Feeling disorganized
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
I think it might just be one of the side effects of international travel and two weeks of vacation, but I’m feeling utterly and completely disorganized.
Part of it has to be the two-tiered moving in that’s going on right now (I’m semi-moved in but the person who was subletting from me for the summer still hasn’t moved out), and part of it is just trying to get back in the loop of school, Flicker, real work, and friends I haven’t seen in several months.
Regardless, it’s going to feel really good when I get everything settled into my room and into some sort of ruitine so that I can sit down and really re-organize my thoughts.
There’s a lot I need to be doing right now, so I wish I could get myself un-cluttered and motivated. Scratch that. I need to get myself un-cluttered and motivated.
Sometimes it stares at me
I’m sure that by the year 2012 I will have grown to hate this page. It sits there with a queue of drafts listed garishly across the top and a huge title that says “Write Post.”
Some days I just go nuts and write fifteen new posts about who knows what (and ironically, those are usually the days where I make myself write something pointless in the morning), and there are other days where I stare blankly back at the page.
Stupid blogger’s block.
Nothing works
Hooray for getting in and trying to set up stuff that doesn’t work.
For some reason, turning off my media center for two days has broken the remote control. And my e-mail doesn’t work on any of my computers.
lKJSDfpoaihds;lkahsdg
The “one more thing” travel paradox
I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but I think my luggage was less full coming back than it was going out - it doesn’t make any sense since I picked up a pint glass, mug, and bottle of wine while traipsing about Europe, but there you have it.
Right now I’m getting ready to shut down my big rig and lug it upstairs in preparation for my long haul down I-5 from Seattle to Los Angeles. It’s going to be a long ride.
But as I pack for the trip (by adding things to what I packed, basically, huh?) I keep thinking about the “one more thing” travel paradox, which, according to me, states that there is always room for one more thing, no matter how much you have already packed.
Bag full but you want to take a camera? No problem, put it in your pocket. Car funn but I want to take a DVD? No problem, I’ll slide it between the seat and the e-brake. Want to take a pencil? Tuck it behind your ear.
I know it’s not logically, physically possible, but it works pretty damn well.
Next time your packing, to to think of something you’d reasonably want to take that it’s actually impossible for you to squeeze in somewhere. I dare you.
hello from england
I’m sitting in a pub in Brighton right now taking advantage of the free wireless network on my phone. Ben, who i an traveling with, is writing a massive email about our trip which i will ironically only be able to read once i get back home.
So far the trip has been extremely fun, and it’s been very refreshing to be away from all sorts of technology and the internet all week. I thing sometimes people today forget that vacation is supposed to be a removal from everything they are used to doing on a daily basis. I am looking forward to sitting on the beach in Nice next week and very intentionally not worrying about the blogoshere, flicker gaming, or anything else i worry about on a regular basis.
I promise to take some really pretty pictures and share some stories later, but don’t be surprised if i don’t post again until i get back.
Get yo’self some traffic with the Linkbox
Some people are figuring out that tagging things in our Linkbox is a great way to draw some attention to themselves and drive a little traffic their way.
Like all social tagging services, our Linkbox lets anyone have a real voice on OUR FRONT PAGE. Smart site owners know that letting someone else do the work to build up an audience and then basically advertising relevant content for free can really pay off.
Sometimes we even pull main page posts from what gets seeded there.
So do yourself a favor and give the linkbox a whirl.
Getting ready to travel
Assuming nothing really drastic happens before Saturday, I’ll be on a plane to Amsterdam with my friend Ben.
Getting ready for the trip is more trouble than I’d like it to be, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy the trip. Posting will be light, but I’ll do what I can.
Shooting is only half
It occurs to me as I look at photos like this one and this one that finding the right shot is only half the work in making a good photo.
The rest is in drawing out the right colors and mood - in digital photography, this means good use of photoshop and RAW conversion tools.
I’m not really sure where this came from but it’s awesome
You can find part 2 and part 3 on Youtube.
FlickR in Gamma
Did anyone else notice that the photo service FlickR has moved from being a “beta” service to a “gamma” service?
I think that’s pretty clever.
Blue Angels at Seafair
Went to see the Blue Angels today at Seafair. Took some cool pictures.
Playing editor
Writing to grow and atract an audience (what I do on Flicker Gaming) is a hell of a lot different from writing for my own gratification (largely what I do here). It forces me to play editor, which means trying to pick and write about things that people will want to read.
In other words, I’m trying to figure out what people want to know before they know they want to know it.
It’s turning out to be pretty damn tricky. At the moment, the best method I have is to take a guess, write it up, and put it out there. We tag a lot of things on Digg, so I actually have a quantitative list of each post’s popularity: the number of diggs.
Sooner or later I’ll get a good feel for what people really like to read, and that will make Flicker even better.
Spam Spam Spam Spam
My oldest emal address is from Seanet - leftover from the days when we had dial-up accounts that came with 500k of web space and an e-mail account.
Recently they “switched” spam filters to some new system, but as far as I can tell all they did was switch it off.
I had ten mail messages in my inbox this morning and 9 of them were spam from my old account. Since they turned it off last week I’ve gotten an average of 15 spam emails every day, which is up from about 1.
Come on Seanet, get your act together.
We have smart readers
This is partly a product of having a reasonably small audience, partly a product of Firefox’s growing market share, and partly a product of catering to a growd that just gets it.
At Flicker, Firefox still beats out IE as the number one browser that hits our site:
Entrepreneuring on the web
Looking at articles in Business Week like this one covering Kevin Rose (Digg.com) makes me realize several things about being an entrepreneur on the web today:
- You either need to be able to do something yourself, or have the cash to actually hire someone who can. It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how easily you can talk yourself into “I’ll find someone who knows how to do this, and we’ll split the profits.”
- A great way to offer a successful service is to find out something that web users are doing already or want to be doing, and come up with a better way for them to do it. (In the case of Digg, that “something” was “find and share cool links with other people”).
- In the increasinly long-tail digital world, there’s as much money or more to be made in successfully aggregating content (being a filter) as there is in creating it. Practically every link on Digg sends you to another site, and it’s almost as popular as the New York Times.
-
Subscribe
-
Jason's Shared Items
-
Contact Me
j [at] jason-preston.com
AIM/Skype: Jasonp107 -
MyBlogLog
-
Admin