Digital Brainwaves

(This got bounced down the page a ways pretty quickly after I initially posted it, so I’m bumping it back up for a while. — Pauley)

By now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen some of the new sections popping up over on the right.

Technorati and The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem both show how Digital Brainwaves links to and gets links from other sites in the blogosphere. Technorati scans and spiders pretty much any blog that appears, when scanned, to be a blog. TTLB only catalogs and checks on those blogs that specifically apply to be listed. Each site has a widget in the sidebar to the right; TTLB shows my standing in the ecosystem, while Technorati’s shows links to details about incoming and outgoing links in addition to a search box for the site.

Pajamas Media has set up a weekly Predidential Straw Poll, where you can indicate your interest in one candidate for each party (you can choose just one, but they encourage picking one of each). Digital Brainwaves is now a voting precinct in the straw poll, kinda like real-life voting precints in the actual election. You can vote your preference here and see how it stacks up against other readers, as well as everyone who’s voted anywhere in the poll.

Of the four new widgets, though, the one I’m most excited about is the one at the top of the sidebar. Twitter is basically an IM “away message” that isn’t bound to an IM account, and asks only for the answer to one simple question: “What are you doing?” Users can post their responses and receive updates from others via their cell phones as SMS (text) messages, via IM (AIM, Gtalk, and some others), or they can post to the Twitter web page itself. Mac users can use the application Twitterific to post and receive updates from their menu bar, and I recently del.icio.us-ed a link to a “search box” widget for Firefox that allows you to post updates to Twitter from the search box that appears in the upper right corner of Firefox.

My Twitter network is pretty scant right now, so feel free to join if you’re interested. Please let me know if you join, so I can add you to my network, too.

Kinda late notice, but I’ll be liveblogging the State of the Union address tonight. Look back shortly for updates, which are likely to be slightly time-delayed by the end of the address, as I’ll be pausing the DVR to post updates It’s easier to post the timestamps if I go live, which I’ll endeavor to do.

Alex and I will be liveblogging the results of the elections tomorrow night, in between explaining subtle (and not-so-subtle) nuances of American and New York state politics to Yvonne.  I’m not sure what all will or will not be covered on the blog, but I imagine many of the races that affect the Rochester and upstate New York, and maybe a few of the more noteworthy nationwide races.  Tune in tomorrow sometime around 7 or 8 PM ET.

Due to technical issues with the keyword tags, Q&A Weekend has been retroactively renamed Ask Me Weekend. Readers watching on LiveJournal may (or may not — LJ is fickle sometimes) see a sudden backlog of syndicated entries soon.

EDIT: Yep.  LiveJournal users can now see all of my entries back to September 29th now on their LJ Friends pages.

Life has been busy this month so far, so I haven’t been by in a while. I haven’t forgotten, and I know I still have Ask Me Weekend questions to answer. So, it’s been a long weekend. Go have a look at what’s been asked, and if you’ve got anything else to add, go for it — I’ll try to answer them this week.

As promised, now posted to Flickr are my photos from Dave and Kelly Rea’s wedding. There are other pics there too, and more will be added as time goes forward.

You’ve noticed by now that the look has changed up here. Everyone likes to reinvent themselves from time to time, so here’s my new view.

A few notes:

1. I’m using a different comment-threading plugin, so the previous parent-child associations aren’t available.
2. Subscribing to comments isn’t totally playing well with the new threaded comments. The subscriptions are working, and the emails are going out, but the little marker on the comments that shows whether someone is a subscriber isn’t working. Fixed a bug that gets that displaying correctly now. I may replace the text at some point with graphics.

Other than that, all that was there before is still here, it just looks a little different. Have fun, play nicely.

We’re gonna try it again.

Use the comment section below to ask me my opinion or thoughts on just about anything. Kinda like the interview memes that have bounced around LiveJournal and the like. I’ll post answers as the questions come in.

…aaaaaand, go.

Lately, Digital Brainwaves has become more about my thoughts on life, politics, and the world, and less about the day-to-day (or week-to-week, or whenever-to-whenever) goings-on in my life. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, though I’m sure some of my friends are more likely to read the more day-to-day drivel than what’s been appearing here instead.

So, I’d like to start bringing some of that stuff back, but not here. I’ve got a couple places I can put it — I have another domain name, associated with my actual name, where I could post such things… I also have the ol’ LiveJournal where I was posting last summer.

Any thoughts on where to go next?? (Doesn’t mean I’ll take them into account, just want to hear them.)

I see Ask Me Weekend went over like a lead balloon. Maybe you were all busy this weekend. We’ll try it again another time.