My answer to "life, the universe and everything"
Advice on how to become a blogger in college from Wired:
Spend less time on coursework, because unless you’re going to graduate school, your grades don’t matter. And you don’t need to go to grad school to be a journalist. This route will leave more time for you to start blogging in college and jump into the work world with a strong following already established (plus a public record that you can write and report the news).
Sounds about right.
From Wired Science:
No, you cannot blame individual events like [the tornado in Brooklyn] on climate change, as it was possible for them to occur even without the human-made changes to the atmosphere. However, it is fair to ask whether the human changes have altered the likelihood of such events. There the answer seems to be yes. Storms driven largely by latent heat, and that includes thunderstorms, are expected to become stronger as the air becomes warmer and contains more moisture. Global warming does cause just such a tendency.
–James Hansen, scientist at NASA
The Wordcamp conference has come and gone (I know it was a couple of weeks ago and I just now blogged about it) and all I can say is I had a blast. It was nice to be able to meet the faces behind some of the blogs I follow like who this Matt guy who created WordPress or that Lorelle who gives so many tips are anyway. Thanks to my employers, Los Angeles Urban League, for paying the accommodation and travel fees.
The Wordcamp conference has come and gone (I know it was a couple of weeks ago and I just now blogged about it) and all I can say is I had a blast. It was nice to be able to meet the faces behind some of the blogs I follow like who this Matt guy who created WordPress or that Lorelle who gives so many tips are anyway. Thanks to my employers, Los Angeles Urban League, for paying the accommodation and travel fees.
There were a number of great speakers. One session I liked in particular was the one by John Dvorak and Om Malik who talked about blogs and journalism (that talk can be seen on One Man’s Blog). I also liked the panel (and hanging out a little) with Jeremy Wright of b5media, who talked about blog monetization through finding your niche. Other great sessions include the Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems (her slides) and the Usability Analysis of WP, both of which got me to think a lot about the design of my own projects.
I met some very great people there like Enric Teller, Naoko McCracken, and Micah Johnson. Also many thanks to George Yang, who helped me with the pictures below of me with some prominent bloggers. I will be looking forward to attending Wordcamp next year. Continue reading “What I saw at Wordcamp 2007”
A section of a class picture I had posted on Flickr is now serving as the picture of the front of Wikia (link to the image). Sadly I was cut out from it, but I am happy to see the picture used on another web site.
Thanks to my job at Urban League, I’ll be headed up north to San Francisco for the Wordcamp 2007 conference. Looks like it will feature a number of great speakers on the schedule. I won’t be liveblogging, but hopefully I’ll have a recap when I return.
Top 10 Things Americans Want but Can’t Have – The standard list of things that doesn’t seem to get through to the people in the beltway of Washington, DC. Namely, this list includes universal health care, increased social spending, and the impeachment of George W. Bush. It’s been pretty clear our politicians aren’t paying attention to the will of the people, but to corporate interests. (via Digg)
I think I may have found a working blogging client for Palm. Get Vagablog.
[amazon-product]0757302610[/amazon-product]I recently received a free copy of Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul: Advice and Inspiration on Fulfilling Dreams, thanks to Smugmug, whose President Chris MacAskill wrote the “Following Our Hearts Chapter.” MacAskill offered to give copies of Chicken Soup on his blog. That sure is one way to promote a book. I look forward to finishing it.
How to submit your sitemap.xml to Ask.com-There’s a manual submit link to submit your sitemap file to Ask for indexing. Just use the following URL: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://theurlofthesitemap.xml
