Archive: March 5, 2005

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onetrick pony

Saturday,  03/05/05  11:18 PM

I've been blogging for a little over two years now.  When I started, on January 1, 2003, I started slow.  My posts were short, with few pictures.  I had very few regular readers (hi Mom!) and very little traffic.  Then exactly two years ago I did something very few bloggers have done.  I wrote a "popular" article.  That one little article, The Tyranny of Email, transformed my blog presence.

Suddenly I was on the map.  Dave Winer linked it, and the rest, as they say, was history.  I'd only been blogging three months, but there I was on the home page of slashdot, and my traffic hasn't dropped much since.  That article remains by far my most popular page, and periodically someone new discovers it, links it, and poof! I get a bunch of traffic.  (This just happened, Omar Shahine, "yet another Microsoft blogger", posted a link two days ago, and I've had a flood of traffic since.  Thanks, Omar :) 

I could probably stop blogging altogether and I'd still get a bunch of traffic from that one page alone.  Don't worry, I won't.

I've posted a bunch of articles and notes and pictures and all sorts of stuff in the past two years - if you're new around here, please check out my greatest hits over there on the right, which are the posts which have received the most hits - but actually I'm just a onetrick pony :)

 

Saturday,  03/05/05  11:37 PM

The Ole filter makes a pass...

I have to say, Bittorrent is the coolest thing ever.  Tonight I wanted to download xCode v1.5, the latest version of Apple's Developer Tools.  So I'm a member of Apple's Developer Connection, and I find the link on their website, and I click on it, and I start the download of the 300MB disk image.  I'm getting 100KB/s, not bad, but this is going to take hours...  Okay stop that.  I launch Shareaza, find a torrent for xCode v1.5 on eDonkey in, like, five seconds, and crank up the download.  In no time I'm downloading at 350KB/s.  Fifteen minutes later I had the image.  Oh, and yes I did leave it running for a while to donate some upload bandwidth.  We care and give back :) 

WritTorrent: Drag & Drop .torrent creation.  Excellent.  This is going to be IP TV.  Really. 

Steven Den Beste pokes his head out of retirement for brief post: Victory is never cheap.  I'd kept U.S.S.Clueless in my aggregator in the faint hope this would happen, and it did. 

I like this - the bathroom wall principle.  "If you write a poem on a bathroom wall, the owner of the restaurant isn’t obliged to erase it at your whim.  Nor should he have to let you back into the bathroom to edit it yourself.  He can stick a neon Guinness sign in the bathroom next to your poem.  If he happens to hoist his double-wide restaurant onto the back of a trailer and move it to another city (or country), then the bathroom goes with him and he’s still not obliged to do anything about your poem."  So be it.  [ via Sam Ruby

Jamie Zaworsky, ex-Netscape coder and current nightclub owner: Groupware Bad.  "So I said, narrow the focus.  Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"  Not coincidentally, everyone thinks Google is going to announce a calendar soon.  So be it.  [ via Tim Bray

Chris Anderson: In Defense of Endism.  "You have to realize that there are three kind of people: 

A) Position People
B) Velocity People (first derivative)
C) Acceleration People (second derivative)

Category A people think: "4 million subscribers is a lot. Consumer Reports must be doing something right."

Category B people think: "It used to be 4.2 million. Consumer Reports is in decline."

Category C people think: "They lost 200,000 readers in three years! Consumer Reports is dead."

The jump from "their growth has slowed" to "they're dead" seems to be instant, doesn't it?

Yahoo! turned ten recently!  Wow.  Anyway they've posted a cool netrospective, 100 moments from the last 10 years, a la 10x10.  Check it out.  [ via Napsterization

What's really interesting is how many things came and went.  Sure there was Netscape and eBay and Google, but do you remember Excite?  Pointcast?  Webvan?  And Napster?  They were BIG.  And now they're gone

Do you read Tom's Hardware?  It's a cool site, they're sort of a Consumer Reports for computer hardware.  Plus they've got a dry and nasty sense of humor.  Anyway they just reported on the Ultimate LAN party in Texas.  You know it's going to be good when people show up with liquid nitrogen to cool their overclocked systems :) 

 

 
 

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