Postsecret's growing with an audioblog and a geocache of pre-addressed postcards. Anonymous confessions are taking over the globe....

Apparently Christopher Ecclestone is scared of being typecast. He shouldn't be. He's a good enough actor that it needn't happen. Anyway. The New Dr Who looks good & it would be a shame to make a strong restart and then burn through a regeneration after 1 season just because...

We were already deprived the McGann-Ecclestone moment, (just as we had, incidentally, been deprived the McCoy-McGann moment.... wasn't that an actor in a Sylvester McCoy wig?) & he only has 12 lives, after all.... Stick around.... Make some more episodes.... Save the regeneration for another time.

Check out Madison Puddle, which looks like a frequently used portal into another, hopefully less chaotic, dimension. See also Edge of Water, Waiting for Falafel and alotofrain. Clearly a day for reflection.....

After the 2nd episode last night it is clear that the US version has figured out the key to the whole show. We watch everyone else, with their crass lack of social graces, but what kept us watching the original & what will keep us watching this is the romance between Jim and Pam. True love is the key, especially when it is a secret....

So I've been digging around, and there are tools out there for blogger users who want to tag their posts without hand-keying the HTML. There's a link to a technorati bloggerlet, and a great tutorial about the tags & how they work that I found via the blogger forum. Since I blog from public PC's & don't have the ability to use bookmarklets, everything has to be contained on the page. I'm going to see if the bloggerlet will work for me. It would be good, after all, to tag & categorise my posts.

Update - that's a bookmarklet too, huh? Darn!

Metroblogging has a new best-of blog that pulls out the highlights from around the world. Check it out.

They've already used the image of Dr Evil's curled little finger, so we'll let that go. There's an I-Pod Shuffle in the offing for the person who correctly guesses when the billionth link will be tracked by Technorati. What if the correct guess is also the billionth link? A twilight zone of bloggy connections. (sound effects here....) To enter the post must have the Technorati Tag Technorati one billion links, which this post does now. (I wish blogger would make that easier... Anyone have a hack?)

To see what the fuss is all about, visit Sifry's Alerts. "Technorati now tracks over 8 million weblogs and close to one billion links. We are at 990,172,347 links." as of 4.12pm yesterday.

So my guess for the links... 9,900,000 to go as of 4pm Monday? I have no idea. Let's say 7.42pm Eastern Standard Time Friday April 1. I'll have to get my cable connection back if I win an I-Pod shuffle.

So. The Office is not Coupling. Possibly thanks to the executive producers, the show was magnificent. The changes for a US audience were minimal and very funny, but the essential documentary nature of the show, the cringe-worthy moments, and the stolen moments when we see more than they think we see were all still there. Another 1/2 hour tonight, hopefully as strong as the first episode. Check it out. I especially like the effort that NBC went to to fake a whole corporate site for the company, Dunder Mifflin, which has "branches in Buffalo, Stamford, Albany, Utica, Scranton, Akron, Camden, Nashua and Yonkers." Here's hoping that the American audience go for the format & don't hold out for the 30 second laugh-track that they're used to. Excellent.

This blog turns 2 tomorrow. In that time it has had:

2 names
3 URL's
4 templates
5 visitors... (kidding...., I hope....)

I'm finally feeling like I'm getting into some good stuff, both with the template & add-ons, & with the subjects of the posts. If you compare the original off-the-peg-at-crimsonblog Britblog template with my new rockin' & cool customised Freshblog, the difference is clear. There's not a great difference in the tone of the posts, I don't think, but I've realised that I'm not able to blog the politics and high culture of either the U.S. or the U.K. I retired this site as a Britblog on September 4th, '04, then had some post election disturbance and a brief blogging pause for thought before relaunching w/ URL 3 & template 4 on Jan 6, '05 once I had made my mind up about what I wanted to say.

Despite pauses, breaks and transitions, Blogging does a couple of things for me.

1. It helps me indulge my webpage-building interests in a non-professional but legitimate & somewhat advanced way. As you'll see, this is the zone that I've been in for the past week or so, with tracking services and favicons and link cosmoses (cosmi?) . Anyway.
2. In a "keeping a journal" kind of way it helps me think about what I'm thinking about, or actually see visually what I've been preoccupied with. A visual representation of my interests and curiosities.
   
3. It helps me (especially now that I'm not trying to be a Josh Marshall any more) to find some funny and unusual things to enjoy. My new post-election blogroll has helped massively with this. You can't write about what you don't know... & I don't know the inside skinny in Washington D.C. I do, however, know if something appeals to me in a funky way, & I want to keep tabs on it. I'm a virtual scrapbooker. I'd like to be a thinker & poster of original philosophy, but try as I might I'm so much more comfortable as a collator & indexer!!
   

Anyway. Enough neurotic biography!! Happy Birthday, blog. Here's to another good year. Now that the template is set solid, let's work on an increase in quality posts.

Update: Binary Bonsai turned two too!! (in a slightly higher traffic mode, I fancy!!)

So I've updated the blogger comment code to reflect the changes in their service. Now the "comments" link from the main page and the "post a comment" link from the post page both go to a new pop-up page that lets you either read comments or post them. Not what I'd choose, I don't think, but I'll take it.

Comments still appear on the post page and have their own #'d permalink so that they can be linked to. I've added a permalink from each post too, and changed the signature line so that the timestamp prints without a link & my signature links to my blogger profile. At least it all makes sense again....

So now Hotmail want me to type the characters from a wiggly picture into a text box before they let me log in. I guess that's OK so long as it cuts down on the amount of herbal viagra I'm getting offered...

So, fresh from my technorati cosmos triumph I am trying to make a favicon, but it isn't working.

I am using the free editor at imageauthor.com, then saving the file to my directory on geocities, changing the filename back to an .ico and asking this blog to see it with the following html:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.geocities.com/jjewitt.geo/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

This came from thesitewizard.com and is hopefully fully functional, unless I'm screwing up the syntax. The old .ico is gone though, which makes me think that there's a problem with my image rather than anything else. Help if you can!! Thanks.

Update 3/21: So the problem was with the image & not the code. I made a new image, and voila, favicon in the address bar. Awesome!!

Update 7/28: Freshblog has had a graphics makeover, & my new Favicon was very easy to make using the CoolArchive Logo Generator. They let you define the size in pixels, & go as small as 16, so making the image was v. straighforward.

via Scrubbles - a new blog called Drawn!, that deals with illustration, animation and other such creativity. It also scores big with me since the blogroll opens up a whole new world of blogs - always something I look for in a new read. Excellent. Get the scoop on Drawn! at its creator's other site, Robot Johnny.

So where does that leave us regarding tracking tools, stats and visitors?

• Inbound links from blog posts will show up in the technorati cosmos
• Inbound links from search engines and other pages show up on who links to me and the ttlb ecosystem
  
• Inbound links that have been clicked on in the last 24 hours show up on the referring pages list
• Outbound links that have been selected as exits from this blog show up in my blog log
• I have comments thanks to blogger and trackback thanks to haloscan
• I also track generic numerical stats with sitemeter
  

That's a bunch of bells and whistles!!!

After a couple of tries spread over a couple of weeks, and some time clicking around the web trying to find some instructions that will work, I have managed to add the technorati cosmos to each individual post page. This uses Technorati to show inbound links to individual posts, & therefore give an author some sense of what readers are finding interesting enough to link to.

I would be very surprised if any of my posts have been linked to by any means other than my grubby little trackbacks, but hey, part of the reason I blog is to keep my page spiffy with all the latest bells and whistles, so here's another whistle.....or is it a bell.......

[<a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?
url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>">Link Cosmos</a>]

The instructions came from Wizbang Tech via Wizbang, and the crucial twist is that the code for blogger is available in a zip file because it won't display correctly in a browser - which is why my first attempt, using info from this site, was not successful. I was steered to the right information by the Technorati Developer's Wiki. Thanks, Wiki!!!

Now, as usual, I just need to turn some readers into linkers so that there's a cosmos to reveal.

Update 8/1: Have switched to TalkDigger to provide my post's cosmos results. See my how-to & why.

Thinking back to the flickr ransom notes, here's two more montage creators.

1. Montage-a-Google, which uses a Google image search to build a custom collage. - via the Gates Memory Blog
   
2. Amaztype, which will give you an author's name built from the front covers of their books. - via Boingboing
   

"Here in New York I tried to steal a piece of The Gates, so I felt bad when the nice volunteer gave me this piece for free."

Piece included - scotch taped to the postcard.

Filed in: gatesmemory

are all over and done. Scroll down to see the winners & to find some good new reads, I hope.

Dave Sifry digesting his technorati data to bring you a two part essay (so far) on the number of new blogs and the frequency of posts. Visit Sifry's Alerts to see further installments.

"On average, Technorati is tracking about 500,000 posts per day, which is about 5.8 posts per second. In October 2004, we were seeing about 400,000 posts per day. It is interesting to note that posting volume suffered a decline during the months of November and December, 2004. A large part of this decline is the reduction in postings about US politics after the election in early November."

So at least I'm not the only one who went through the blogging blues over Christmas & came back strong in the new year!!

via BoingBoing

Update 3/19 - Part 3: The A-List and the Long Tail. Power and influence blog style.

The buzz is the automatic ransom notes

1. Google Blogoscoped via Wil Wheaton & BoingBoing
2. Flickr via BoingBoing

Now how will the CSI's know which city you're from by the headlines of yesterday's picayune?

Need a new car, or at least a car that is new to us. Saturday we found one that we liked & could afford. That model year has some reliability issues according to the research we did, so the sales guy offered us a bumper-to-bumper warranty & included it in a price that he quoted us.

Tonight we go back there to sign the paperwork, & the finance guy says that the sales guy is new & doesn't know what he's talking about, & that the included warranty is a manufacturer certification only, covering drivetrain only (not the gizmos that break) & that the full warranty we though we'd been promised would cost another $2000.

We walked, of course, but we're somewhat disappointed to have been baited and switched, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Based on my experience, if the sales person promises something, the cashiers should honor it......

Tomorrow already. Doesn't time fly. I'll be watching & enjoying the show as usual, I'm sure.

that blogging is good for your career. These are useful to me today, since an opportunity to blog for my job, however briefly, seems to be evaporating. There were 10 reasons but I'm not sure the 10th one applies to me. (6th one doesn't really either...) Besides, that'll give you an incentive to go check out the original post. via Boingboing

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say "Oh, I've written about that, just google for XXX and I'm on the top page" or "Oh, just google my name."
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you're more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you're an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you're in marketing, you'll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.

Ralph McQuarrie's concept art for Star Wars, which, I learned from the new extras DVD, was an essential tool for George Lucas in his communication with the Studio and the set fabricators.

via Binary Bonsai

Need a drink? Droogle!! A search engine for the cocktail-ly challenged. Droogle the ingredient & get the recipe. As Robert at A Welsh View points out, there's sure to be a lawsuit. In the meantime, show me some creative things to do with my Baileys!!

Shame I missed the leaked Dr Who, because I've spent my morning enjoying the very finest in BBC sci-fi & it would be interesting to do a comparison. I speak, of course, of the excellent 1981 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, of which I have borrowed a 2 disc special edition DVD from my local library.

Over at Incredibleblogs, there's an in depth investigation of the metroblogging phenomenon in a series of three posts:

1. Metroblogging
2. LA Observed
   
3. Gothamist

Blogging about the same city works for a group blog endeavour because everyone brings their own interests and perspective about their city, & give us as readers a diverse and interesting picture of the places we're "visiting". The blog, like the city, contains an experience and a thread for everyone.

See the Austin Bloggers Meta-blog for another example that gathers Austin TX-related posts from their original blogs & republishes them on a shared page. As I have previously suggested, experience the cities without buying a 'plane ticket. Excellent.

The art itself is fleeting & transitory, but in what promises to be a potent example of multimedia harvesting and display, the web's going to collect and arrange. A virtual attempt to recapture & preserve the experience. Visit gatesmemory.org for more:

The Institute for the Future of the Book and Flickr.com issued a call today for photos and stories documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates Project in New York's Central Park. Using Flickr's unique photo-sharing platform, the Institute for the Future of the Book will gather pictures of the Gates from anyone and everyone who wants to contribute. The aim is to harness the creativity and insight of thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine - one that is designed not just for the moment, but as a lasting and definitive document of the Gates and our experience of them. "The photographs are a jumping off point for further exploration," says Ben Vershbow of the institute. "Ultimately, we are interested in collecting anything that can be shared over the web - film, audio, text - parodies and remixes."

Visit gatesmemory.org to contribute your media or to suggest ideas for presenting the collection.

via BoingBoing.


Filed in: gatesmemory

Twinoo. Wow. The ultimate in online mental gaming. Two players, one person. "And then, my brain started to bleed....."

via A Welsh View

LONDON (Reuters) -

The BBC said Tuesday it had launched an inquiry into how a new episode of cult British TV sci-fi series "Doctor Who" has been leaked on the Internet.The classic program, which has been off air since 1989, makes a much-anticipated return to the small screen later this month with Christopher Eccleston starring as the time-traveling hero and former pop star Billie Piper as his sidekick.
However, the BBC -- which was due to trumpet the show's regeneration at a celebration launch Tuesday -- said one of the 13 new 45-minute episodes had been posted on the Internet.

BBC News via 10x10 6pm:

Iain Balshaw will replace injured captain Jason Robinson at full-back for England's Six Nations match against Italy at Twickenham on Saturday. The Leeds player is the only change to the England team which lost 19-13 to Ireland at the end of February. Robinson, who has been filling in for Jonny Wilkinson, will miss the game because of a thumb injury.

Woodpecker Day at my house today. We had a Woodpecker festival in the backyard before breakfast. We were visited by a yellow shafted northern flicker, a downy woodpecker, a red-bellied woodpecker, and what I think was an immature red-headed woodpecker all at the same time. I'm wondering about putting nest boxes in the woods behind the house so that they'll be around even more often. Not quite living on the water in Florida with the Pelicans and Egrets, but much more interesting than the sparrows & starlings that I grew up with. Cheaper than TV too!!

The Washington Post has a financial round-up of the impact of Christo's latest work:

$254 million in economic activity -- more than triple the $80 million pre-exhibit estimate -- includes spending for hotels, restaurants and concessions and cultural institutions, as well as use of subways, buses and taxis, plus shopping and general entertainment.

Looking over my "guess the plot of the next book" posts has set me thinking and a-noodling.

J K Rowling recently said that "there are two questions she's never been asked, but which she should be asked. Not 'Why did Harry live' but 'Why didn't Voldemort die?' and 'Why didn't Dumbledore kill, or try to kill, Voldemort?,' she said."

To take the second one first: What if Dumbledore is Voldemort's brother? Or if Dumbledore IS Voldemort. Try saying Dumbledore when you've got a cold and my impeccable logic will be revealed. Sinus congestion? Aisle 5.

This makes my previously explored "Star Wars - Dumbledore as Obi Wan" theory more interesting. He has to go, doesn't he, before Harry can really fulfill his destiny as a mature hero? So will he go in a Palpatine v Mace Windu mighty mighty duel to end all duels with a sibling, or will he go because his cold clears up & his true identity is revealed....

Further to the fake-o blogs that were designed as a component of Sharp's "win a big-screen TV" contest, and of course the ground-breaking Alias web puzzle, now here's a Crossing Jordan pathologist reaching out to fans of the show with an ongoing mystery to solve. How long 'til CSI is doing the same thing?

Interesting use of the web to draw in the fans and keep them interested and engaged for longer than 1hr/ week. I assume there will eventually be a commercial tie in for the TV companies too....

My local newspaper (of all places) pointed me to 10 x 10 this morning... a feedreader that creates a photographic quilt of significant images every hour, and graphically represents the culture that we're immersed in. As they say:

Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers.

Check it out. V. interesting.

Wow!!! A graphic representation of the history of pop culture. NameVoyager: The popularity of names in cool graphic chronological form!!!!

via Collision Detection.

Having loaded more Java I thought I should cut down on the images and extra goodies, so I've converted all the webring links to text links. Hopefully the services will still love me & list me even though I'm not linking with a logo-bearing branded image any more....

Hey, at least the list is alphabetical....

Big Island Valley. Like a vacation without the tickets or the luggage.

via Flickrzen

Researchers are tracking which parts of the screen people look at when they're viewing Google search results. "As you can see from the image, if your ad doesn't appear in the top three spots searchers probably won't see it."

The next part of the problem, then, is picking a unique, relevant and interesting keyword that people will search on.

From A Welsh View and Google Blogoscoped

I have signed up with mybloglog.com, a service which tracks which outbound links are being selected by visitors who leave your blog.

I have a couple of thoughts.

1. Don't leave... You just got here!! Stay & explore a little!!
   
2. Come back!!.....
   

via A Welsh View.

in the vein of Postsecret, and via the Lycos 50:

grouphug.us:

The idea is for anyone to anonymously confess to anything. it actually feels kind of good to know that someone will read it. This is completely confidential. no information about you or your computer is stored. in fact, we only collect the text you type, the date, and a random number....

[rant]
There are suddenly a lot more Yahoo hits for Freshblog. They're not all down to my google-savvy & excellent page design skills (ahem...)

My feeds and my pages are being spammed, stolen and reproduced without my permission.

1. FerretMarketing.com
2. http://business-directory-advertising.co.uk/
   

Are you web-savvy? Is there a way that I can stop this? Do I benefit from it? How do the spam reproducers benefit from it?

I sure don't appreciate it. If you like my content, do as we all do & link back w/ a via or a trackback. Don't paste the whole page into your frame.
[/rant]

I note that britblog has channeled some visitors here because I listed Rugby as an interest. I apologise to those who have come expecting all the news, scoop and skinny on the '05 championship. There's a couple of reasons why I haven't mentioned anything yet. Clearly this is part of it:

Country	P	W	D	L	For	Against	Points
Ireland	3	3	0	0	87	43	6
Wales	3	3	0	0	73	35	6
France	3	2	0	1	52	50	4
Scotland	3	1	0	2	40	66	2
England	3	0	0	3	39	48	0
Italy	3	0	0	3	35	84	0

I don't sound like the people around me. I look like them, for the most part, except that I need a major haircut, but I don't sound like them.

Normally, this is not an issue of consequence, but over the past couple of days I've had some interesting "flashbacky" experiences of the sort that occured regularly when I was fresh off the boat. They made me want to respond in interesting ways.

1. The "where are you from?" question, eight million times.
2. The "how you doin', Mate?" impersonator who thinks that mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery - and keeps it up for much of the day. I LOVE that!!
   
3. The "you're unusual... I think I'll just giggle" 'phone correspondent.

I only bring it up because it seems to have happened a lot in the last 36 hrs.... I wonder if my accent has become more pronounced?