I wasn’t aware that all the the current crop of TVs couldn’t display all possible colors that the human eye can see, we’re you?

Researchers in Switzerland are developing a new nano technology they claim will double the range of colors that future TVs can produce — displaying every hue the human eye can see. By comparison, most of today’s TVs — be they plasmas, LCDs or projectors — display only about half the visible colors.

In particular, the article notes that hues of blue in the sky or water are not faithfully reproduced. Expect to see a bunch of split screen ocean waves with blue skies demo pictures on TVs someday in the future.

Last week when I checked out that sweet picture on a 42″ Samsung LCD monitor with Blu-Ray movie, it sure seemed as if I was seeing all possible colors.

I would think the color hue thing would be most important for graphic designers trying to match up true colors rather than ordinary television watchers.

Don’t expect to see these new TVs to be at Best Buy any time soon. Eight years in commercial products is the projection and I’m sure that will be the very high end TVs first, meaning it will be more like 10 years or more before the technology is in your living room.

Congratulations to Digg that has crossed the 500,000 member mark. An impressive amount of members for any site. I was curious this morning how that compared to the total internet population? I think it’s important to remember how many people there are in the world and how many are connected to the internet as to what really makes something a worldwide success.

I think most people in the tech community, myself included, would consider Digg a success, but what about the rest of the world?

According to Internet World Stats there are 1,043,104,886 connected to the internet. A little over a billion folks worldwide that could possibly be Digg members. Maybe a little more if you count people going to libraries to sign up for websites.

500,000 is a very small fractional percentage of the total internet connected population. If you take Netscape who just announced crossing the 50,000 member mark the numbers are that much smaller. It’s the kind of thing where you’d see several zeroes on the calculator.

Pretty insignificant in the big picture, isn’t it?

Important to get grounded once in awhile and remember these stats when talking about the success or failure of something. I can’t think of anybody, myself included, who wouldn’t think a half million or even 50,000 members for a site isn’t a good achievement. Heck, getting 5,000 members to join a site and a large percantage active isn’t easy. Of Digg’s 500,000 members they probably have less than 5,000 truly active members worldwide. The number of active to passive members, at least in my experience, is very low.

Somewhat unrelated, but check out the population in Asia compared to North America in that stats table.

North America population: 331,473,276
Asia: 3,667,774,066

Digg’s numbers when you compare to North America where most of their users come from (I believe) are more significant.

Anybody who doesn’t think the Asian market is a significant piece of the international puzzle had best study these stats.

Apparently I have a new arch nemesis on the web: Randy Charles Morin. Poor Randy has a number of issues with me but the primary complaint seems to be my (current? past?) involvement with the adult business.

For those who haven’t read my bio, please do so now. Before you continue any further with this post, read it carefully. I haven’t changed it one iota since Randy started crying, but I would like to update it for what’s happened in 2005 and 2006 at some point in the near future.

I think most of Randy’s allegations are clearly refuted there. I can’t do much about him not being able to use my name properly. Maybe his legal name is Randall, I don’t know. Does he use his legal name? And if he’s not what does that mean? What if he had chosen to go by “RCharles” would that be indisputable evidence that he’s trying to hide from his real identity? Please, the T in my name stands for Todd and the rest is my middle name. So when I say TDavid is my name, it’s the same as F.Scott Fitzgerald saying “FScott” is his name. I wonder if F.Scott was treated with similar confusion? He had the period which probably would help me in some name disputes, but periods are for women.

Interestingly enough, Randy’s friend Coolz0r is linked inside Rmail. Is Coolz0r trying to hide his identity online too? What has Coolz0r been up to? I don’t really care, but you can see how quickly Randy’s point becomes absurd and hypocritical when applied to his own situation.

Generally speaking, I don’t use different names in the adult business than I use online in the mainstream business. It’s TDavid (or TD) in both. When/if you should ever meet me at conferences (mainstream or adult, I’ve been to many of both) I rarely go by my full legal name unless there is simply no other choice. Microsoft had no problem for Search Champs v4.0 properly identifying me as TDavid and countless other events I’ve attended has this rarely become an issue. Sometimes people are curious about my name and it’s a conversation starter and icebreaker. I really don’t understand why Randy can’t accept a name that somebody wants to use is somehow invalid or fake or evidence of anything sinister? My friends that have seen Randy’s post, including one who’s wife went to high school with me, think Randy’s crazy.

Our Script School mascot, C-Munk, who is a foul-mouthed chipmunk talking creature and the creative work of several people (male and female) over the years “thanked” Randy today (warning: adult site link, and it’s not very nice) in typical C-Munk fashion for acknowledging that there was a missing IRCA meta tag for our only adult surfer-oriented website. That issue was quickly resolved.

We certainly don’t want to see children — Randy’s or any others — visiting websites that are intended for adult audiences. He was right to call queston to that, but instead of doing something more friendly like emailing us directly or calling me on Skype personally about the situation or even making a more civil request or question on his blog, he wants to make it look like I did this maliciously, intentionally in a snide remark in his blog comments. Nevermind the fact that the site in question actually did have the IRCA tag in a former incarnation. Of course anybody reading this can verify using the WayBackMachine and caches around the web that what I’m saying is 100% accurate.

There are numerous mistakes, holes, assumptions and outright fabrications in Randy’s statements that I’m not going to bother refuting. Let people make their own minds up about what’s been said, what’s actually been done, and what’s the truth. I don’t have to defend myself, including my business reputation to anybody, including Randy Charles Morin. My record on the web, and it’s well documented and historical, show what kind of businessperson I am and continue to be. And that’s working with both mainstream and adult webmasters.

You see, I don’t draw moral lines in what you do online so long as it is legal. If you want to have a website with gay porn or transvesites or interracial or that you dislike the government or websites and webmasters then hey, more power to you. That’s the First Amendment and I believe strongly in the protection of those freedoms.

I take back when I said this was a “good” guy. Randy Charles Morin, at least in this situation, is not behaving like a good guy. He got his feelings hurt and is trying to project all his negative feelings toward the adult business onto me. For the last 6+ years I’ve been more a B2B adult webmaster than pornmaster, as Randy puts it, but let him perpetuate that falsehood if it turns his crank. Maybe I should work harder at being a pornmaster so I can validate his anger?

(Note: I have been working on nakedyougohmm.com so maybe someday that will prove such validation!)

Sterling seems to have the best take I’ve seen on this mess. I was clearly overzealous with Randy last week here and do apologize for that exchange. This is a genuine apology not some erroroneous sarcastic flame.

I’m not going to remove the exchange because that would be like what the Computerworld contributing writer, Richi Jennings, did earlier this week when I pointed out that he, too, made a mistake with my name. His response was to nuke the quoted post (which also had the same paragraph twice) and my name and then to flame me on Randy’s blog as a “loser.” When one of my friends mentioned this situation in Randy’s comment area, Richi also removed my original name correction comment on Computerworld. Anonymously, of course. Or so he thought it was anonymous. Wrong.

I do not, and will not ever apologize for pointing out to Randy the problem in Rmail which remain unaddressed and unchallenged. Maybe some of you with blogs want your categories pointing to Randy’s kbcafe search engine instead of your own categories and looking like they are part of your post (above the fold), but I sure don’t. Not even once have I seen Randy address why he is doing that (it’s obvious why he’s doing it, that’s why). If you want to wonder about something, wonder about the motives there.

At least our company responds to activity and challenges made about our web properties. I should note that not a single reader, save for ex-reader Randy, has complained about the images for this blog not showing up in their favorite RSS reader, despite me opening up and soliciting that information last week.

Not one single person.

Ironic considering this was the original issue that got Randy and I derailed. He thought this was some huge deal. This helps support the notion that most people continue to read blogs on the web and not via RSS reader.

- Blurb.com is going to start producing full color hardcover books and will offer 600 bloggers the option to convert their blogs to books [via Wired]
- Microsoft has launched Live QnA. I beta tested this extensively for 30 days.
- Google’s Eric Schmidt has joined Apple’s board. I’m not sure what to make of this move. Does it mean Google is one step closer to buying Apple? I still believe the OS move, the one that Google has ferverntly denied to date will center around a Linux variant of some kind. I believe GoogleOS is coming in some shape or form. Does Google believe that online is the only way to fly?
- Ubuntu on top in Linux desktop survey
- A list of the new Fall TV shows by network. Hereos looks interesting to me. I’ll have to catch it on the internet (legally, if available) or wait for the DVD to come out. 70+ days without TV [via Digg]
- electronic pink slips alert — Radio Shack tells 400 employees they won’t be needed any more via email.
- Sell your software at Windows Marketplace [via Inside Microsoft]
- Major Nelson shares that an episode of Battlestar Galactica in standard defintion available for download (free) on the Xbox 360. This has raised speculation that maybe they will be using the Xbox Live Marketplace as a legal movie download site? If this turns out to be true what’s the point if the movies aren’t in HD? And if they are in HD more than a 20GB hard drive will be needed for storage. I saw a 500GB external drive for $249 the other day. Sub $500 TB drives are here which means I’m about 6-8 months late on my prediction that this would happen at the end of 2005.
- A few hundred people show up for Mike Tyson sparring on the Las Vegas strip. A true character study for the rise and fall of a prize fighter who could have been the greatest of all time.

CNN is reporting that the oldest person known has died of pneumonia at 116. I’m thinking it’s just a matter of time before somebody makes it to 120+. Good thing most whole life insurance policies have moved up the endowment date to 110 or higher. People are living longer and longer which should be driving down life insurance premiums. This is also a sign people are more healthy. What is the possible lifespan if we really take care of our bodies? 125, 150 years?

I’d be happy to make it to three digits of any sort, you?

thatedeguy waxes and wanes on the recent proliferation of job boards:

I just noticed that Om Malik’s new media giant GigaOM announced the release of GigaOM Jobs today. My Lord! How many job boards do we need? Frankly, I’d rather not have to check 30 boards in order to find a job. I certainly don’t want to check jobs.gigaom.com, crunchboard.com, jobs.problogger.net, and performancing.com/exchange just to find a job. Oh, that’s just the boards that have been announced in the last month or so. Several of them in the last week.

Amen, brother.

Here’s an area where mashups could be godsends. Sites like Simply Hired are trying. For our offline business I would first think of a local classifieds either via the paper or craigslist than using a job board. For online business we’ve hired within our sites and advertisers for every job we’ve had. As I mentioned in the comments area discussing the performancing votes function, I see number of votes, digg-style, for promoting job listings to the main site as not very useful to either employers or job seekers.

Since imitation is a form of flattery, I’m thinking Mike Arrington should be smiling. Though I might be wrong, I think Techcrunch was the first to kick off this latest round of we gotta have a job boardism. I can see how people want to branch from their brand but thatedeguy points out the problems for the job seekers. And how many job owners will go the old fashioned way and use the classifieds in their local area or online via craigslist instead? I’ve seen lots of advertisements for Monster and Dice but have never spent any significant time at their sites or placed an ad.

Will be interesting to see if any of these job boards make a splash. My guess is they will get about the same amount of bite as they are getting with advertisers. Is TechCrunch selling all its ad inventory? Is Om selling all of his? If they are and this expansion is enabling them an additional place to sell oversold ad inventory and for other onsite reasons it makes a lot more sense than just adding a job board because the competition is doing it.

From what I saw from the Problogger board where Darren is charging most the ads were for the parent blog network. I find it odd though that they’d use Darren’s blog to do it and not use B5 Media but Darren indicated he has been wanting to do a job board for awhile. Maybe they have a separate B5 Media job board?

Not accusing any of the sites above of this but doing something only or primarily because your compeition is doing it isn’t always a good business decision. I hope that’s not the primary motivating factor in any of these cases. If it is, then the web is going to see a lot of dead job boards in the coming months and years.

James Yu writes that Digg sent a Ceast-and-Desist notice to digggames.com, a site that skimmed digg for Flash games:

But, why not stop there? If Digg is going to go after digggames, why don’t they also go after 80% of the sites on the digg tools list? Sites like Diggdot.us, DiggLicious, and Digg vs Dot would also be ripe for a takedown. At the extreme end, mashups would all be considered illegal, squashing all the creative juices that have made web 2.0 innovative and liberating.

If you look at the digg tools list (pictured left) it appears like something officially from digg and there’s no disclaimer saying it’s not affiliated with or endorsed by digg, unlike mydeathspace mentioned yesterday.

James has legitimate concerns, although if these sites are piggybacking off a trademark to promote their mashups, I’m not sure the courts would agree. It’s all too easy to villify the lawyers here as they are just doing their job. Or trying to anyway.

I’ve questioned mashups that scrape websites that don’t have APIs before, but mashups that use APIs and follow the TOS of the API are fine. Creating a mashup and then using a trademarked name in the domain for the project? Even if it’s a non-commercial project? Don’t know what the law says here. My layman guess would be this would be a trademark violation. Your guess is just as good, probably better if you have any legal training (I don’t).

I’ve never registered a domain with another site’s name in it. About the closest I’ve come is with my Gmail Talk blog as a third level that is hosted on blogspot. I created that blog as primarily a personal area to collect my notes on Gmail, not a business site, even though I did add Adsense to it awhile back. I even used one of those Google-like logo creators for the logo which means I’ve copied the likeness of Google. Hasn’t even been updated in 2006. It’s not a threat to Google’s trademark, but it could be violating their trademark on some level. Google hasn’t ever contacted me to complain and since it’s on their servers anyway they could take it down any time they wanted. Maybe they view it as a fan site, of sorts? Don’t know.

I’m not sure what the legal perspective is on using trademarks in your domain name but it seems to me sites like paypalsucks.com would have been taken down long ago if this practice was a clear violation.

I do realize that trademarks need to be defended so please stop before making that generic comment below. We covered that topic when Google protested its name being used as a verb. My problem with trademark law as a layman is it seems intentionally foggy. Law should be much more clear so that people don’t have to be in a position of protect and defend over unclear situations.

As a website owner I’ll likely continue not to register domains with trademarked names in them, but it makes me go hmm when there are so many cases out there where others have done the opposite, some sites of which I’ve linked to here like diggpuzzles.com on Hmm quickies #36.

Does anybody reading have a link or know of a source which specifically discusses if using a trademark in a domain name violates the trademark? A domain name can become a brand so I can see how trademark lawyers get itchy when they see third party sites using a trademark in the domain name, but is this a case by case basis or what?

Randy Charles Morin who unsubscribed from Hmm in a huff the other night lists what he calls “10 mistakes made by my blogging friends” Since I’m probably not high on his friends list at the moment and more importantly because I disagree with a number of things in his post, I’ll go ahead and list 10 mistakes he made in his post. This technique is bound to move your position in a friend’s list.

1. His #5 point contradicts #1. Randy is advocating not to block image serving to third party sites and then use Flickr for image hosting if you are worried about bandwidth? So you are supposed to pepper your posts with hotlinking? Er, no. We’re supposed to use a third party to serve images on our sites? What if Flickr is attacked, slow or down? Any time you link to a third party site, you give up a little piece of page loading speed. Any graphic, any file, any widget. Yeah, it’s a small amount and the images will be cached by the browser and so is the bandwidth if the picture size is small. Uncompressed pictures can become expensive bandwidth-wise.

But this isn’t an issue of bandwidth, it’s an issue of control and promotion. He laughs it off as your images aren’t important unless you are Picasso. Let him talk for his own pictures, not mine or yours. A serious site, especially a business, should want to control their own fate and not rely on some third party site to be up or down. Or suddenly cap the amount of hotlinking bandwidth you can use (great for the archives to have third party “sorry bandwidth used” images). All these sites that claim unlimited bandwidth are full of crap. There is no such thing as unlimited anything in the hosting world. If the site doesn’t cap the bandwidth, the host will do so. That’s why most of these services make rules about the types of images you can and cannot use. Like on Flickr if you use too many Second Life screenshots they won’t show your pictures in the search results. Who wants to worry abou what will and won’t show up? Or if you use too much of their bandwidth? Host them yourselves and follow who is linking to you.

And by keeping your images on your own site and by using an image with your URL you are actually encouraging clickthru to the website where more money is made than in the RSS feed or some email program where very little money is made by you, the publisher. Keep in mind that an image explaining where the original image is located when hotlinked can be very effective advertising.

This isn’t saying that you shouldn’t allow readers to read your RSS feed with images in their favorite RSS reader. If some new, hot reader comes out, you can add that to your accepted list.

Note to readers: if you are unable to read this blog in your favorite reader than now is your chance to identify the reader the images are showing up as unauthorized and I’ll look it over in the comments below. Hopefully you will actually give me the information unlike Randy did.

None of this is saying you shouldn’t use to your advantage third party sites like Flickr and Zooomr. Heck, I use those sites too. Thomas Hawk promotes his photos on these services and seems to do quite well. Just depends on what your business is like and how you use these services. Don’t depend on them as much as your own first party hosting. I trust the multiple dedicated servers we pay for more than Yahoo, and I own Yahoo stock.

2. Disclosure alert (#4). Randy is wise to recommend Rmail along with Feedblitz (that’s what we use here) but when I challenged him about disclaiming his Rmail conflict he said it was “ridiculous” to disclaim this in other blog comments. I would generally agree with him except when he’s complaining about a problem on another blog and he’s the vendor and doesn’t say that.

Apparently, it’s ridiculous to disclaim this in his own blog posts too. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You should disclaim your own products and services by adding the word “my” or “our” at the very least to posts. The person reading might be a brand new reader. Same with affiliate links. It is important to be straight with readers.

3. More failed disclosure alert But wait, Randy doesn’t tell readers about his program Rmail using the publisher’s categories as keywords to point to his own search engine (kbcafe) either. The content is made to look like it’s part of the post (above the fold) as I pointed out to him. What did he do? Tell me to “have a nice day.” Here’s a screenshot showing what I’m talking about:

The links to tags for gaming and Xbox 360 appear to be part of my post here, but they aren’t, they lead to search results at kbcafe:

Rmail is welcome to promote Randy’s search engine, after all he’s paying to shuttle around all those RSS to email notifications, but it should be done below the post fold so it doesn’t look like it is part of the publisher’s post and authorized by them. Certainly isn’t authorized by me. Deceptive in its current incarnation.

4. “Your best bet is to use FeedBurner from day one.” Actually, I’d agree with this one, but only with a little further clarification. For your own domain this could be a mistake long term. I would agree with this if it were a third party hosted blog like blogspot or typepad or like we did with our VTOR blog at blogcharm because the ultimate goal for those sites, the ones doing this for more than fun anyway, should be to get to your own domain. As Randy aptly points out, you’d be leaving your RSS traffic behind. That’s not the end of the world though, because look at Scoble. He managed to get people to follow him. It could also be a good way to find out your true active reading list.

First party hosted blogs can still use Feedburner, as we do here for category feeds, but the main feed should be hosted by the blog for the same reason I mentioned above: control. You want to control that your blog isn’t having garbage added to the feed that the readers believe is coming from you.

Also, perhaps worse are those annoying Feedburner clickthru URLs that are being sent through Feedburner to have the clicks counted. Good thing you have to actually turn that on (don’t do it). Take control of your own feeds and do not use the Feedburner count clicks function which obscures your permalinks. There are tons of scripts out there you can download and use that will count clicks and the links will be on the same domain as your blog.

Keeping your URLs at a reasonable size is another thing to consider so they aren’t run through shorter URL services.

5. “If you have a belligerent troll, then your best bet is to encourage him to leave.” Not always. Look at one of the most prominent trolls on Robert Scoble’s blog: Christopher Coulter. He adds to the conversation and often has good points, albeit they are sometimes very brutal to read. Most label him a troll, including me, but I’ve seen comments from other readers of Scoble’s blog point out that the comments are some of their favorite part of his blog. Just because Randy doesn’t like reading trolls, doesn’t mean some of his readers might.

I think when you start deleting the comments of those who disagree with you, even if they do it harshly, you might as well turn off the comments altogether. It’s a one-way dialogue. It’s better to edit down the harsh parts if you can and let the troll’s counterpoints come to light. You can always encourage the troll to get his/her own blog and write the really nasty stuff there if they like.

Are there instances when trolls go too far? Yes. I’ll delete despicable comments about my family. That is an off-limits area to me and I’m not going to pay for trolls to abuse my family in any manner here. As for myself, it’s open season as long as it isn’t completely off topic. One comment I remember deleting awhile back talked about how the commenter in detail wanted to give me AIDS. Um, no.

So I don’t completely disagree with Randy’s point, but it’s a mistake as a general rule to get rid of a belligerent troll. The troll might actually add interest to your comments area. Yes, you’ll have to get a thicker skin, but the web isn’t a nice place overall.

6. “I’ve even played with some trolls, discovering their IP address and forwarding their requests to other rather nasty websites.” No, most trolls based on my own research and experience aren’t using static IPs, so this is hopeless in most cases. You might show them a 404 page or send them somewhere on the same site like here if you can’t contain or promote their activity. If your goal is to grow the interest level and traffic at your site, do you really want to send a troll away? Some would say the troll does more harm than good. I don’t think that’s always the case.

Look at Slashdot. How many trolls are there? Digg? Fark? Trolls abound in the comments. Boing Boing doesn’t allow comments or they’d have trolls too.

If your site is entertainment-oriented then you might try getting in and mixing it up with trolls once in awhile, it can actually help raise the interest level of your comment area. I’ve said before that some of the comment sections are more valuable to me than the post and I mean that.

If the trolls are so passionate that they will stalk your comment area, they are helping you from having zero comments versus at least one which may earn a click from a passerby. I point to Coulter again who I believe has helped Robert Scoble more than he’s hurt, despite the number of people who have commented negatively about Coulter’s presence.

7. “… and commenting negatively about their own readers.” I’m not sure if Randy is talking to me or not on this one, but if he is, uh oh, here I am commenting about a (former) reader negatively.

Look, readers aren’t sacred cows or untouchable glass figurines. Neither are you or I as the writer. I would rather read somebody honest than somebody who claims they are honest and behind my back wishes I’d go away or thinks I’m full of shit and won’t tell me so. Yeah, sugar and honey get further than vinegar (most of the time), but it is wrong to kiss people’s asses when you disagree with them simply because they are reading or subscribed to your blog. And you aren’t doing them any favors if you are nice to their face and totally disagree behind their back. Being critical of someone or something doesn’t mean you personally dislike them.

For example, I like Randy as a person although this post will probably come across to him as some kind of personal attack. If that’s the case, then that would be another thing we’d have to disagree on.

I disagree with him on a number of business-related things, including the context of our 15 comment dialog the other night and I’m specifically addressing comments and actions in this post, I’m not saying his mother wears army boots.

The converse is Randy was the first to comment about my wife on her surgery day. I appreciate that and thanked him accordingly. He seems like a real good guy that I’d probably hit it off with over a cold/warm beverage. I can disagree with someone passionately about something and still like them, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never write something critical on my blog about something they have said or done. Readers/subscribers do not get that kind of pass and if they want one, then they need to look elsewhere. That’s not being real, sorry.

I do agree with Randy on the first part though and hopefully I’m not talking about how great I am here ever (I’m not) — and trolls and non-trolls please slap me around if I ever should do that — but the second part of Randy’s statement is completely bogus. If your reader says or does something you disagree with, why should you avoid commenting on this just because they are your reader? Screw that.

8. “… most a-listers have 100 people linking to them daily and it’s highly unlikely your post will catch their eye.” I doubt very few of the top blogs have 100 people linking to them daily. The top 25 A-listers have more than that but it falls well below that number after that. I’d be surprised to learn of Scoble getting 100 people linking to him every day when Technorati shows 19,170 links during their entire analysis period. 100 x 365 days = 36,500. If that period is only six months, then he’s there as Randy suggests but he’s definitely part of a very small minority. I’d doubt there are any non top 100 blogs getting more than 100 links from other sites daily. I’d like to see Randy share some stats that prove his numbers.

Therefore, I think you have more like a 1:10 or 1:25 chance of getting noticed by these people. Those odds improve dramatically if what you have to say is different, unique and creative. I’ve unsuccessfully argued this point with Seth Finkelstein and he disagrees that extraordinary content has any better chance. I’ve seen other people say it’s all about being buddy buddy with those at the top of the chain. I recently saw Kent Newsome say if he could buy his way into conferences he’d see more link love but he doesn’t have the time.

Perhaps I’m in a very small minority who still strongly believes that if you write good content and work continually at improving the material you will eventually attract your own audience who enjoys your own view of the world. In today’s crowded blog wilderness it might take years instead of months or days, but hard workers eventually get noticed for their efforts. Hopefully not posthumuously.

Take a look at Mike Arrington and the rise of TechCrunch. He started by focusing on a niche and was empowered by his contact list in Sillicon Valley. Look at him now burning up $100 bills in print.

9. “If a reader is leaving regular comments on your blog, then subscribe to his blog, find out more about him, so you can engage with him more completely.” This isn’t a mistake for others, but it is for Randy, I agree with him completely here. However, I’ve read, commented and linked to Randy’s blog and he didn’t find out enough about me to even get my name right. But he’s in good company, Google still thinks it’s “david” too.

10. “Not using a spellchecker and a grammar checker.” This is BS. Whether or not you use a spellchecker or grammar checker will have very little bearing on your blog’s success. I see some blog styles which intentionally don’t capitalize the first letter of every sentence. Blogs can have highly polished posts, be more instinctive, reactive and raw or be some combination of both. The art of editing is an entirely different discussion. It is a mistake and in fact gets in the way of being a productive writer using too many tools that keep your work in editing mode.

(gasp, horror!)

No, I’m not suggesting that misspellings and poor grammar are good things, but your blog isn’t going to be relegated to the trash heap because you are a lousy speller. It’s one of those rules that even Randy admits he doesn’t follow, but the grammar checker thing is overly anal for the vast majority of blogs. Unless it’s your English teacher’s blog. Exceptions to everything. You may completely ruin a good post with too much editing. And throw away the thesaurus, please. Showing readers a big vocabulary unnaturally is a far greater sin than a post with a couple spelling errors.

Everybody makes mistakes, including me
Now somebody else can list the mistakes I’ve made in this post and we’ll have a post about mistakes with a post pointing out the mistakes with a post pointing out the mistakes of the mistakes post. She sells seashells down by …

(rimshot)

Nothing like a mistake chain blog letter. Like any other advice gleaned for free from a blog, do what works for you in your business.

Rocket Dock is a free Mac dock clone for Windows that is easy to setup and configure [Thanks Download Squad]. If you are looking for something similar that you can really tweak like mad, then you might want to check out ObjectDock ($19.95 USD) from Stardock, but if you are primarily interested in the dock-like feature like me then give RocketDock a try.

Keeping both my physical and vitual desktops clean is a chore. My physical desktop is made of glass and requires frequent cleaning to rid of smudges. By week’s end I often end up with tons of icons on the desktop which is where I find the most handy place to temporarily store items before filing away and/or using.

With RocketDock I dragged the shortcuts used most often over to the dock. I found that I liked the dock placed on the far right instead of atop, left or the bottom. In the dockbar settings I changed so that the dock was always behind other windows instead of atop and also made the icons smaller using the slider, so they wouldn’t underlap the systray and clock.

I removed most of the default RocketDock icons including My Document, My Pictures, My Music. I’m used to using Windows + E to access Windows Explorer quickly and navigate from there. The only default icons I kept were the Recycle Bin, Dock Settings and Control Panel. The only duplicate I left on my desktop was the Recycle Bin as the topmost screenshot shows.

Using folders on the desktop for additional organization
I also have five folders on my desktop that I drag shortcuts and files into periodically, in an effort to keep the desktop clean: screenshots, icons, ebooks-write, software-try and SLPics.

SLPics - screenshots I take while in Second Life. I prefer to keep this separate from other screenshots
software-try - downloads I plan to check out as time permits
ebooks-write - I keep various text files and eBooks I’m reading here
icons - all shortcuts that would otherwise mess up the desktop, I’m two clicks away from every program I want to use.
screenshots - all screenshots and captures I’ve taken except for Second Life

What tips, tricks and tools do you use to keep your desktop clean and tidy?

- Go ahead, you know you’re dying to spell your name with Zombies
- Keyboard designers: the Caps Lock key is placed stupidly for these times. Considering how little it is used it should be moved elsewhere. Fortunately, keyboard remapping is possible.
- they wanted to make Snakes on a Plane a rated PG movie. Samuel Jackson is fired up in this YouTube clip. Listen to him scream “Sequel! Sequel!” The reptillian madness begins this Friday August 18. I’ll be there, will you? Best promotion for a movie in years.
- Nintendo Wii will offer free online gameplay according to gamasutra
- Over the weekend Microsoft released a desktop blogging tool called Windows Live Writer (Beta). Somebody up there must enjoy the fact of attaching the words “Windows Live” to everything. The official Writer blog is here. Developers can download the plugin SDK from here. Once installed look in your My Documents folder for two new directories containing the sample code and a help file.
- An ink blogging plugin for Writer is already available
- Smart move by Microsoft for those thinking of buying a Vista capable PC — a free Vista upgrade — and it starts in October. Just wait a couple more months. Lifehacker has more.
- fly around Google maps in a plane [thanks Make]
- Time magazine lists 50 coolest websites
- I wasn’t planning on our home buying Texas Hold ‘em for the Xbox Live Arcade, but the first two days (August 23-24) it will be free before going on sale for 800 Microsoft Points and that’s a plan changer, thanks Nathan.
- draw space looks like a good place to start for the artist-impaired like myself
- new how-to video site videojug moderates submissions to keep the quality higher.