In continuing my trend for going on hiatus for major life events (such as my brother getting married), I am going on another hiatus as my wife seems to have gone into labour.

Life, as they say, moves on whether or not we’re prepared — and its time to see if all the on-call shifts will mean something as I look forward to all those sleepless nights!

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out a few of my favourite websites:

• BlogHerald — my blogging home away from home
• Matt Ingram — A local Canadian journalist covering web2.0 issues amongst other things; Mr. Ingram usually hits it on the head more times than not [yes, I also saw the Clinton piece on Google!]
• Successful-blog — Liz Straus always has such a nice smorgasbord of issues to blog about involving communication skills, corporate blogging, and the power of just plain ol’ being nice[Sorry, won’t be attending the live-blog tonight]
• Chrisekblog — Not Canadian, but almost as good, Mr. Chrisek is one of the hardest working bloggers today — climbing the Digg charts, and also hammering posts at the same time on the web2.0

See you all in a few days!
Tony @ dji

In what surely must be the meatiest post of the day — virtually dripping with rich fat – Andy Hagans over at Text-Link-Ads does corporate blogging proud by de-mystifying Google’s Sandbox.

The sandbox is a type of purgatory that most, if not all, websites (or domains) go, when they are first put up on the ‘net. It serves as a testing ground of sorts before the site pops up with any sort of ranking under any relevant search terms.

Mr. Hagans does a masterful job of breaking down:

1. What the sandbox is
2. What it means for your business
3. How its changed over the past few years
4. How to take advantage of those changes
5. What links means to the sandbox
6. How to *really* get great links

Do yourself and check it out.

Because it needs to be printed, bookmarked, and pasted on your fridge.

For real.

In what surely must be the geek 21st century equivalent of Wayne’s World — Revision3 announced quite splashily through the New York Times that it has secured 1 million dollars in financing. Revision3 will then make the leap from a couple of guys sitting on a couch with a cold brewski in an apartment to a full fledged production company.

While their every-geek pathos clearly resonates with every geek with a blog (yours truly included), it remains to be seen how far they can exploit this niche, or whether or not they’re able to expand it as successfully to other niches.

Digg, for example, has branched out into other domains outside of the geekniche, but without delving into Digg’s logs, its hard to know what how popular they really are.

One thing Revision3 does have in its corner, much like Dogster, is profitability. If the NYT article is to be belived Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrect are pulliing in anywhere between 50 - 100, 000 per month in advertising for their show.

And if productivity is any measure, no — the web2.0 hasn’t yet jumped the shark (although, perhaps it getting close).

I guess the only question that remains is: who is Mike Meyers and who is Dana Carvey?

Yes, this is going to sound an awful like like sour grapes, and yes, “please add a glass of whine to that sir” — but I can’t get over how much traffic Neil Patel is getting over at PronetAdvertising.com for his most recent article on “making your blog popular through content”.

For those uninitiated, Neil’s blog covers blogging topics, and mostly does posts through a tutorial-type fashion. He does some great work from time to time. I especially like his posts on web analytics. As an introduction, I’m not sure you’ll find a better series of posts on the topic. They’re easy to read, thorough, and covers a wide breadth of topics.
But his latest post doesn’t really match his previous best and I’ve got to call him out on this one:

Its mediocre.

How? Well, there’s nothing on that list that hasn’t been trumpeted a bajillion times before — since, “making your blog popular through content” also goes by another moniker known as “linkbaiting” (Hmmmm … I wonder if this would qualify as an “attack post”?). Yes, if you’re so inclined, search “linkbaiting” and see if what kind of information pops up here (I like this one, this one is also pretty good, but this one is also pretty good as well).

And in spite of its mediocrity, this particular post has inexplicably blown up (a good thing). Its getting coverage on Digg, Techmeme, and goodness knows what else.

Although it lacks freshness, thoroughness, pizzazz, and really ads nothing new to the topic of linkbaiting.

So, why is it so popular?

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Well, after promising to get an interview with the TechCrush folk (namely Lutz Winters), I finished one yesterday. As I have not contributed much in a while to BlogHerald, I have opted to post it over there.

Michael Arrington has certainly posted his side of things, and so I thought it would be fitting to allow Mr. Lutz to give his. I hope it serves as a bit of an epilogue to the fuss going on late in the week. To Michael Arrington’s credit, he certainly resolved this in a professional and congenial fashion.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem the end of the legal issues bubbling around the blogosphere, what with Apple sending their goons to threaten another small company again, for using the term Pod in their trademark, Wal-Mart sabre-rattling over Apple’s movie downloads, and small African nations jailing people for selling a VOIP service.

• Secrets Of The Self-Made
  14 of the 400 Wealthiest sit down with Forbes to discuss some great questions: My favourite “What was your biggest mistake?”. Check out this slideshow if making it big is of any interest to you.
  (tags: interviews forbes billioinaire entrepreneurship howto secrets)
• Nik Cubrilovic rants a little about how disappointing his new MacBook Pro is, given its utter hardware failure after ponying up 3700 australian dinero. Well, he’s not the first and won’t be the last.
  (tags: omnidrive techcrunch nik mac apple)

Over at the UK version of the BBC, there is a great article on how blogging seems to have taken off — in particular, in Ireland, where a few local politicians have taken to it.

It discusses how more and more politicians of all political flavours are picking up on blogging. Most of the audience tends to be young, and as such the articles goes to say that it will continue to evolve as a political tool for actionism over time.

In terms of “corporate” blogging it does touch on a few important points, such as choosing your posts with care; it remains a permenant record forever. Or,not being too press-releasey, but trying to continue with a genuine narrative of events.

But it does touch on something that I did find exception with. A local politician whom they interviewed mentioned:

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