The Inflatable Soapbox

Every now and then I read a post and smack myself in the head, saying “Why didn’t I think to blog that!” I’m sure we’ve all had that experience. Today, it was this post from Green Colibri.  I’ve been using Blackle as an eco-friendly alternative to the Google home page since last year. There were about 140,000 Watt hours savedat that time; as of this writing, it’s 479,622.172 Watt hours saved. I think I Twittered about it, but I never thought to blog it. So read the post by oyvind and use start using Blackle for searches. It’s good for the environment and it looks much cooler.

The Inflatable Soapbox is now rated E for Excellent! It’s the first blog award I’ve received; indeed, the first award of any kind in quite a few years. Thanks to Stacey of RealWorldMom! Stacey is a first class blogger, be sure to check out her site! I introduced her to blogging just a few months  ago and she’s already kicking my butt!

It is my pleasant but difficult duty to now choose ten blogs deserving of this award. I could spend all day reading the great blogs I’ve found, and still not get to all my favorites. But here, in no special order,  are the top ten on my list. I chose them  for the quality of their writing, subject matter, humor, and dedication to blogging:

Who Knew? A Writer’s Blog

42

Just A Girl In Short Shorts Talking About Whatever

Tattling On

allfacebook – the unofficial facebook blog

Bliss in Bloom

Failure is the Key to Success

The Kansas Curmudgeon

Howl @ The Moon

And, finally, because she so richly deserves it,

Real World Mom

By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you have to award it to 10 more people whose blog you find Excellent Award worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want – even those that have received it already, but please award at least 10 people.

Thank you all for your efforts and thanks, Stacey, for this recognition.

EDIT: Here’s the code for the award. Paste it into your sidebar or wherever you’d like. (Thanks, Veronica!)
2nd EDIT: Fixed some blog names I screwed up. Oopsies!

<center><a href=”http://timkissane.com/” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://timbury.net/images/eaward.jpg” alt=”E for Excellent” height=”160″ width=”105″ /></a></center>

I’m enjoying this new site so much! Cre8Buzz! is a friendly network of talented people trying to spread the word of their projects while making friends and contacts. Because of the ranking system, and the communities, it is easy to quickly find talented people in many fields. Two things I noticed immediately: the warm welcome from the community and the lack of css themes. Both may be attributable to the relatively small size of the user group.

The Buzz, as some users call it, just launched recently. Many users keep the default theme, which is clean and functional. Some try using Myspace themes with predictably horrendous results. Some members use themes from khenny of Quartz Mountain Communications, a California-based web design studio. His themes are very good but limited in number. As some of you may know, I love to play with themes, changing them to suit my mood. So I’ve started saving them to themes.timbury.net where they are available to all. While the site is not “live” yet, the themes can be accessed now. I hope to get the site built up soon, with a snappier look and an upload facility so everyone can share. As always, feedback is welcome.

So come join in the fun, sign up on Cre8Buzz! and use my themes or create your own. Stop by my page and give a shout out to my friends Antman, RealWorldMom and piper of love. They all have great profiles and links to some really slamming blogs of their own. Peace.

Technorati Profile

This is a test post to link to technorati.

Edit: It hasn’t worked yet. After embedding the code from technorati in this post, I clicked “release the spiders” (what a horrid metaphor). In less than a minute, a message informed me “we can’t connect to your blog. Try again later.” I’ve tried several times over the last few hours. I sent a message for support. I wonder how long this will take.

Edit: Almost resolved. Must now wait for thumbnail to update, but should be alright. See comments for details. Thanks Janice and technorati.

Reading some of the comments on the Robert Scoble v. FaceBook issue this morning, which centers on an issue of great importance for all of us. It seems FB suspended Scoble’s account because he was using a script to gather data from his account. FB’s IDS probably caught the activity and took automated action. But this is where it gets sticky. What is the purpose of banning the scraping of data from your own account?

I don’t see how it can be a violation of any reasonable TOS for a user to employ a script to gather the information stored in their own account, the same data that could be harvested with a pencil and paper. The only possible issue is the load on the servers, not data ownership. Who owns the “relationship data” that exists in my cell phone? T-Mobile? Samsung? Ridiculous! I own it. It doesn’t matter that I used the tools and services these companies provided to make new social connections. They were paid for the use of those tools for that very purpose.

If the system load is the issue, that is a valid concern. The burden is on the providers of the service to offer a way to export your data in a way that taxes the system minimally. If they can’t afford to do this in the context of a free service, perhaps they need to reexamine their business model.