He’s not quitting blogging, but I just spotted Nick Denton on the Food Network. Not as a guest or host, but as background b-roll in the trendy Noho Star restaurant. It was during Rachael Ray (no words can explain how horrible she is, but she probably already has a stupid acronym for it… EVOO my ass).

And no worries, Denton isn’t wearing a huge diamond–that glint of bling is the LED flash on a Nokia N80.

Sphere was supposed to be the blog search engine that figured out how to not include spam. It launched this morning and is unsurprisingly overrun with spam. Take the search “mobile tech” which is currently one of the most popular searches according to the front page. Every single result on the page is spam. Every one. Way to go guys, that VC really did something .

UPDATE: Good to see that I’m not alone.

After being one of the first thousand TypePad users (I think since June 2003) my account has been officially cancelled. I haven’t used it in quite some time, but kept it up for posterity. See ya!

Bloglines has been down all morning. According to their site it’s a multiple database outage which sounds bad. I thought the painless transition to the new data center was too good to be true.

Technorati tags: bloglines rss

I’m once again giving the blog posting tool ecto a try. I was never able to get used to it in the past, but it has improved quite a bit since I last used it. I don’t for example remember image uploading to be included when I last tried it. So far so good, I have several sites hooked up and am able to post from the one window.

The website and name (company and product) are all still crap, but as long as it works right?

When I was in school I wrote a few papers on globalization but it’s just now starting to hit home. According to Measure Map which I’ve only been running for a few days, MobileTracker has reached 155 countries. The list includes countries like Sudan, Iraq, Iceland, Congo and Ghana. The long tail holds true and most visitors come from the US (followed by the UK and Canada), but I still find it amazing to see so much of the world represented.

Yesterday I started to dabble in outsourcing for some programming that I just don’t have time for. Don’t worry, no US jobs were lost–it may just mean the project will actually launch in a reasonable amount of time. In about twelve hours there were bids from over a half dozen companies/programmers located around the world. We’ll both be getting a deal.

Normally I would be nervous about outsourcing a project like this, but since it’s stuff I know how to do it’s a different situation. I won’t be duped by hype because I know exactly what I want and can look at the code and see if it’s up to snuff. I’ll report back here on how it turns out, hopefully soon!

This read more like a ProBlogger post than most of my typical content, but I think it’s worth saying…

I didn’t tell too many people, but for the past 2 months, MobileTracker has been absent from the vast vast majority of Google search results pages (SERPs). I wasn’t trying any crazy blackhat optimization techniques–I just rely on having great and timely content–so it came as a complete surprise. I talked around a bit and consulted forums and found out that for whatever reason this can just sometimes happen. I’m happy to report that it looks like the dark days are over and the goodtimes are back.

Luckily, I had some great exclusive content pieces that went up during the outage, as well as a lucky uptick in placements at Yahoo. Still visits were down about 25% overall–missing a few thousand visitors that average a few page views apiece is a hard thing. Advertising revenue was down, but was still at a decent amount (very livable). Personally I would have thought AdSense would have seen more of a dive since search engine viewers click ads more often than daily visitors.

Traffic is now higher than ever and the future is rosy.

While it wasn’t fun, it’s nice to know that it’s possible to continue with the site and income if there is a big (permanent) shift at Google. This experience reaffirms my goal to not depend on any one source of traffic or revenue.

SixApart has finally shipped MovableType 3.2, you can snag it from your account. I’m installing it right now and will update on what I think.

UPDATE: Love the style changes. I think I’m going to try out running comments on each story now (without moderation) to test out the new comment spam management features.

… And the world listens. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about it, but GoogleRumors is on a breakout.

I’m having a lot of fun over at GoogleRumors. A while back I stopped following Apple news as closely and Google has really taken over my newshare. Not that Apple isn’t interesting to me, but too many of the news stories (and rumors) have to do with really boring things like iBook speed updates and iPod related news. I still use (and love) Macs, but Google is just plain more interesting to read about these days. That is until the Intel switch gets closer I suppose.