Who uses a blogroll anymore?
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.
It dawned on me that I never even look at people’s blogrolls. I used to actually care about blogrolls before MyBlogLog rolled along (incidentally they’re sponsoring the Blog Business Summit. Grab a discount through their code and see them at the conference).
But I can’t remember the last time I clicked out through anyone’s blogroll. Can you?
Loading …Ripping DVDs
For the past month I’ve been slowly but steadily ripping my entire DVD collection onto my Media Center, so I have a gigantic digital scroll/search/rateable directory of my movies that I can simply browse through whenever I want to watch a movie (using MyMovies for Windows MCE).
It’s going to be really cool when it’s finally complete. But ripping a full-length movie with Magic DVD Ripper on my media center takes about 3 1/2 to 4 hours. So I’ve been ripping only about three or four of them per day, and I have…a lot of movies. I don’t really know how many DVDs I have, but it’s well over a hundred.
Yesterday it occurred to me that I could probably start ripping movies on my new beastie as well, thus doubling my movie-ripping output. And then it occurred to me that I could also use my brother’s computer since he’s out of town. Triple the movie-ripping output!
you see where this is going?
So now I have four computer simultaneously ripping DVDs, and my beastie rips them more than twice as fast as my media center (about 1:25 for a full movie), so in the past day I’ve ripped 11 movies instead of the usual 4.
Why didn’t I think of this before? I might actually finish before the end of the week!
Using the “more” tag to get better SEO in wordpress
You might have noticed that I’ve been sticking that pesky “read more” split in way more of my posts than I have done in the past.
The reason is detailed here, on the Blog Business Summit blog, but essentially, clipping your posts on the main page will reduce what Google considers to be “duplicate content,” and consequently improve your search ranking.
If everyone hate hate hates it, I might cut it out. But for now I’ll give it a try and see what happens to my Google placement.
World Series of Gaming on CBS
In a format that is undoubtedly going to be compared to Poker at least 300,000 times in the next five days, CBS is airing some footage from the World Series of Video Games tomorrow (today?) - Sunday, anyway - and I’m going to definitely check it out.
I don’t get G4TV and as a result, I really never get to see video game TV coverage. This is probably a good thing since I’m:
- A video geek
- A video game player
- An actor
which means that any video game TV I watch is likely to make me cringe because I think I could shoot it, play it, and host it better than some doofus on an actual cable channel.
Comfort Movies
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. There are times when I just need to sit down and watch a movie that for some reason or another reminds me of good times.
Whenever I get that itch, I reach for a very specific set of movies. I call them comfort movies. Top of my list is probably Return of the Jedi, which I’m watching right now.
If I had to pick my top 5, I think the list would look like this:
- Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (from which I learned the word “optimism” and the phrase “delusions of grandeur)
- Better off Dead (also known as my favorite movie ever)
- The Princess Bride
- The Naked Gun
- Hackers
If I’m feeling weird or tired or burnt out, chances are you’ll find me watching one of these movies. They just, for some inexplicable reason, make me feel warm and fuzzy. Note the prominence of 80s comedy.
What are your comfort movies?
Beyond the Sword looks sweet
According to this review over at IGN, the new Civ IV expansion might be one of those irresistible goodies I’ll have to go pick up.
I’m normally a little wary of game expansions that multiply the complexity of play by a zillion-fold, but Civ IV is based on complexity to start with, and as an added bonus, I get to think about things as long as I want because it’s turn based.
I still play Warcraft II because, at least in my mind, it boils the RTS genre down to all the essentials: you’ve got to a good selection of units for both land and sea, you got great maps, decent AI, and a good story.
My Deathly Hallows Predictions Revisited: how did I do?
Just before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hit the shelves (OK, technically, not very many copies hit shelves when I went out to get it at midnight. They seemed to skip that step and go straight to people’s hands), I sat down and posted a short list of my predictions for the book.
I like to read a bit more slowly than everyone else, though, and I only finished the book yesterday. It makes a lot more sense to me to read the book once and enjoy it than to use my friend Teresa’s twice-through method (Spoilers here!), which involves a lot more words.
I have since read the book, and I have also since realized that every freaking blogger in the world used the same book cover picture I used, but I guess that was probably inevitable. I won’t make the same mistake again (see image).
I’ve considerately tucked my spoilers and book impressions behind the cut.
The Ultimate rolling list of Facebook Groups
For bloggers, entrepreneurs, and Facebook Marketers.
Check out the list.
If I forgot anything, let me know.
Twitter should separate personal streams and business streams
I like Twitter. I like having conversations with people line by line. It’s a lot more personal, immediate, and direct than blogging, which is fun.
But I think some of the rules of blogging still apply to Twitter. For instance, some blogs are really about business. They’re promoting a service or a product. And that’s fine, because the reader knows what they’re going into.
I think people on Twitter should be careful to separate their businesss twitter streams from their personal twitter streams. Because they come in different categories. A good personal stream can (and probably should) have some business links in it occasionally. That’s a more complete picture.
But now twitter should find some some way to mark that difference. Chris Pirillo’s twitter stream is essentially a constant list of links to the Chris Pirillo show. Which is fine. But it’s not what I was expecting when I started following him.
Granted, it takes five seconds to pull his feed from my list - so it’s largely a non-issue. And I might do that someday.
But I think it would be neat if Twitter would segment their streams, maybe even create a second tab on the Twitter home page so that we can flip between the two types of streams. Or maybe let you tag each tweet as a business tweet or a personal tweet, and then it gets colored differently, and you can view them in one stream or in two.
In any case, it’s worth playing with.
Drive Traffic with Destination Content
This is a modified excerpt of the book I’m slowly writing on marketing your blog and getting noticed in the blogosphere. Any comments are more than welcome.
I have a term to introduce: Destination Content.
Destination content is the holy grail of blog fodder. It is what every great blog is full of, and what every blogger aspires to produce. It is the type of content that brings people onto the web in the first place, and if you make it, they will come.
That’s rule number one of blogging: if you have destination content, you will get readers. Oh sure, it helps if you advertise and cross-comment and do all the stuff we talk about at the Blog Business Summit, but I’ll tell you right now that fundamentally, it’s the content that matters.
So, what exactly is destination content?
Destination content is, in this order:
- Reference material (how-to’s and reviews)
- Lists (top 10s and memes)
- Opinion (why nobody will win the Triple Crown again?)
A little more practice is needed…
YouTube debate questions? That’s freaking cool
Have you guys seen the news that CNN is going to host a debate where presidential candidates will be forced to evade amateur, softball questions posed by YouTube users?
More than 2,000 video questions have been submitted, representing a cross-section of issues and coming from as far away as Spain, Panama and Chad.
CNN editors, including tonight’s debate moderator, CNN host Anderson Cooper, will select as many as four dozen to air in the two-hour broadcast from Charleston, S.C. But the submissions, which must be 30 seconds or less, can be viewed at Youtube.com.
That’s a pretty sweet debate idea. Bringing the debate back to the masses instead of having some boring, pre-arranged posing contest where candidates spend too much time thanking the host for such an excellent question. Let’s have some stupid questions, so they can skip that part and go straight to the answer!
Only in America is it bad to be healthy
In the New York Times today, President Bush is quoted on his intent to veto a new expanded health care bill being introduced by Senate Democrats:
President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, which he describes as a step “down the path to government-run health care for every American.”
Normally, I’d consider “government-run health care for every American” a better deal than “privately run health care for rich Americans,” but apparently the President knows something I don’t, and we’re better off letting large portions of our population die because they can’t afford health care.
Visiting Snoqualmie
My friend had his birthday party last night out in Snoqualmie - his mom has a great house right on a river…it’s beautiful:
My official list of Harry Potter predictions
I figure now, mere hours before the widespread release of the last Harry Potter book, is a good time to make my official predictions.
I haven’t read any of the books since the last one came out, which is when I read the last one, and so on backwards.
As a result I don’t have many, so I’m going to make a few up arbitrarily, just to keep things interesting.
The list:
- Snape is a good guy (duh)
- Sirius Black is actually dead&gone
- Draco will somehow be involved in Voldemort’s death
- Snape will die, Harry will probably kill him
Excellent. Let’s see how I do.
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