I haven't been on the prowl for new blogs in a while, but looky what I found ... FlickrBooty

I have talked about eSociety a bit before, but now things have taken a new turn. Google has aquired Dodgeball, a networking service based on SMS messaging.

I think I had this conversation with my sister back a while ago when I basically said something like, "All these networks like Friendster, The Facebook, Dodgeball, etc are all great, but it sucks that none of them can become *the* standard. It's too much of a pain when you have a few friends in each network and nobody is commiting to making one of the networks the best. What really needs to happen is for a big company like Yahoo, etc to pick up one of these services and make it mainstream."

Well, now that's happened. With Google handling Dodgeball now I'm sure you'll see a huge influx of people signing up and using the service as well as a whole bunch of new features. This could be a good sign.

My more corporate face ... blog://gconf

The title makes it sound like a really geeky blog, but Life Hacker is actually the total opposite. Life Hacker is an excellent blog that gives solid and very usable tech advice targeted toward people who don't necessarily sit in front of computers all day. Most of the posts are simple and easy to understand for the non-geeky, and they really do offer some great tips.

it's fun filled friday isn't it! go check out postsecret

I probably shouldn't pass this along because it's one of those, "Beware! this will cause time to evaporte." Del.icio.us has a feature called the inbox which I believe is reasonably new because I don't remember seeing it when i first signed up. Anyways, it lets you subscribe to feeds of links essentially providing an aggregated inbox of links for you to browse. This is insanely valuable for discovering blogs when you combine it with firefox's live bookmarks feature.

here's what you do ...
Go to the del.icio.us homepage and click the "blog" filter/tag link on the right. That will show the most recent XXX links posted with the tag "blog". Then at the top under the title you'll see the link "subscribe" ... click it and you are now subscribed to the "blog" tag. Now go back to your del.icio.us page and click the link in the upper right hand navbar that says "inbox". This is your aggregated view of all your del.icio.us subscriptions. Now just click the little orange button in the very bottom right hand corner of your firefox browser and "subscribe to rss". Choose wherever you want to file this in your bookmarks and you're done.

The live bookmark will update periodically by grabbing the latest batch of links from your del.icio.us inbox and make them available right in your browser. You now have the latest blogs posted on del.icio.us delivered directly into your browser!

Repeat with any user/tag combinations you like to get a great variety of links in your inbox.

Note that if you don't want to flood your inbox with too many links, but you still want to have access to them you can always just create a live bookmark from pretty much any page on del.icio.us rather than subscribing. i.e. go to del.icio.us/blog and create a live bookmark.

Is it me or is blogging becoming too much fun these days =)

Waiter Rant and Overworked and Underf*cked ... blogs with a more personal touch. It's nice to be reminded that blogs aren't all about gadgets, gizmos, and other geeky stuff.

Discovered Hack a Day while browsing around at Frostyland. 2 for the price of 1 ;-)

2004 Weblog Awards. See who has the best blogs on the web (according to Whizbang!).

Well, the good stuff is just rollin' today. This tip courtesy of The Sect of Rama ... check out Flickr for a great place to store/share/find photos.

Flickr really does seem like the all in one photo sharing app. It basically does everything you would want, and my new favorite is that it allows you to instantly send any flickr photo directly to your blog, so expect to start seeing more photos in the blog via flickr.

The other great feature of flickr is that it allows photos to be tagged with keywords, which makes it really easy to search for photos using keywords and you actually get good results. Way better than google images if you ask me.

Really good article from sfgate.com about why Japan is at the pinnacle of the gadget market and why us Americans are so far behind.

The article basically boils down to what you may already know, it's just part of their culture, but the best part is all the actual detailed explanations of how that culture was derived. worth the read, especially if you are like me and wish you had the opportunity to buy a lot of the cool stuff you only see in Japan.

Found this little thingy called Word Count on I site I was browsing around today. It shows a breakdown of the most commonly used words in the English language, ranked and ordered. It also has a pretty cool little flash display as well.

Overcompensating ... funny comics :)

First there were blogs, then there were photo blogs, then came audio blogs, and now ... now, we have video blogs. crazy. It's quite natural that any form of media show up on a blog, so video blogging doesn't suprise me.

Especially when it's got a really cool use like the Kong 2005 Production Diary. fun.

So it seems that every where you go these days you hear about some new electronic social network which supposedly "everyone is on." Friendster is still the original, but it seems like there is a new one every week or two.

My sister recently joined thefacebook.com which attempts to network people together starting with their university connections. You start inside the network of people from your school but can add friends from anywhere. After browsing around a bit it seems like it's a new trend mostly populated by those still in school now, but it does offer some cool features like the ability to lookup/contact ppl via an sms messaging service.

About a month ago I found out about dodgeball.com which takes the network into your phone and uses proximity software coupled with SMS messaging to tell you where/when prospective friends are nearby. Basically what you do is create an account and add friends as usual, but the twist is that when you go out you are supposed to SMS the dodgeball servers where you go. In turn the dodgeball servers lookup all friends and friends-of-friends who are within a certain proximity, and it notifies them about your location. Pretty slick. The one catch is that it's only available in certain metropolitan areas at the moment, sorry suburban folk.

Both these options have their merits, but i am still yet to see any of these services really do what they promise. maybe i just don't have the personality for it though :|

So here's a new catagory for listing links to any random blog that I find interesting, amuzing, or in this case a bit freaky.

Die Puny Humans comes from writer Warren Ellis who has written some of my favorite comics/graphic novels including Transmetropolitan. Check out the books, check out the blog.

http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/

A record label that is selling high quality mp3 files without any DRM.

ahh ... too cool for words. check out kcrw.org and listen 7-12 weeknights as well as saturday nights. if only all radio was this good!

I love finding great new sites to visit. Especially when they are forums that get serious action and have bounties of information. Check out all the great art work on this forum I just found ... appropriately named The Drawing Board

This is a pretty good article that explores the possible reasons why societies make bad decisions, even ones that lead to destruction.

I like how the author tried to sound optimistic at the end, but really we all know that life is coming to an end. There are far too many people, and too many problems to be solved anymore.

Wahoo ... free comics. Go get 'em!