I’ve received a few e-mails and direct messages from people who know I’m in Maine, accompanying the 18 year old on a college visit. I thought I’d answer with this map. Yes, there’s a hurricane heading to Maine. No, I’m not in its path. However, in a few minutes (Sunday, a.m.), I’m evacuating Brunswick for Portland where I’ve located a sports bar with a screen dedicated to the Titans game.

I’m sorry if you’ve had problems attempting to comment on this blog during the past few days. For some reason (translation: operator error), the setting got changed so that someone had to be “registered” on the site to make a comment. As I probably have “registering” turned off, that made commenting problematic. Sidenote: I’m trying to install the Disqus and FriendFeed plugins but the blog’s custom theme is making the installation of both a notch above my skill-level — I’m close, but not quite there. I’ll tackle it this weekend. That is all.

One of the great things about blogging consistently over a long period of time is being able to do this:

10 steps of political scandals: It worked then, it works now. [August 28, 2007]

2002 Olympics closing ceremonies: My first real-time blogging of a TV Olympics ceremony. Twitter is my real-time “quip” platform these days, however. [February 24, 2002]

Due to technical difficulties yet to be determined, the RexBlog is not picking up my daily post that aggregates (or, perhaps, aggravates) the bookmarks I add to what is now the less-dotted web service, Delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us). You can still find the bookmarks at the easier-now-to-remember-and-spell-address: Delicious.com/rexblog or any of the social networking, lifestreaming, RSS-reading places where some of you may be reading this. I think it will start working again tonight.

Next day update: Still no links. I’ll keep working on it. It’s not Delicious with the problem as I have it working elsewhere.

Philipp Lenssen has a post that displays some hilarious image results that are occurring on Cuil.com, the heavily financed new search engine that all those mean bloggers are ganging up on.

Philipp’s results are so amusing, I thought I’d do another ego search on my name to see what happens. And whoa, the screen-grab below is what I found. While not me, the guy on the left is my friend, Joi Ito. He’s taken my photo a few times, and I his. So, other than him living in Japan and me in Tennessee, I guess I see the relation. As for that photo on the right that accompanies a Nick Bradbury post that mentions me, if it looks like a pregnant man, well, it is. Huh? Oddly, the pregnant man image shows up on a Google Image search for me, as well — thanks to this post related to my annual warning before April Fool’s Day. I guess the April Fool’s joke was one me.

If you follow me on Twitter (twitter.com/r), you may have caught me mentioning I’m planning to go “Neo-Amish” for a few days. I hadn’t heard the term until earlier this week when Kevin Kelly, who coined the term many years ago, wrote about bloggers, blackberry addicts or the kind of people who stand in the line at an Apple Store, who decide to abandon the devices they use to stay plugged in. No way am I going to do that permanently, but if I wanted to, hey, no problem, I could do it — no, really.. I could quit using this stuff anytime I wanted to. Cold turkey. Really.

In reality, I’m going to be spending the next several days involved in a project that involves cutting up wood. If all goes as planned, I’ll be making a looped-back windsor chair that looks (if I’m lucky) like the one pictured. It’s going to be a full-time focus for several days during which I’ll be spending time with a very talented guy who enjoys teaching people how to keep from cutting off their fingers while making things like windsor chairs. One way to keep from cutting off ones fingers, I’ve been informed, is to avoid text-message while using a lathe. The same goes for using any power tool while Twittering, blogging, or being obsessed with loading apps onto a new iPhone 3G.

Making a windsor chair, I’ve determined, is very 18th century. So I’ll be “offline” entirely during the project.

For the record, I won’t be gadget free. I’m documenting the experience for a magazine and video project. In other words, I’ll still be digital, just not conversationally.

See you back here on July 21.

I’m in Washington D.C. today, attending the Small Business Summit sponsored by NFIB and eBay. For those of you who help produce events, you may find the media-gallery we’re producing of interest. It is aggregating Flickr, YouTube and Twitter updates several people are adding throughout the conference.

One thing that means is that I’ll be tied up during the Stevenote at today’s WWDC (for regular people, that’s shorthand for saying I won’t be able to hear what Steve Jobs announces about the iPhone today, live, while he’s speaking.)

I’ve seen plenty of rumors over the past few weeks and as many people who read this blog know, I have a two-year-old list of rumors that still has a few items to mark out, some of which I may be able to do today.

As for me, the only break-through feature that will cause me to trade up to the new iPhone is video — specifically the ability to stream video using services like Qik.com. iPhone video iChat is taking the phone to the next level and (as you can see from my two-year-old rumor list) something I’ve wanted for a long time.

Anyway, have a fun day.

P.S. Here are some early morning D.C. photos from a jog I took before the heat (and meeting) sets in.

 End of day update: Oh well. I won’t be standing in line for this version — no video iChat and the camera is still on the wrong side of the phone — however, I’m sure it will be really swell to have such a scorching phone. Ironically, I already pay for AT&T 3G as that is what powers my cellular broadband I use on my MacBook Air (indeed, I’m using it now). I’ve been very pleased with AT&T 3G and, while it may just be my imagination, it seems to be moving faster lately.

This is a comment added by Mr. Charles Wilkes to my post the other day about a source for 20,000+ free eBooks. I don’t know if I kin to Mr. Wilkes (I am closely related to lots and lots of Wilkes), but I hope I am just like him when I’m 82:

I got my Kindle last Dec. 4th, love it more and more every day, and now have over 600 books in my directory storedon my 8 GB memory card, with enough room left for more than 10,000 more. But I have thousands of paper books — over half hard bound — that I no longer want, and will never try to read again. I do want my heavily colored illustrated books, since my Kindle cannot replace those — how I wish it could, but it can’t.

My problem then is how do I reduce my regular books which are truly a burden in my home. Obviously I would like to sell as many as possible of these for at least something, or all that I can. I guess there is always EBAY and other auction sites, but they are a lot of work to set up to sell, and then deliver via the mails. And this is not as easy as it once was, since I’m now 82 years old. What I really hate to consider is that under current practices, these will some day end up in a land fill or recycle bins. They contain the knowledge of this world, and many many young people really need access to this, and what with the closing of school libraries and financial problems in supporting public libraries, this is getting harder and harder for them to obtain.

So if any of you have any better ideas of how to give these books a more extended life amont those who would really read and appreciate these, please give me your ideas. I am sure many are in the same position.

Any advice to Mr. Wilkes?

• Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee | BBC
  Berners-Lee Quote (Regarding 15th anniversary of The Web) - What’s exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance.
  (tags: internet history web)
• Harvey King’s 2004 Letter to a Future That’s Now | Hammock.com/rexhammock
  Over on my Hammock People Page, I’ve posted a letter my friend Harvey King wrote to his ‘future-self’…and, as they say, the future is now.
  (tags: observation)
• Teens use emoticons in school writing | msnbc.com
  Other breaking news: Teens say “you-know” in the middle of sentences. Teens think surveys are, like, duh. Teens are beginning to limit all test answers to less than 140 characters.
  (tags: obvious)

The storyline is this, people: The economy sucks. We’re in a gut-wrenching recession. Batten down the hatches for the worst economy since (fill in blank). And oh by the way, where are those MREs we stored up before Y2K?

The storyline is this, people: The whole Internet advertising thing is ready for a bust. Sure, online advertising is growing, but with the economy in the dumps, no way is Google going to keep growing.

The storyline is this, people: Small businesses buy lots of those search ads and small businesses are hurting now, so expect to see some fall-off in the growth of search advertising. It’s going to happen. We’re experts, we’re ComScore, and we know these things.

And then, Google has to go and spoil it all by out-performing the storyline and even having the audacity to ignore the storyline.

Quote from the New York Times:

“Google’s first-quarter report comes amid intense interest and speculation over the impact that a slowing economy may have on the Internet search giant and on the online advertising business overall. When Google reported financial results for the fourth quarter of 2007, Mr. Schmidt, told investors that the company had seen no adverse effects on its business from a slowing economy.

The storyline is this, people: There’s going to be a bust in all that search advertising and all those startups who are depending on Adsense revenue to help them “monetize” themselves are going to get flushed out when that crazy money stops flowing.

The storyline is this, people: If Google sneezes, web startups die of pneumonia.

The storyline is this, people: Lots of old-time web people wouldn’t mind seeing that happen.

Unfortunately for them, those wishes are delayed at least another quarter.

People, don’t ya’ll know the storyline?

I’m away from the office a few days. Any non-bookmarking pings will occur over at RexHammock.com or on Twitter.com/r. Photos will be posted at Flickr.com/rexblog. Today, I’m one-day into re-enacting this current (and apparently not very good) movie, except our language has already precluded us from earning a G rating. Happy Easter.

No one asked, but here are the primary ways I’m currently expressing myself online.:

rexblog.com: Professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). Once each day, my blog includes a posting that aggregates all of the links I’ve bookmared on del.icio.us/rexblog that are related to those topics.

Hammock.com/rexhammock: My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”

RexHammock.com: Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.

Twitter.com/r: Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I "hang-out" online.

Flickr.com/rexblog: Where I post photos.

YouTube.com/rexhammock: Where I post videos.

Last.fm/user/rexhammock: Music I’m listening to.

Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”

FriendFeed.com/rexhammock: A “lifestream” of everything I post anywhere.

Recently, I re-booted RexHammock.com, a URL on which I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr.com for several months. I had determined that I was under-utilizing it as merely a “lifestream” catcher — a place that collects all the different RSS feeds generated by my various online-expressions on Twitter.com/r, Flickr.com/photos/rexblog, etc. And, with services like FriendFeed.com and even MyBlogLog getting more into being pure-play lifestream platforms, I decided to go back and figure out how to better utilize the very cool features of Tumblr.

As you can see from RexHammock.com, one of the smart things they did was make it drop-dead-simple for me to use my own URL instead of some long / this-and-that account name. And, despite my design-free look on the site, the Tumblr platform has some attractive templates and is very CSS-friendly for those who want to (and can) be creative. I’m trying to master the functions and ethos of the platform and its community, before putting any time into determining what it should look like however. So, in my experiment, you can consider it now in a wire-frame state.

What I have determined is this: I’ll be writing about and pointing to mostly non-work or non-professional-related topics on RexHammock.com. For example, this week, I started off with my review of the Punch Brothers new release and have followed that up with posting quotes from the New York Times and the long piece yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. (I’m happy to note that if you had read my review on Tuesday, and had listened to a YouTube video I pointed to, you would have been better prepared to understand why such a “different” kind of recording is receiving such attention.)

So, to summarize: On rexblog.com, I’m gradually shifting to focused commentary and links related to magazines, new media (specifically, what I call “conversational media,”) marketing, corporate and association communication. Some of this is cross-posted on Hammock.com and elsewhere. My non-professional interests (stuff my wife & kids & pets do, the world, my hometown, travel, music, photography, books, movies, table saws, humor, tomatoes, Tennessee Titans, Vanderbilt basketball, etc.) are slowly showing up on RexHammock.com.

Posted on February 23, 2008

Over the years, I’ve heard lots of stories about couples meeting online. And I know that an online industry has grown up around helping people connect with others who are of the same mind — or heart — or both.

Yet when I started blogging, the last thing (but definitely the best thing) I ever expected to post one day was a photo of a happy couple who are getting married this weekend who first met because of this blog. I feel like Michael from The Office when I interject myself into this couple’s “how we met” story, but they’ve told me they first became aware of one-another through comments on this blog and the first time they actually met was at a blogger event I co-hosted with the guy on the left, a Nashville lawyer who was a legendary early “persona” blogger who went my the name Mr. Roboto. Yes, that’s Mr. Roboto.

Anyway, I’ll skip the rest of the story and merely say congratulations and best wishes and I hope the weather is swell in Hawaii where you are arriving and preparing for your wedding — however, I know that first, Mr. Roboto will be watching a little basketball game.

Congratulations, David and Lena.

As my online time has been sparse the past few days, I’m only now realizing that Jon Gordon’s Public radio show Future Tense posted the story about about Apple and Think Secret that includes some Rex sound bites.

Thanks to Jon’s amazing editing skills, I don’t sound like a complete idiot — except to those who believe Apple can never do wrong.

I’m back on the grid after two days of un-plugged bliss. It’s odd for me to be outside the range of internet connectivity — in a spot where cell-phone coverage is spotty and I’m beyond any “edge” that AT&T’s Edge coverage may reach. My email’s backed up and my RSS reader is overflowing. I doubt I’ll be blogging much today. However, tomorrow I’ll be posting photos from Nashville’s Boulevard Bolt, one of my favorite community events of the year.