to expect things to get tied up neatly,” said Jerry Herron, a professor at Wayne State University in Michigan, who found the ending brilliant. “The claim that Chase is making as an artist here is, real life doesn’t have neat endings.

“You want Tony blown away? You want him in jail? Chase is saying, ‘Fine, you write that script,’” Herron said. “He’s saying that life goes on, and art goes on, and he’s just going to end it right here.”

Brilliant wasn’t a good enough word for screenwriting professor Richard Walter, of the UCLA Film School, to describe Sunday night’s finale. “That’s too tame,” he said. “This was genius!”

Article is here.

Note to David Chase of the Sopranos. Fade to Black is a dramatic technique used in both theater and film. It can signify various things: live goes on, that is all there is, things are never resolved, the end, etc.

However, our cable providers often go black for short periods of time for no discernible reason, so using it on a TV program is problematic. Perhaps another technique – fade to white might work better. Maybe fade to black now means is it real? is it fiction? or is it cable?

I am glad that Tony Soprano did not find climatic redemption or punishment. It would have been a cliche.

In the end it was a tale of two bosses.

New York Phil Leotardo went over the top. He got too emotional and he made some bad business decisions. He went too far, his underlings turned against him, and he got whacked and squished.

New Jersey Tony Soprano tended to business. He cut a deal with the New York underlings, whacked the New York boss, and went out to dinner with his family. Fade to black

Brilliant.

The HBO Television show The Sopranos ends tonight.  Over the last two days, I have watched or re-watched all the shows from this season.  I am ready for the final show.

I have read some of the speculation about what the final show might contain.  For Tony Soprano, the speculation varies between getting punished or redeemed, between getting killed or making peace, between hell and heaven.

I do not know what will happen, but I will speculate that it will be somewhere between the two.  It will be cathartic but ambivalent.  Tomorrow we will all declare we saw what was coming.

I have more than 20 blogs, and I know that is not unusual. I collect blogs in all the normal ways:

• I sign up for a Social Media site and automatically get a blog (2 or 3 including Vox).
• I sign up for a professional service and automatically get a blog (2).
• I check out a blogging service and create a blog with a Hello World post that then gets abandoned (Several).
• I maintain a good number of link blogs. They are blogs where I link to articles and other blog posts on specific topics. Each blog is a topic. In serves a similar function as del.icio.us in that I save links on specific topics, but it provides additional flexibility. I save articles on website planning, website design, website construction, website promotion, and website planning for example. My link blogs are all on Blogger, which provides a button to save to the blog as you are browsing. Again, one can save a blog post with the same effort as saving a link on del.icio.us. Some would question whether these are true blogs. (14)
• Then I have some blogs that are more traditional blogs that I write myself. (2 or 3).

It creates issues of course. No one wants to read multiple blogs from one person.

• I could write one entry and cut and paste to other blogs. I will do that with this entry to try it out.
• If one knew RSS, one could subscribe to all the feeds and send them to one group or folder.
• There are RSS tools available to merge RSS feeds, so one could create one RSS feed from many. See RSS Feed Mixers.

Some people create one blog and put everything into one blog.

• Jeremy Zawadny from Yahoo writes a blog with excellent technical perspective, but I also get his blog posts on his other passion which is learning to fly.
• Matt Cutts from Google writes a blog on SEO that is required reading for anyone promoting websites, but I also get his vacation pictures.
• Dave Winer pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. He always has interesting perspectives on current technology. But I also get his posts on his lawsuits or travel plans.

Options include:

• Do one blog and accept that it is good to get information on the person behind the blog.
• Create different blogs on different topics.
• Treat blogs like Newspapers and only read the articles / posts of interests. A sports fan reads the sports section without a care about bridge columns, comics, or horoscopes.

I think one of the most interesting options is to add intelligence to RSS Readers to filter by tag. That way I could filter out Jeremy’s flying posts, Matt’s vacation posts, and Dave’s naked Jen posts (I am not going to explain).

And for the one that asked – I will also post this on Vox so that I am posting there as well as on Les Bain’s Blog.

I blogged that I had a fantasy that I could participate in a discussion on Global Warming with various experts that slowly and carefully explored the issues.

If we reached a consensus on the fact that Global Warming did in fact exist, then the discussion would turn to:

• What is causing Global Warming
• What if anything do we want to do about it.

As I think about it more, it is not so much Global Warming that I was really thinking about, it was the lack of reasoned debate.

In my fantasy, I am going to add another expert to the panel, a Logician. The Logician will act as an umpire or a referee. The Logician will throw the penalty red flag on every logical fallacy.

And then think of the possibilities of adding a Logician referee to the Political process.

Google should number their search results. Yahoo does.

I get lost in trying to remember which sites I have looked at when searching.

OK, what I really want to know is the number of the Google result without counting.

I wrote an RSS Tutorial several years ago.  It is time to do an update.  I collect material from one version of the Tutorial to next.  This will be the second major update.   There are new products, new kinds of feeds, and new statistics for RSS usage. And of course, there are products and services that are now obsolete.

The Tutorial got noticed when Robert Scoble mentioned it on his blog.

My tutorial is consistently in the top 10 results on Google for the keywords “rss tutorial”.

There is of course an RSS feed from the Tutorial that announces updates.

When I created the RSS Tutorial, I put a PayPal donation option on the first page.  I was not expecting to earn money, but I was curious to see if I would get any donations.  To date, I have not received a one.

Google Trends – Hot Trends is a new Google feature. As people check out Google Hot Trends and search to see whats going on; it reinforces what is hot. A self fulfilling prophecy.

The article “Who’s Got the Monkey?” was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1974 by authors William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass.

I used to keep a copy of the article in my briefcase at all times, and I would give it away whenever I thought it would be helpful.

I also kept it because it was a lesson I needed to re-learn. It is the best article I have ever read on effective delegation.

I wish I could participate in a discussion on Global Warming with various experts that slowly and carefully explored the issues as follows.

1. Is it getting warmer now? If it is, by how much? How do we know that it is?
   Discussions about ice ages, meteor storms, Greenland, and what killed the dinosaurs are excluded at this point.
   “Is it warming up NOW” is the question. The question is not “did it warm up in the past”.
   If (it is getting warmer by any agreeable measure)
   {on to number 2}
   else
   {break for coffee and go home}
2. What does it mean that it is getting warmer? What has happened so far?
   Keep the conversation to what has happened that can be observed or measured.
• If something is happening that might or might not be attributed to global warming, merely note it is happening and that there is disagreement about what caused it.
• There should not be major disagreement here. It is either happening or not. The glaciers are either melting or they are not.
3. What does it mean that it is getting warmer? What might happen in the future?
   What do we think might happen.
   • No one knows exactly what will happen. Well meaning experts should be able to reach some consensus of what might happen or what will probably happen.
   • Discussions about ice ages, meteor storms, Greenland, and what killed the dinosaurs can be included at this point.
   • Disagreement is expected at this point.

Do most experts agree? That is not what I am reading. It seems we should be able to reach some consensus on the above. Which leads to the next discussion on

• What is causing Global Warming
• What if anything do we want to do about it.

I tweaked the CSS for this blog. Just cleaned it up a bit.

It always surprises me that when two people look at a blog or website.  There can be such radical differences in their opinions of the website.  It seems especially true for the kinds of small changes I was making tonight.

Thankfully, I do not have to get anyone else to approve these changes.

My son went sky diving today to celebrate the end of the college semester.

I am pleased that he is enjoying himself. Later on this evening I will hear how it went and see some pictures.

It is inevitable that soon I will start watching the clock.

I was updating the client list on my website, and looking at various websites I have worked on over the last couple of years and months. I have learned a lot.

I guess it is human nature to think about all the things you do not know (for example Ruby on Rails) than to remember all the things you do know.

Today is the day for phone calls.  Each phone call is “dial and wait” or “dial and navigate voice mail”.  I know it is phone call day, so I am prepared in advance to put on the head set, open snail mail, clean the desk, and do filing as I wait on hold.

If I could just turn off the music on the phone and listen to what I choose it would be a happier day.

The common analogy for a push down stack is the stack of dishes at a buffet. Take one off the top and the next one pops up.

That is like what it has been for me lately. Do one critical task, the next one pops up. Work like crazy to try and get the stack down, but it just keeps getting reloaded. Maybe that is just life.

This has been a good week. I popped up a lot of dishes.

My son is going to be a Student Intern at SixApart working on Vox.com.  He invited me to sign up for Vox and check it out.  I have been checking out Vox, and it is always fun to check out a new site.

Vox is a personal blogging site, and a social media type site, so there are lots of comments, responses, and trackbacks.

People that use the Internet create lots of accounts, registrations, blogs, and email accounts.  Does anyone ever try and clean it all up?  Does anyone ever go and delete all the accounts?

What happens when someone dies?  Does it all sort of diminish over time?

I keep track of accounts and passwords, but it would be an onerous task to try and clean it all up.

It is Easter weekend. Easter is a Christian holy day that celebrates what happened on a Jewish holy day and uses the Pagan fertility symbols of bunnies and eggs. I live near the city of Walnut Creek, and it got some notoriety recently because the local festivities used the term “Spring Bunny” instead of “Easter Bunny”. It was, of course, originally a spring bunny.

Because this is a holy day for many, work is lighter. It is also a time to take a quick breath, post to my blog, and catch up on email.

I do a daily podcast with my partner at biziii.com.  We just passed our one year anniversary.  We have done a show Monday – Friday for a year.

Independent Entrepreneurs are sometimes called solopreneurs. Being a solopreneur requires energy from the solopreneur, which means exercise, good diet, and adequate sleep. But solopreneurs are too busy to exercise, eat right, and get adequate sleep. They can succeed in the short term, but not the long term.

I have been busy with clients, so I am not reading blogs as regularly.  It makes me wonder what I am missing.

I had an aunt that used to watch soap operas for the same reason.  She just did not want to miss anything.

Mary Jo Foley discusses the new Google Office for Business proposal and thinks offsite storage of corporate data might be a deal breaker. She sites the Microsoft Hailstorm project as a precedent.

In the corporate world, it is more instructive to look at outsourcing. EDS and IBM do in excess of 20 billion dollars worth of outsourcing where they store corporate data at offsite data centers. Google should look to that model.

Heard about fatblogging.  If not see http://www.technorati.com/search/fatblogging

I am joining in the fun.  I am going to lose weight also.

Today is my Birthday.  It is the sort of information that I used to keep very quiet.  This blog is encouraging me to share that sort of thing with the world.  I am not sure why.  Maybe it is just a topic to blog about.  Maybe it is realizing that sharing is connecting.  Nah .. that is way too pompous.

If I only had a few bloggers to read, they would be in this order

• Dave Winer
• Doc Searls
• Jason Calacanis
• Eric Rice
• Robert Scoble
• Amy Bellinger

Very simply, they are all authentic voices.

I saw John Edwards interviewed.  He discussed the two bloggers who were blogging on his campaign until it was discovered they had written some critical posts about the Catholic Church.

He said the two bloggers resigned because of the criticism they were receiving from conservatives.

We sometimes think the Blogosphere can be rough, but it is not as rough as other media.  The issue is whether bloggers have thick enough skins.  It is difficult, because Bloggers do not have an organization behind them to support them.

The Police Reunited at the Grammies.

There is a cycle to RSS feeds: accumulation, overload, purge, restart.

I am going into the purge phase. I am considering just reading a very few blogs and listening to more podcasts. My latest criteria is to only read blogs that require you to read more than the headline.

I like public transportation. I have always liked buses and trains. I use public transportation when I can. It is a particularly good time to think, plan, and consider.

I looked at some alternate search engines today. I like the ones that cluster. My test cases:

Saturn – the clustering search engines divide up the results by planet, the car, and the Roman god.

Cardinal – Stanford University, bird, Catholic Cardinal, Arizona Cardinals, and Cardinal Health.

I have two members of the Millennial generation in my household. They do not understand the big deal about Web 2.0 and Social Media.

They were both on the Internet at a very early age, and they always experienced the web as a read/write media. They were never passive on the Internet. They were in chat rooms, forums, groups, and bulletin boards from the start. They both have long term friends they met online.

And of course there were aggressive household safety rules. They helped define those rules by their participation in various Internet safety forums and groups.

When we discuss Web 2.0 and Social Media, they just do not get it. For them, it is their parent’s generation finally figuring out what the Internet was all along.

I have an old Palm.  I like it just fine.  I have taken it to geek meetings and it gets almost as much attention as the new products.  I am carrying around a dinosaur.

I wanted to start syncing it with my laptop, so I had to get a serial / USB cable and drivers from Radio Shack.  I am synced again and ready to go.

I am trying out Carbonite Backup. It is a backup system that backs up my hard drive to a Carbonite server. It is easy to set up, it backs up without worry, and stores my information off site.

I have an Amazon S3 account also, but I cannot seem to find the right software. Carbonite software backing up to Amazon S3 would be nice.

My biggest problem with Carbonite is that is does not back up external drives.

There are apparently two Super Bowl Winners.

One is the the Indianapolis Colts.

The second is the unofficial winner of the best Super Bowl advertisement. This winner is harder to determine.

Check out the new Website at Yahoo about WII.

Yahoo takes the information about Nintendo’s WII from Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Shopping and other Yahoo properties and creates a website. It then adds advertising.

That is repurposing. Is it also a splog?

Today I am working in a library that has excellent free wifi. Sweet.

Bloggers that are not on the A list, work to get attention, links, and comments so they can move to the A list.
Bloggers that are on the A-list complain about the unwanted attention and mean comments.
Makes one wish they could switch for a while.

Vista?
iPhone?
Office 2007?
Microsoft Expression?
HDTV?

“Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
Alexander Pope

Discrete tasks have a beginning and an end: continuous tasks do not.

I am a discrete task person. I use a popular task list program. I add tasks, prioritize the tasks, do the tasks, and then mark the tasks complete. When confronted with a challenge, I automatically start to break it into discrete tasks. If I feel overwhelmed, I focus on the task at hand. Getting a project done is like working with one lego block at a time.

I work with people that seem to find everything a continuous task. Every task is intricately related to every other task. When a task is done, there is no recognition of a task done, just an expression of the next task that needs to be done. It feels like working with a ball of twine, with each piece pulling the next piece in and no celebration of a finished piece.

Everyone works in their own style, but it wears me out to do it the second way. There is no sense of completion. No little break after a finished task, no little celebration.

In California, an elderly couple was taking a walk. The man was attacked by a Mountain Lion. The woman beat on the Mountain Lion with a log to no avail. She took a pen and tried to jam it into the eye of the Mountain lion to no avail. She clobbered the nose of the Mountain Lion and that finally worked. The man is in serious condition, and I certainly hope he recovers.

The local talk shows were full of after-the-fact advice. One caller suggested that the appropriate response was not to try and poke the pen into the eye of the Mountain Lion, but to lift its tail and poke the pen there. What followed was alternately very yucky and very funny radio, as everyone tried to top each other on comments about that approach.

This weekend is the Super Bowl. SuperBowlMonday.com is pushing to make the Monday after the Super Bowl a National Holiday. I keep seeing the numbers that 85 million Americans voted in the last election, and 140 million will watch the Super Bowl. I do not know how many of the 140 are eligible to vote.

Some random thoughts:

• I think only those that voted in the last election get to take the holiday.
• Let’s consider moving Martin Luther King day to the Monday following the Super Bowl and call it National Unification Day.
• Both head coaches in the Super Bowl are African-Americans.
• It seems that for some sports fans, the winner of the Super Bowl is more important than the winner of the Presidential race.
• I remember how much of the day after was spent discussing the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl parties. Maybe that conversation just gets moved to Tuesday.
• I voted yes for the Holiday. I also voted in the last election.

I voted for my favorites blogs for bloggies today. The bloggies are the oscars for blogs. I did not vote in every category. I do not read blogs in every category. I do not read any sports blogs or teen blogs for example. But I am very fond of lifehacker, and voted for it twice.

We order groceries online and have them delivered.  There are 3 in the household, and the responsibility of placing the order falls to the one that wants new grocery items in the house.  Sometimes it becomes a contest as to who can hold out the longest.

I rarely place the order.  I find it a challenge to live on the cans and boxes of food on the shelves in our apartment.  I search online on food ingredients and try the recipes to various levels of success.

But when someone starts the order, they get lots of Instant Messaging help from the other two about what to order.   Does everyone else IM to members of the family they live with?

As I am working today, I am watching the Sunday Political Talk Shows.  I am watching shows about Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Islam.

• A Jewish lawyer is going to defend a Muslim in the United States who is accused of terrorism because he identifies with what he feels is religious persecution.
• A moderate Muslim in London says the radical Muslims are mentally unstable.
• A Palestinian cries when he tells of losing his home when Israel became a state.
• Agents that infiltrate terrorist organizations describe the terrorist plans to attack the United States.
• United States authorities talk of needing more resources and more laws.
• A Radical Muslim cleric says death is all that the United States understands.
• Osama Bin Laden’s son left him after the 9/11 attack because he felt it was so stupid to awaken the sleeping giant – the United States.

I am trying not to judge, and just let the mosaic of different opinions weave the complex human drama.  But it does remind me of the proverb “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.”

I have been working long hours.  I am at the computer for 15 hours a day.  I have not done that for a while.  I got backed up on some client work, and I am refocusing my business.  It is taking some time.

It is exhilarating in a way, maybe because it reminds me of my younger days when I worked long hours regularly.

Get a Human is a website with a list of major corporations with instructions on how to get through the “voice mail jail” and find a human.

I used to work for a guy who knew a whole series of things to try to get through voice mail. He would certainly like this list.

There are now over 100 million websites.

More and more tools are available to create websites easily and quickly, including the blog services like Blogger and WordPresss.
At the same time, high end websites are getting more expensive as more Web 2.0 options are available, including AJAX and methods of participation.

Sports Analogies were frowned upon when I was in the corporate world. Sports were supposedly a male activity, and so sports analogies were sexist. It has been a while since I was managing in the corporate world and attending sensitivity seminars. I wonder if that is still true.

First, more and more women are playing sports and attending sports evens. Secondly, it is now sexist to say that a certain activity is defined by sex.

I transferred the Word Press programs to the Web Hosting server and the problem was fixed. I forget what Category I was trying to add, but the process is working just fine.

The WordPress Database is giving me errors. I cannot add new categories.

I used Database utilities to add the category, but now I need to debug the situation. I will probably just reinstall WordPress to start.

WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'category_licename' in 'field list']
INSERT INTO wp_categories (cat_ID, cat_name, category_licename, category_description, category_parent) VALUES ('0', 'a', 'a', '', '0')

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/wizardcr/public_html/les-bain/wp-includes/wp-db.php:104) in /home/wizardcr/public_html/les-bain/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php on line 270

Everyday we have new announcements of new candidates for the President of the United States. We will discuss at length the marketing of these candidates. There is one problem that we all know: the best marketer does not necessarily make the best president.

I would suggest that our current system might insure that the one who would be the best president might not ever be the best marketer.

I read of people dismissing candidates because of one remark, or one mistake, or because of one character flaw. It reminds me of the story when Abraham Lincoln’s advisers pointed out the Ulysses S. Grant was a heavy drinker and so should be removed as General. Lincoln suggested finding out what Grant was drinking, and having a case of whatever it was sent to all his other, less successful, generals.

Does anyone keep statistics on how many blogs are abandoned?

I am compiling a list of skill sets required to provide Internet services. The purpose of the exercise is to create a visual representation of how many skills it takes to maintain an effective Internet presence.

It will include everything from Graphic Design, Copy writing, and Photograph manipulation skills to HTML, CSS, and PHP coding skills.

I upgraded WordPress to version 2.07. The upgrade process went very well. A clean upgrade with no issues.

Word Press Upgrade.

BizIII – Podcast Tag Cloud

WordPress offers a Press It function to easily blog a site you are visiting.

Mike Hughes and I do a daily podcast on the convergence of Media and Technology.

Mike has worked in media as a producer and reporter for NBC and CNN.

I have worked in technology for 40 years including at the CTO and CIO level.

In the podcast, we discuss the convergence of media and technology. That is sometimes call Digital Media, New Media, or On-Demand Media.

The podcast is called BizIII. The III is the roman numeral for 3. It is pronounced as Biz-3. The three I’s are Ideas, Information, and Inspiration.

Check it out at BizIII.

Added the email subscription to the blog. I am using the Feedburner service. I am fond of Squeet, but decided to let Feedburner do the Feed and Email Distribution for now.

My laptop is running hot. Every so often, it will turn off because it is overheated. The internal fan is probably getting dirty. When I get a break, I will clean the fan.

For now, when I use the laptop at my desk, I plug in an external keyboard, monitor, and external hard drive, and the laptop is off to the side. I have an external desk fan blowing on the laptop to keep it cool and running.

It is cold in the room, so I have a space heater running near my feet. I am not sure I have ever had a cooling fan and a heater running at the same time.

If reminds me of when Nixon was president, and he would run the air conditioner so he could have a fire in the fireplace.

The term Web Hosting is often used to describe the service that hosts a website. It usually is more than that.

It can also host any of the following:

Email – Web Hosting Servers can provide Email service.
Blog – Web Hosting Servers can host the Blogs created by Blogger or WordPress.
FTP – Web Hosting Servers can provide FTP functionality.

The 2007 CES (Consumer Electronic Show), according to the website, was defined by New Convergence of Broadband, Content and Consumer Electronics.

Content has been such a buzzword in the industry, that a colleague of mine has chosen to use the term nontent as an antidote to content. Sometimes when I watch a video on YouTube that is particularly inane, or see certain photographs on Flickr, or read some blog posts (perhaps even this one) it amuses me to think of them as nontent vs. content.

I read about people who subscribe to hundreds of feeds. I read about techniques of getting through feeds as quickly as possible. I read how to use keyboard techniques to scan and delete more quickly. One person bragged he could get scan multiple RSS feed items every second.

Then I think about the people who are carefully writing blog posts. People who refine and polish their posts. Polish and refine so that readers can spend part of a second.

It makes one wonder.

Time to start working on this WordPress Template. I will start the work to make it look more like the rest of the website.

The i-date conference is next week. The Internet Dating Conference focuses on all business aspects of the online community markets. It covers management and marketing for the Internet Dating and Social Networking industry.

It should be an interesting conference.

I have been working with computers for almost 40 years.

I have two children. They started using computers at a very early age. They have been on the AOL or the Internet as long as they can remember. They are now 18 and 21. We still discuss technology, computers, and the Internet, but woe be under me if I am behind on any thing related to technology in our discussions.

And you know, I do not mind. I like the challenge, and I like that the teaching goes both ways.

The secrecy around the iPhone was so elaborate it makes you wonder whether Apple should consult with Homeland Security.

This week is both CES and MacWorld. It is the ultimate in techno-lust.

I do website development, but that does not really represent what clients want. They want to know how to get build their businesses using the Internet, they want to know how to get known on the Internet, and they want a prominent Internet presence for their niche.

I wish I knew what to call it, helping businesses and professionals build their Internet presence. It it is more technical than Internet Marketing, more comprehensive than website development, and includes the alphabet soup of SMO, SEM, SEO, RSS and others.

I am a generalist. I know a bit about all of it. I am making a list of all the specialties that are included. It is a long list.

A cold means lots of sleeping during the day and restless nights. Diurnal cycles are unusual. I am up early, napping in the afternoon, and up late. Lots of quiet time to do website work, but not much energy to do it.

I have a cold. One thing a cold does is focus you on the present. It is difficult to do yearly resolutions when you are waiting for the next sneeze or the next cough. Maybe I should resolve to live more in the present …. but without the cold.

If you want me to review Vista, please send a $2,200 Acer Ferrari laptop with Vista installed. I will do full disclosure. I will find something productive to do with the laptop at the conclusion of the trial period. I will not let the loan of the laptop influence my review.

I am a private person. Blogs encourage openness. I wonder how it will work out. Perhaps I will become more open. Perhaps not.