farewell to fredshouse

It's almost spring, most certainly a time for renewal and taking stock. So I'm cleaning house, metaphorically. This blog Fredshouse marked the opening of a new phase of my life, and now I am declaring an end. Or at least, the end of the beginning, as someone said about the web awhile back.

I started writing here in July 2003, and my first post was a panorama of Tokyo's Shinjuku station. It was the summer of love, for mobile media anyway, and I was in Japan to discover the first fuzzy threads of a new mobile, social media fabric. Now it's almost six years later, and things have changed. But still, things are things.

So now, a new chapter for me. I'm still around; you can find parts of me here, here, here and sometimes here. Don't be a stranger, OK?

FYI, the fredshouse.net main page now redirects to genebecker.com; if you really want the old stuff, the fredshouse archive page should give you a way to find it.

oops, forgot to blog

I keep forgetting to blog lately, must be busy or something. Fortunately, many other people are remembering to keep the tubes filled. You can see some evidence of this in my shared items from google reader:

mybloglog's descent into spam

I've been a member of MyBlogLog since pretty much the beginning, and I used to enjoy the small-community feel of the service. But now that it has achieved some reach, it is becoming a spam magnet. First it was the spammy messages inside the service -- "come check out my new pyramid scheme". Then it was the friend collectors with their thousands of contacts, very often promoting their splogs and spammy little scams. And now it's the widget spammers, like "online-pharmacy" and "free-apple-iphone" who run automated scripts to get their icons into the MBL widgets on as many sites as they can (or as Scott Rafer named this practice, "widget-hogging"). Yes, you can delete these spamicons, but I already have enough work to do, keeping the comment and trackback weeds out of my garden.

It's sad to see this happening, yet another tragedy of the Internet commons I guess.

don't go away mad...

Jessica sure has a way with Venn diagrams.

Meanwhile, the cat has a blog and are wii having fun yet?

don't go away mad, just go away

Since I'm not being very useful around here, the least I can do is send you off to someone who has a really fascinating blog. Allow me to introduce Pruned, by Alexander Trevi.

If you liked that, you'll probably want to look at some of the other best blogs of 2006 that you (maybe) aren't reading. Personally, I'm newly discovered of subtraction, indexed, t-shirt critic, eyeteeth ('incisive' ideas, heh), and ypulse. You'll almost certainly like others too, so, you know, go.

where are all the hp bloggers?

This isn't supposed to be a blog about HP stuff. I never wanted to go there, and mostly I have managed not to. Unfortunately, this last week I just could not stay out of the HP board story, it was too important and full-frontal to ignore. There's no way I could just pretend not to notice, and just keep posting about ubicomp and music as if nothing was happening.

But after poking around in the usual hangouts, I am starting to wonder where are all the other people like me, the HP employees who run blogs and feel they have to speak up on this? Maybe I just don't know where to look, but I'm not finding them anywhere. In fact, one really weird thing is that if you look at the official HP blogs, out of the 15 or so actual people there (not counting one time event blogs), only 7 have posted at all since the flap started on 9/5/06, and none of those have commented on the situation whatsoever. Zero. Seriously. How can they just say "move along folks, there's nothing to see here" and write about business as usual? I don't understand. Maybe I missed a memo or something.

finding new stuff with mybloglog

So this MyBlogLog Communities service is starting to grow on me. The idea of a social network for blogs looks like a useful way to find interesting writers outside the memestream of the bigg aggregator sites. One problem with the Long Tail is that it's so, well, long; MBLc helps with that by making it easier to find sites that are popular with niche audiences. Sure, you can join BoingBoing or Valleywag, but you already knew them and there's not much value add in joining their communities. On the other hand, in a few minutes of surfing around MBLc I found these fine sites:

Stochastic/Page 3.14, the SEED guide to science blogs

warrenellisdotcom, writer Warren Ellis' sequel to dearly departed Die Puny Humans

Bitch | Lab: undermining feminists and feminism since 2005

Mmm-mmm good. Now go away and find your own new stuff.

i want your face

I want your face on my blog, right over there in the right sidebar under "Recent Readers". You can do this by joining up with MyBlogLog Communities, the new social-mediafied version of an original javascript stats counting service. It's fun and a bit of a different twist on the usual YASNS, plus the site stats provide a nice simple look at where readers come from, what they viewed, and what they clicked on the way out the door, on a daily basis. I still prefer googlytics for full-featured site analysis, but I look at my MBL stats every day too. You can read more in Eric the founder's blog.

UPDATE: Thanks Scott for pointing out that the widget lives on the front page of the site, so if you're reading this somewhere else (like the archive pages) you'll probably wonder what I'm talking about. Here it is. Cool, no?

creature from the blog lagoon

Like some gooey, rubbery demon from a bad 1960's horror film, fredshouse has finally crawled out from the tar pits of blog oblivion. No thanks at all to IBM, maker of the fine Deskstar hard drive which scraped all of my bits right off its zippy little platters. And no thanks to me, since I hadn't done a backup in about a year and a half, thus screwing myself quite thoroughly. But gratitude and exaltation are very much in order for the almighty Google Cache, which amazingly turned out to have about 95% of this site squirreled away in its capacious brain. I mean, it's not exactly the best backup strategy in the world to just rely on Google to come by and save your bits, but in my case it worked astonishingly well.

Anyway, if you're looking for fredshouse stuff from before January 2006, you can get to most of it through the archives page.

picking up the pieces

So this site is currently smashed into a million little pieces, loosely joined. The janitorial staff is working hard to clean up the mess, but it's going to be awhile before everything is back to normal. Lots of things on the site are broken, like feeds, comments, pings, and most of the archives. We're going to need a dozen fine crystal tumblers, a case of Jack Daniels, some serious firepower, and ice. Lots of ice.