100 Posts and Open Threads

I feel like I should somehow make this post special.  It's the 100th post since I've reset my blog. While this isn't exactly the most prolific stretch of my life, I've put out a respectable amount of work in the last several months, and it's crossed a number of media types.

I don't have any big observations to make on that, but I really have enjoyed the freedom here and at Mashable to explore online video, audio and text-blogging in it's various forms. I really feel as if I've gotten to understand the intracies of these different formats in a way most won't get a chance to.

By the way, as I've recently found out on a number of podcasts I've guested on (as well as a few heritage media journalists who've rang me up for comment on various gPhone related things), I really love answering questions, and as it turns out, I'm not a complete nincompoop when it comes to most things (so my answers are generally believable, if not actually correct).

I'm not sure if I have the community for this, but how does a periodic open thread here at rizzn.com sound to you (ala Liz Strauss)? Ask me questions, and I'll give you reasonable answers?

My gPhone Predictions Were Awesome [thanks deep throat]

Duncan Riley, my buddy over at the Inquisitr, along with many others have said openly or privately to me that the gPhone (or whatever it's going to get called this morning) is not an iPhone killer.

Let me preface what I'm about to say with this: the gPhone is likely going to end up being the first mobile phone I've felt compelled to purchase in four years.

That said, I completely agree.  Let me quote myself from last year (circa August last year):

I talked to one of my inside sources at Google today. He spoke on conditions of anonymity, but the guy is someone I trust implicitly. He said that he was baffled at Google's apparent internal confusion on the GPhone issue - that they've actually demo'ed the thing in public before.

He said that the Google (applications) Suite is going to play a huge role in the usability of the GPhone, and the thought process behind it's functionality is less about beating the iPhone and more about beating the $100 Laptop, which provides a huge clue behind what will be the pricing structure on this.

My friend later clarified (and I included this in subsequent posts) that the gPhone/Android initiative isn't really in direct competition with anyone, but it's aimed to be a low cost internet access point with a pricepoint closer to the OLPC than the iPhone. Consider at the time that the OLPC was edging closer to $200, while the iPhone was pushing $600.

All in all, not too many off base points! I'm actually pretty impressed with the accuracy of the info he handed me. I fully expected to cringe, looking at the early reports (particularly given how widely misinterpreted the data was in the subsequent days to my release of it), but it wasn't that far off the mark.

At any rate, enough slapping myself on the back. Wake me when it's Android time, I'm conking out.

The Right to Bear Cybernetic Arms

It's weird when you read two stories in a row that connect to each other in a way that no one ever intended. The first story was one about a guy running for mayor in Toronto who had the audacity to suggest that when weapons are outlawed, only outlaws will carry weapons. The second story was about a Scotish team of scientists who have devised a bionic arm that's more effective than the human arm it's designed to replace.

When you read the two stories in that context, it's not difficult to follow my train of thought.  The Canadian story is pretty ho hum (at least in the context of this article), but the story from Scotland is simply amazing:

The Livingston-based firm specialises in hi-tech limbs for patients who have undergone amputations or were born with limbs missing. The researchers say their new arm is capable of repeatedly lifting a weight of 10kg up above head height and could do so all day, compared with the average human being who would tire within minutes. The wrists could rotate 360° and anyone using it could perform hundreds of push-ups.

However, the sheer power of the limb means its creators are faced with the problem of deciding which patients could be trusted to use it safely, as it has the potential to be used as a weapon.

Granted, I'm not up on the Canadian bill of rights, but I'm relatively certain they don't have the American equivalent to the US Second Amendment. Still, it is difficult for anyone to try to make an effective argument that the founding fathers could have possibly conceived a future where augmented human arms could be considered deadly weapons (and that it would be our right, as US citizens to bear them).

If you've ever wondered about when exactly the days of Ghost in the Shell would be here, though (Sean Kennedy, I'm looking directly at you), this is them.

This is a limb that can seriously augment human performance. No, I'm probably not going to replace my limbs right away, but that's because I'm just a lowly Tech. I don't have much of a need for a hand that can at a whim rotate 360 degrees.

If I had a prosthesis that increased my manual dexterity (and my typing speed), we might be looking at something I'm interested in, though. And a set of hands that can type 1200 WPM can probably be used for some sort of nefarious purpose as a weapon, which means that I can't duck out of this hypothetical political debate.

There are two basic situations where these prosthetics can conceivably come into use, here. One is where they're used to replace a catestrophically lost limb (obviously), but the other no less real circumstance is where they're being used to augment human ability so as to better perform in a sport or profession.  Should the law treat both recipients the same? Should they be licensed and monitored? What if the laws change - do their limbs get taken away?

This is the convergence we're all headed for, soon. Technology, politics, medicine - it's all coming together.

Do you have any answers on this?  

What I Did with my Weekend Vacation

Hey folks. I know I sort of dropped off the map this weekend. I wish I could say I was unplugged for most of it, but I wasn't.

I did unplug for several hours Saturday evening, though, for my eldest son AJ's birthday party. He's turning seven next weekend, and we celebrated early due to some travel constraints. His big gift was a Nintendo DS.

Saturday during the day and Sunday from morning to right about now, I spent the bulk of my time rendering video. The SummerMash footage continues to roll in, and I'm about to buy a new computer so I can render the video quick enough to get it all posted before the next SummerMash event.

The good news, at least for my readers, is that I did most of the Austin-ite interviews, including Gendai Games, Jon-Ray, and Conjunctured. You're going to want to catch these when they come out, so go sign up for the podcast feed if you haven't.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mashableconversations-video.

Hey There, gPhone Enthusiasts

I had forgotten exactly how much traffic posting about the gPhone could bring (or Android, or the Dream, or whatever the term du jour is). I had my biggest traffic day in over a year here at my personal blog.  A lot of folks linked me on the images, so to those of you coming in from Gizmodo, Boy Genius Reports, JKOnTheRun, and InformationWeek (as well as the tons of other smaller but no less important blogs that linked me), thanks to you.

I would pledge thanks to TechCrunch/CrunchGear, who ran my pictures, but they don't know how to link properly. They ran the picture with my URL in the caption, but linked to my Utterli post. I'm not surprised, but am somewhat disappointed.

Rather than give them any undeserved linkjuice, I'll return the favor and just paste the text of their URL in this post rather than hyperlink to them: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/19/htc-dream-g1-handset-in-the-wild/.

If you're into gadgets, this isn't a specifically gadget focused blog, so it may not be your cup of tea to stick around.  We do, however, occasionally talk about robots (because robots are just frickin' cool), convergence devices like eReaders, and the gPhone (because I was the one who broke the story on it last year).

If your into sticking things into your RSS reader, jam in these two feeds: http://feeds.feedburner.com/rizzncom and http://feeds.feedburner.com/rizzn-video.

That's it. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

gPhone Spotted in the Wild!

Yesterday, I teased some photos of the gPhone spotted out in the wild, and today I deliver. The official release date of the Android-powered T-Mobile Dream is the 23 of this month (a day quickly approaching - http://mashable.com/…ember-23/).

One of my super secret spies at Google just happened to trade contact information with someone who admitted that the phone in his hand was the rumored Dream.

Most of the details of the plans and specs are publicly available in various spots around the blogosphere, as are some leaked photos, but it would appear that there are a few of these roaming the wild and in regular use, particularly in day-to-day use as the fellow in questionused it for what appeared to be his primary phone.

On the larger image, zooming in shows a bit of a peek at the interface, but from what I can tell it isn't significantly different from screenshots I've seen elsewhere.

Who's excited to grab one of these? At a price point fabled to be under $200, I know I am.

Mobile post sent by rizzn using Utterli.  Replies.

Update: From the comments, a video that shows the interface in more detail.

Utterz is now Utterli

Over at Mashable yesterday, Paisano and I both spoke with the folks over at Utterz Utterli today - and I think we both got a good taste of what's coming down the pipe, and we're both excited.

A lot of it is still under embargo, but Paisano wrote up the parts that weren't, and I did a screencast to compliment it.  You should check out both, but the screencast is below.

Utterz is now Utterli
by mashable-video

As I note at the end of the video, there's an incredible opportunity to create a Twhirl-like third party app for Utterz. The general community is very large and active there (think on the level of FriendFeed a couple months ago). Someone who writes up a client today can have 100% of the market!

Food for thought.

MSN Live Search Beating Google?

In my personal blog's web stats, I've been consistently (for the last month and a half) getting five times as much drop-in traffic from MSN Live search users than from Google.

Why do you suppose that is? That's completely up-side-down from how it's ever been in my experience.

I Was Wrong about the LHC. Panic Now.

I did a blog post last week about how there was no reason to panic about the imminent destruction of Earth due to the Large Hadron Collidor (due to the infallible logic that if destruction was imminent, we'd know about it via Twitter).

I was wrong. Start panicking - I found this webcam shot from inside the LHC facilities. I estimate we have a few minutes left.

[h/t: dallas morning news tech blog]

 

There is nothing new under the sun - not even me!

Ego-search is such an odd thing. I've set up a number of custom filters to do some good ego-searching that prevents that annoying duplication problem you get whenever you have a Google Alert (and you get 30 copies of the same article triggered by one keyword!).

You'd think with a name like Rizzn, you'd be alone on the Internets. There are a few other pretenders out there, though, and you shouldn't be fooled should you come across them.

For instance, there's a guy out in Germany who likes to play a lot of first person shooters and MMORPGs. I'm not a fan of FPS, unless they're on a console, and generally MMORPGs, not at all. You can safely assume that if you see someone named Rizzn and he's in a gaming guild, it isn't me.

There's also a DJ Rizzn who's name I see pop up on BlogSpot blogs quite frequently. Very prolific, and from what I've heard can put together a great illegal mix tape. He's not me, though. For a time, I was DJ Rizzn, and I occasionally mixed music without permission. This guy isn't me, though. Also, buy my album.

Then there's this thing I saw pop up on the feeds the other day; it appeared to be a thank you to a number of folks who helped out during a funeral for the blog post author:

Thank you to Mark with Mark's Funeral and Cremation for being so caring, and helpful. The pallbearers, Rizzn Praise Team and Marilyn Flynn for their wonderful music and also to the ladies of First Methodist Church and the Lunch Ladies from Windsor Middle School for their wonderful luncheon.

So, to dispel any rumors before they start - no, I don't own a funeral parlor and crematorium. Likewise, to the best of my knowledge there isn't a team of people devoted to praising me.

Flashback: RizWords 9/11 Episode

Back when I first started at Mashable, I was still doing the RizWords podcast with Art Lindsey. The show focused on politics and technology, but Art and I set aside party rhetoric and affiliation to bring a number of folks together from around the blogosphere to talk about their memories from that day.

I'm warning you that this is a very emotional episode from top to bottom, so if you're not in a place where you can devote roughly an hour to memorializing, you might want to save or bookmark this and listen later.

In this episode: Glenn Beck, Ken Rutkowski, Jeffr0, Jon Wilson and of course the experiences of Art and myself.

Play the embed below or download the MP3 from here.

Interesting Convergence of Hardware and Software

I don't do gadget reviews, generally.

This, though, is the coolest thing I've seen come out of DEMO or TC52 so far... It's the PlasticLogic thing from the DEMO conference. I wrote about it on Mashable last night, and I played you some stuff about it on my last podcast.

You have to see this particular demo video, though.  They have a working prototype of the device, and it looks fantastic.

Get your MP4 link here.
Subscribe to the podcast feed.

If you haven't read my Mashable article about it yet, read it keeping this demo in mind.

What is The Next Step for Books?

When I first started thinking about the "The New Kind of Journalism" series, it was intended to actually be a business plan. Because I had a number of folks I wanted to show the plan to, I started writing it as if I were addressing a complete newbie to New Media. Of course, in a business plan the idea is to be as succinct as possible, but for me it helps to write things out as verbosely and detailed as possible so I can then capture the highlights to shrink down to an elevator pitch.

As I've been considering this from the perspective of it being a potential book, though, I think about how limiting this whole images and text on paper format really is.  I've only written two complete books, they were private journals, and while they had a great deal of emotion in them there was no need to make witty cultural references or explain complex issues. 

As I'm writing something that's semi-academic and based in cutting edge business and media, using only text and images seems limiting. I can sort of get away with it here on my blog by linking to a video rather than embedding it (as I did for this one), but if I throw out the line "your a fag" in a hard copy book with no hyperlink or embedded video, you can bet I'll be getting a call from whatever the LGBT equivalent to Al Sharpton is the day it hits the press (that is if it gets past an editor).

That's one extreme example, but there are tons of better examples as to why video can often be much better than other formats.  This weekend I was watching a number of CommonCraft videos, some of the best uses of multimedia to succinctly explain a point.

That's why I'm left with two questions (and I know you folks are qualified to help me answer this):

1. What are some existing financially viable models for releasing information that would generally be considered book length form, yet allow for the inclusion of multimedia?
2. At what point do you think we'll see some new media type that easily allows for inclusion of multimedia eclipse traditional book sales and adoption?

Throw your thoughts below!

[also: I almost got the next "new journalism" piece done last night, but had to sleep. it should be done for tuesday, hopefully.]

The Grand Unmasking

Look, it occurs to me that I have a lot of negative personal blog posts here that contain drama between myself and other bloggers. I understand that's not what most of you come here to read (and then there's those of you who only come here to read those posts).

I'm not a vindictive person, but I am a guy who will defend myself and others I feel need defending. Here's a tip on not getting "featured" on this blog in that manner:

If you have a problem with me, send me an email or some other method of private communication. If you call me out on FriendFeed, Twitter, your blog or any other place where hundreds or thousands of folks are likely to read it, I have to respond. If I'm in the wrong, I might own up to it, but chances are you've really exacerbated the problem by bringing the world in on the issue.

I admit to being wrong several times a day. It usually happens over IM or e-mail. When I've hurt someone's feelings legitimately and they've come to me over it, I apologize. When someone decides to instead to stand up on a soapbox and talk about me or my friends negatively, I get on my soapbox, too.

I try to keep personal issues like this out of my professional work (though occasionally it'll seep in). This is the place where they end up.  I apologize if that bothers some of my readers (and no, I haven't had many emails on the topic, it just seems to me that it isn't particularly entertaining reading for everyone).

One thing that it does fit very well here thematically is that this is a very honest place, my blog. I try to unmask stuff here, whether it's secrets I've learned, explaining topics I'm an expert on, or using frank talk to discuss accusations leveled against me or my friends.

If you want to broaden up this issue to something applicable to your life, instead of just mine, consider it a lesson in PR. Robert Scoble, this weekend, has been featured on this blog in a most unflattering manner. This is because he decided to level some ungrounded accusations against the place where I work, impuning our ability to write (followed by several threads on FriendFeed trying to get a mob of folks to pile on to his accusations). 

I suppose if he was truly offended by offended by how we cover stuff, or if he had some constructive criticism, he could have done that privately - we're all easy to get a hold of on the Mashable editorial staff.  He didn't, and he thus opened himself up for having his behavior exposed on a much wider scale.

That's just an example, though.  It's pretty obvious stuff, and is generally common sense. 

And yeah, I've pretty much always been this way. :-)  Thanks to a server re-write last year, my old rizzn.com archives aren't accessible anymore, but I did the same thing when I was an unknown blogger as I do now. Back then, though, getting called out and insulted in front of big audiences was something that happened a lot more rarely than it does these days.

[disclosure: all this mess is me speaking on my own. i'm not paid by the DEMO conference, Pete Cashmore, or any of my co-workers to care about my reputation and the reputation of where I work.  i do that for free.]

This is an intervention, Robert...

Robert Scoble has been hanging out with Mike Arrington a lot lately, or so it would seem. Ever since he was announced as a "TechCrunch Expert" back in mid-August, he's been channeling the fervor and unqualified attacks we generally only see come from Mike after he's been on a three week blogging bender with no sleep.

And don't get me wrong - we all know Mike Arrington is a jerk. It's part of the persona he uses to sell Techcrunch with. He likes to get angry and block folks with little provocation. Likewise, it's no secret he's had a hate-on for Mashable for a long time. He maintains a Deadpool. I've even, on occasion, expressed empathy to exactly how he got to be so bitter and cutthroat.

The truth is that I've had a lot of folks come at me with the unprovoked accusation that Robert lobbed at Mashable just two weeks after he joined the TC Expert panel:

"I think it's funny to read this from a site that regularly just reprints press releases from companies without really using the stuff they are writing about."

Of course, Robert, like everyone else that's said that to us, has at least two things in common:

1) They can't prove that statement.
2) They eventually admit or it becomes obvious that they got that idea from Mike.

It's an easy enough thing to prove, particularly if you're a blogger. Everyone gets the same press releases in their email. Simply run a search based on text from the press releases. If we're in the habit of doing that, it shouldn't take long to find exact verbage matches.

Thing is, you can't do it. We don't reprint press releases, so you won't find matches.

Robert, Saturday morning, said that every company who entered themselves into the DEMO conference sucked:

I just visited every one of these companies. Boy do they almost all suck (at least their Web sites and if their sites suck, I can’t believe their products are going to do much better).

He then started several FriendFeed threads and posted four blog posts on his site defending his original accusation. Rather than backing away, apologizing and saying - "look, your design sucks but your product may be good," he continued to dig a hole and get defensive to everyone who disagreed with him.

Yeah, I have an axe to grind with Robert. He's been a pretty big jerk to me over the last few weeks on FriendFeed, said some really ridiculous things and didn't walk them back, all after calling out the editorial ethics of Mashable and refusing to apologize for it.

So yeah, I think Robert's essentially turned into a shill for TechCrunch. I'm not sure that this is his indended crowning point of his career, but he's making it really hard for me to like him anymore. His willingness to put his foot in his mouth has always made him a great foil for bloggers (something he's built his career out of), but he's definitely crossed a number of lines lately and it's irritated me enough to do a stupidly long blog post and even stupidly longer video post.

Robert: This is an intervention. We all believe it's in your best interests to re-think your position a little bit. You've been consistently talking down DEMO, and talking up TC50. You've been attacking Mike's enemies and talking up TechCrunch consistently, as well. In short, Robert, stop hanging out with Mike. He's turning you into an asshole. Everyone thinks so.



In the video - I expound on the history of Robert, Mike and this TC/DEMO mess. I also show a peek at a really cool company that's going to be at DEMO, proving that Robert's dead wrong on his analysis. I also, at the end, outline what sorts of companies are at DEMO and why web design doesn't matter as much for them. I then implore Robert to come back from the Dark Side and be the fun loving blogger who occasionally puts his foot in his mouth, but does so without malice.

Creating Satisfactory New Media Since When?

As I'm typing this, it dawns on me that the title can be interpreted a number of different ways, but since my sense of humor often swings toward the self-depricating variety, I think I'll leave it - (I imagine a lot of my readers from over at Mashable utter that phrase fairly often!).

Tonight I'm wrapping up the loose ends on the next installment of the "The New Kind of Journalism" series, and it dawns on me that the date in the graphic on my website is wrong.  On every page of this blog, there's an image my wife took of me while I was preparing for a panel discussion in Washington DC with the caption "Creating Satisfactory New Media since 1996."  

1996 is actually when I started blogging on the Internet, then on the Tripod and Angelfire free webhosting services.  They weren't blogs in the sense we know them now, as there wasn't a real content management system.  Religously every Friday, though I would create a new page of non sequitor, bad angsty poetry, and ridiculous animated .GIFs I'd find around the web.  

Only in 1998 did Rizzn.com enter into existence. It was the home of the "Official Soledad O'Brien Headboard FAQ", Joke of the Whenever I Get To It mailing list, the Official Kyle Howard Fan Club, and also served as the archives for two publications I put out in high school: JBM ONline eMAg, and the Rizzo e-Zine.

Both of these publications trace back to when I was 13 or 14 years old and still on the BBS's. I downloaded and registered a piece of software (that's still available!) called NeoBook. If you could liken it to anything available these days, think of it as a cross between Shockwave and HTML.

It was a WYSIWYG editor that let you create multi-page electronic books, laid out magazine style. There was a moderate amount of hyperlinking and text markup available within the system. There were some multimedia abilities (you could embed download packages as well as audio - don't think video was really viable back then due to connection speeds and conversion costs, not to mention the fact that the only video any of us had was that Weezer music video that came on Windows 95!).

But I used it to build a small media empire for the Greater 903 Area Code, er, Area(?). I assembled a staff of writers from around the East Texas BBS scene, and found a couple of friends from down the block to sell advertisements. I was actually doing fairly well, issuing them monthly, and around seven months in started negotiations with Ingram Periodicals to get the magazine on the shelves of every Barnes and Nobles bookstore.

Of course when you're employing slackers, paying them peanuts, and have the motivational and management skills of a 13-year-old kid, your running on borrowed time.  When school let out and summer started, it was pretty difficult to keep the writers motivated. JBM eventually died.

Punk Rawk Show Flyer - 8-5-97 by *rizzn on deviantART

About the time I got into highschool, though, two things happened. First and foremost, I discovered the Internet.  Secondly, and probably with just as much lasting impact, I discovered our area punk scene.  The Rizzo e-Zine was created, and I published a simple Internet mailer that provided times and dates for the shows as well as brief reviews and descriptions of the bands. 

That lead to bigger and better things of a completely non-New Media related vein, but it always cracks me up whenever I look at my sigfile from 1995 and it says "Senior Editor," and here it is thirteen years later and I've gone down a notch to "Associate Editor."

As for my header graphic, to be completely accurate, I should probably change the caption to say something like Creating Satisfactory New Media since 1996 and New Media of a Questionable Quality Level since 1992.

Somehow, that doesn't really flow as well, though.

Piper Palin: "Patooie!" [rnc08]

There were a lot of memorable moments from the Veep Sarah Palin speech, particularly for those of us who were waiting for some competition in this race to make things interesting and less one-sided.

I saw this when it happenned last night, but amongst all the jabs, jibes and other whatnot, this couple second clip is turning out to be the most memorable moment of the night.

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

Useless trivia: did you know that Governor Palin was winging it for most of the speech?  Apparently, the teleprompter broke halfway through.

Mashable Announces Writer Bonus Program

My boss over at Mashable admits to his worst gift given evar.



The bonus program in place here at Mashable is that you gotta get [redacted] pageviews per month, otherwise we get another bag of that cheese.

A Peek at the Next Installment of the Journalism Series

Hey there folks.  Remember that series I started the other day on "the New Journalism"? I'm almost done with one of the next installments I promised, the one on "The Role of Micro-Blogging." I had to jump the gun on releasing it a bit, given that Duncan Riley continued a meme too good to pass up this evening.

It's up on Mashable right now (entitled What is FriendFeed’s Affect on Blogging?), and it's essentially a condensed and slightly adapted form of the basic concepts I am covering here on this blog.

Obviously, you can feedback over there, but since most of you have already read the first piece in the series, feel free to trek back over here and leave some comments in the context of the larger series containing your thoughts on the matter.

Google Chrome is My New Default Browser

I'm highly impressed and shocked that Chrome is as good as it is, particularly given my lowered expectations yesterday.

You should give it a try.  Here's a screencast

The Worst Browser In The World

Democracy is the worst form of government... ...except for all the other ones that have been tried. -Winston Churchill

I'm a Mozilla Firefox user. I hate it. No matter how many times I upgrade it, I'm always left with a sub-par experience. It'll crash. It'll bloat. It'll crawl.

But it's better than everything else out there.

I'm not excited about Chrome. Not even a little bit.

Look, it's friggin' awesome that Google's doing the browser thing, but from what I understand, this thing is based off Webkit, which is apparently the same codebase that Safari is from. I've installed every single browser on my computer in the vain attempt to get away from Firefox.

Flock, Explorer, Opera, Safari. I even have a port of Lynx for when I'm feeling particularly Luddite.

My problem with Safari, aside from poor memory management and this inexplicable half second delay that occurs between clicking on a link and the browser going to hit the website, is that it mangles text, particularly in WordPress.

This isn't something isolated to me, either. It's a common ailment (but apparently not affecting 100% of the Safari population) that when you type something into a text box, the last character gets truncated. Whenever I use WordPress to edit a blog post, Safari will do all sorts of weird stuff to re-format what I wrote for me, adding and removing random

tags.

I got all this from just about two days of testing. They were deal-killers for me (for obvious reasons), but who knows what other annoying quirks lay below the surface.

I understand it's probably an asinine task to build a browser from scratch these days, but something based off the Webkit codebase doesn't sound like something that's going to make me happy.

I'll probably end up downloading it the second it's available though. Here's hoping.

/rizzn

Also, how cool would it be if the whole theme/skin of the browser was a line drawing like in the Scott McCloud comic?

5 Friggin' Fantastic Blogs

BlogDay this thing thought up by some folks who want bloggers to honor bloggers. I've been blogging since the 90s, and this is the first I've heard of it. I'm pretty much already on the outs with anyone who owns a computer, these days, since I'm not a card carrying Democrat. That pretty much means I'm required to participate in these sorts of memes so that folks can take breaths between meltdowns induced by my political beliefs (real or perceived).

The idea here is that I recommend my readers 5 others blogs that I read/like/would recommend. Get your clicking finger handy, here they come:

Sean Kennedy : You wanna talk crazy politics? This is your guy. He's one of the founders of RantRadio, and is probably most famous for instigating the Wog movement (that is, anti-Scientology) and his Suicide Rant. He's currently the host of the NewsReal podcast and is finishing up his latest novel, an adaptation of the Afternow audio drama. Links to all that crap are on his blog. Eat it all up.

StarterTech : Remember that thing I said about early adopters? You know I was right. We all know or are related to folks who just don't get it. Sean P. Aune, fellow writer at Mashable, does this site and gets it right (and gets it so that the newbs can understand).

WinExtra : You know Steven Hodson. Why aren't you subscribed to him yet?

Chris Brogan : Dude just rocks. He knows everyone, knows darn near everything, and seems to get along with everyone. If you don't like Chris, there might be something wrong with you.

Michelle Greer : Based on what I've read and who I've met about and in Austin, if you want to get into the scene there, you need to know her. I put her on the 13 important tech blogs of Austin list, and I got a bunch of accolades for it. Her blog is updated on a similarly frequent-but-inconsistent basis mine is. She's busy. That's a good sign.