I've got a Treo full of random notes and new announcements to get out to you, so let's dive right into it all, shall we?

So, first the announcements, because I need to get through them all. First, and potentially the biggest news to my life, is that I've yet again started up another blog; and this was started for a very specific reason, and is trying to accomplish a very specific thing, a sorta amalgam of things I was doing before but now focused towards a single purpose. It is in fact a resuming of The Heterotopia Report, the weekly bulletin I used to write, pointing out interesting things elsewhere on the internet; but now set up as its own Blogspot page, and updated differently - only two posts a day, 200 to 500 words in length, specifically in op-ed format, with absolutely no cursing.

Why? Well, because of this brand-new website that is just opening up right now, called BlogBurst. And what a brilliantly simple idea they've come up with, too - to act as a "wire service" for mainstream news publications, but for bloggers instead of reporters. That is, they are pre-selecting bloggers who apply to be content providers, to maintain a really high quality; then offering their feeds to editors at mainstream newspapers, to be picked and chosen one entry at a time, to run in a special "citizen media" area of the mainstream publication's website. Several hundred bloggers, sorted through pervasive tagging, with the news publications getting to do searches and pull just what blogging content they want, for example to run alongside an article by a staff reporter on the same subject, all of it reliable because BlogBurst is doing the weeding-out of bad writers for them. And wow, even before opening, they already have four official partnerships, with four pretty impressive places - the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.

Brilliant! Brilliant, brilliant! And I really, really want to be a part of this, so much so that I've started up a new blog, one specifically for these news editors to follow and pick and choose for their own publications. Which, yeah, sure, is also partly inspired by all the people now who keep saying, "Jason, I really like what you have to say, but do you always have to curse so much? Or talk about your penis so much? Or write so much on a given subject each day?" So yes, this new blog is also for all of you, and especially those who enjoy reading what I have to say about business and technology, without wanting to know too terribly many personal stories about me. See, Aunt Carol? And you thought I wasn't listening!

So I've got that up and running now, and have two sample entries up along with an introduction, and have applied to be reviewed by the team at BlogBurst; so we'll see, I guess. And that would be really cool, I think, to start having some of my work appear right on the pages of some mainstream news publications. And who knows? If I catch on at a specific town, if those editors keep returning to my stuff again and again, maybe I'd be brought on in a more full-time capacity, and actually start making some decent money again, without having to resort to either Starbucks or writing headlines for fucking burger ads. So yeah, that'd be nice.

Next, nice little geeky news - I've figured out how to assign unique title tags to each page of my site now. So that'll make them show up much better in search engines like Google; plus of course will much more help for anyone bookmarking a specific page, to help remind them of what was on that page in the first place. So hooray for that.

Next: new Flickr photos! Thank god for home broadband access, man. Two new photosets, to be precise: random shots from my recent attendance of the Adobe Production Studio tour; and then a set that I'm calling "Satellite images from my Address Book." See, I downloaded this plug-in recently for my Mac's iAddress, which will let me with a click of a button automatically pull up a Google Map/Satellite image of anyone in my address book. (Works perfectly; is really cool.) And so I was playing around with it this weekend, and realized that some of my friends live and work in some very interesting places; so, I started taking screenshots of some of them, then annotating some of them as well. Anyway, some interesting stuff up there, I think, that's been generating quite a few comments over there, if you want to check them out yourself.

Oh, and speaking of comments: other people's first 'jasonpettus' tags are starting to trickle into my RSS feed. Cool! The first was by a reader who goes by "Unpublished Author, PhD," making note of my report on Friday about the "magic middle." And I'll agree with your commenters there, too, UA - why not release that unpublished novel of yours as a free electronic download at your site? At least people could start reading it, start becoming fans, start talking about it to others and pitch in towards you getting it noticed by a publishing company. And then the second mention was actually from this rather famous blogger named Guy Kawasaki, one of the original team members that invented the Macintosh in 1984, as well as the guy who coined the phrase 'web evangelist.' And what he basically did was enfold a comment I had made earlier about an existing post, back into the main entry of the post, as a way of saying that he wanted everyone to pay attention to what I had just said, because he agreed with it too. Which, wow, was a really nice thing for him to do! But completely and utterly proves my point from Friday as well, that it is fairly easy to regularly get the attention of some pretty famous, pretty powerful people, as long as you think smartly about it all.

I have a very strict policy in my life, for example, regarding commenting at other people's sites: that is, I only do it if I have something new and worthwhile to add to the conversation, and keep my mouth shut if I don't. That is, no endless "Yeah!"s and "Ditto!"s and "Right on!"s and "Me too!"s from me around the blogosphere, because who cares? You can show the author you agree with them by linking to it at del.icio.us, or mentioning it at your blog; and meanwhile, their readers don't care that you think he "fuckin' rocks, dude!" Adding something that's actually new to the conversation, though, and that actually spurs people to new thought, suddenly gets you a lot more noticed, because you have smarter things to say and because so many other people haven't yet learned this lesson. ("You fuckin' rock, dude! You're the best!") That means, for example, that more people there will click over to your own blog, to see what you have to say when you have an entire entry at your disposal; it means, for another, that occasionally the original author will make reference to you, in that edited post or sometimes a brand-new one. And then suddenly a search on your name at Technorati or Google lights up all these A-list names, and you yourself inch closer towards the top of the magic middle instead of the bottom.

This is not a trick or gimmick I'm talking about here, people - these are the very rules that are supposed to run the system. Algorithims and sorting methods at places like Technorati and Google are designed to reward the people simply running around, regularly adding thought-provoking content to the worldwide conversation; and so when you do this, you naturally move up at places like that. You don't have to be famous, and you don't even have to be a particularly good writer; you just need interesting ideas, and to share them with others every single day. That's it. (Oh, and even as I've been writing this, yet another new mention at the Darwinian Web, because of that original Kawasaki post. Conversation, people. You see what I'm saying?)

So what else? Well, another change to my main category page: I've decided, in fact, not to bother this year with trying to import archived versions of all the photos I now have at Flickr. Because they're just completely safe over there right now as they are, you know? And very easy to get to from here as well, and reference from here. And that's suddenly 700 archived pieces of content I don't have to worry about, which suddenly makes my life a lot easier. So now that makes my "Photos" category essentially a much smaller, closed one - just for photos that predate 2004, and once I'm done I'm done for good. Whew! So, the main categories page now reflects that decision.

And is that it? That is it! Whew, and that went so long, I'm not even up for passing along some of my random notes. So that'll wait for tomorrow, I guess.

Reprinted by permission from gapingvoid, just too good to pass up. Replace "marketing" with the word "poetry," you now understand the last ten years of my life; re-insert the word "marketing," you now understand the next ten years of my life! Oy vey!