Aurora Student Decides What Millions Read Online

This was awesome.

Yesterday morning I was on my favorite site in the world, Digg.com, when my wife pried me away from the mac mini for some much needed milk at the grocery store.

In rare and grungy form, I drug my morning-breath, foul ass to the local grocery store, where I was greeted at the news-stand I always stop at (whether I'm in a hurry or not) With what...Digg & Netscape.com's very own "dirtyfratboy" on the Front Page of the flippin' Chicago Tribune and the headline:

That gem you read online? You should probably thank this kid.

Friends, that is just awesome. I am not a "dirtyfratboy fanboy" (I don't even really know Henry) but I do know his digg track record, and the kind of stuff I've discovered because of him. I give the kid his propers for helping to legitimize (whether for pay or Not for pay) an activity analogous to blogging and that is social bookmarking. What's good for the goose is good for the gander! Conrgats Henry!

Managing my online "identity"

Working on some blog/online persona consolidation & integration here

It's an OpenID enabled and a pretty niffty "jump page" for all of one's various profiles, accounts, and generally speaking your online life. I'm still playing with all the features & wrapping my mind around OpenID, etc...but this seems somewhat promising.

More to come...

gettin' the flow on for the weekend...

Microsoft has closed off "Soapbox" (their YouTube knock-off) to new users for at least 2 months (or more) They say the rise of illicit content on the service is the reason, but they are also the new home & platform for this NBC/FOX answer to YouTube.

The Brilliance of Joost
I give mad props to Bit Torrent and it's founder, Mr. Brahm Cohen, but I think he's missing the point somewhat in comments that he made in the Valley about Joost being out-dated in it's "TV Channel" approach. It's a lean-back experience over the PC, with many lean-forward features. Ideally Joost could be streamed over a home network to TV as well.

Speaking of Joost, Disney is hinting at bringing their programming to the platform. At the Future of Film conference, an exec told the audience Joost had a quality delivery system and good management team.

I'm noticing national weather patterns, not through any forecast... but through twitter posts by friends all over country ;-) It sounds like its raining all over today.

Top 10 Digger, Chrisek, banned from Digg !?!

***Breaking Update 1:00pm CST, Chrisek is back. See his blog for more info. Evidentially he dugg this and it was reported as spam by enough people to quarantine his account for 5 days (!) Thanks to everyone's participation in digging & voting on the story because 5 days has become 5 hours -- his account is again now active.

Original Post:

Top 10 digger (and my good friend) Chrisek has been banned from Digg.

To his knowledge, he's done nothing to violate their TOS and has yet to hear a response from Digg about it. Chrisek (Krzysztof "Chris" Pajak ) and I have collaborated on blogging and design efforts in the past. I can vouch that this guy is not 1) a Spammer, or 2) Paid to promote content, etc....

He was #9 or #10 on the top diggers list and always submits some great stuff. This was his last post which was subsequently buried right after it hit Digg's FP. It's an interesting post with tons of comments so it's odd that it was buried after +130 diggs.

Hopefully Chrisek is reinstated soon. Speaking for myself, I know Digg is a ultimately a business and that it's KR and Jay's job to run it as they see fit, but I do hope they remember that they've got (and had) a great community of smart and die-hard users and it's a real bummer to see the "old school" leave the site -- especially when they're kicked out :(

Digg this Story

twitter away, twitter away, twitter away now!

twitter is something else. what's more is the application manifested through twittervision.com

the stream of consciousnesses of the crowds? SMS over REST??

sign-up it takes like one second:
http://www.twitter.com

find me.

using delicious, implusively digging, and getting the mac fanboy thing

So, i've been using my del.icio.us more and more. it's far more library-esque than digg of course, but that's a good thing when it comes to cataloging links.

i've become a bit more active with my digg submissions again too. That's probably a direct result of me getting some new fast hardware. I bought a Mac Mini from a friend (it's my first) and I am loving it. I "get" the whole fanboy thing now. (it really is just better)

For example. I installed an older Brother model printer/fax/scanner this morning for my wife (our 7 year old son had a last minute project that needed to be printed, right before the school bus was coming!) I got it set up in about 2 minutes. They may not sound like a big deal, but this same printer took me hours to install on a high-end XP-Based PC machine! (I can't even imagine what it would be like on Vista)

It just "worked" with my new Mac. Crisis solved, hero dad. Thanks, Apple.

Anyway, try Del.icio.us - it's awesome and underrated.

The Virtues of Digg's Slow Load Times

If you're a knee jerk poster or commenter, then digg's slower response times can be a life saver! A crucial extra second or two is great for hitting the "STOP" button and saving you from writing an embarrassing email to digg support asking them to correct a typo in your description or headline. (sheepishly points at nose)

I'm still considering giving Netscape more of whirl (in addition to digging of course), but I am a perennial digg-addict even if the crowd's demo is changing on me again.