Tsk Tsk Tsk

I've gotten into that very bad habit again, that cheating on my blog habit: reading books.

You know, those sqare things with pages that you turn? No typing required?

Freaky, I know.

Recent Reads: My sister's keeper; Ruby Fruit Jungle; Not Tonight Honey, Wait Until I'm a Size 6; and just beginning: Broken for You.

A million good reasons...

there are a million good reasons for me not to be out in the sun all day, from practical reasons to health reasons, but when night time falls and I'm home with jenna tucked in and the ceiling fan is blowing just so, and I'm cool from the pool and baked hot from the sun, I am so relaxed, just smoked and toasted relaxed, just warmed and smoothed with lotion relaxed. No drug in the world, no drink in the world, makes me feel as warm, as free, as bone hot tired.

My favorite thing is my little floatable raft, and lying face up as it carries me across the water, with my extra good sunglasses that let me watch the clouds paint the sky, overlap and touch, brush by, and swirl brighter white.

Information at the Speed of Syndication

I can't keep up.

Even with bloglines I can't keep up. Reading blogs is now like whiplash for me: gnomedex over here--no! look over here, Yahoo's got some social network beta, NO! look over here, technorati's got new features but they don't work, no! look over here, Yahoo's mindset is in beta! NO! Look over here, Weinberger's in Amsterdam with Edleman! NO! Look over here, gmail! HEY look here--Ketchum's still not blogging! NO! Wait! Over here! Scoble says a whole new way to comment is coming! NO! Look over here, blogads wants you, HEY, over here lady, what about grokster?

If you're like me, you're tired of trying to shove as many blog sandwiches down your cake hole as possible at any given sitting.

That's why I'd like to introduce the NEWEST beta--designed to change the way you consume blogs!

It's called Blog(between-the)Lines(SM), a new aggregator/reader that serves up the three most important words from across all of the blogs you subscribe to each day! You can get your Blog(between-the)Lines WordPack 2005 delivered to you via email, via text message, or stamped on your head with a branding iron underneath the Free Download Code Number, 666.

That's EVERY day. And TWICE on Tuesday!

We make you more efficient--so you can subscribe to tens of thousands of blogs and read the naughty bits in no time flat. YOU'RE on the golf course before 10 because we've done the heavy lifting for you, aggregating the most important text nuggets from the blogosphere and tossing them back at you the way you want them.

Here's a sample of a Blog(between-the)Lines Email Message summarizing Wednesday's Activity:

Weinberger Amsterdam Halley Tailbone Doc Google Scoble Scoble Scoble Web 2.0 Technorati Yahoo Google Technorati beta beta beta Winer thanks RSS gnomedex canter beta beta beta.

SEE! You're up to date in 10 seconds flat.

Why waste time with all of those useless articles of speech and prepositions. MEANINGLESS! And flowery adjectives, or hyperactive adverbs? FORGET THEM.

With the new Blog(between-the)Lines reader, Bloggers CAN be Choosers(TM).

You get the choicest morsels in the blogworld: NOUNS NOUNS NOUNS. Direct Objects. Subjects. That's it.

(Disclaimer: An occasional gerund or two may slip in--we're working on that.)

And all of this is yours for only $29.95. (per minute)

Paypal me today and I'll get started on it.

Technorotty

Susan Kitchens has a new term to describe the new Technorati feature that keeps you from looking yourself up: Bruised Ego Surfing.

It has a certain ring to it, non?

HELLO TECHNORATI--Is anyone home?
I NEED YOU TODAY!!!
REAL ENTERPRISES ARE INTERESTED.

T-shirts:

"I beta tested technorati and all I got was this damn squid."

Give Me My Name Back.

Halley's got an interesting post at misbehaving on maiden names and who gets what name in a divorce, and who can call herself what, and what an ex-husband should and shouldn't be able to ask his ex-wife to do in terms of his last name.

As evidence of the complicated times in which we live, check out the comments, and see if you can follow the bouncing ball on marriages, remarriages, taking names, not taking names, and oh yes, kids.

I added my two cents in comments about being both a wife with her husband's domain name, and a kid growing up with a mom whose last name was different from mine.

But the issue Halley presented was really about a guy friend who had gotten divorced and was thinking about asking his ex to take her maiden name back rather than keeping his.

I actually know a couple where the husband asked for this in the divorce decree. Guys, it's something to think about. If you don't have kids, and you want your name back, put it in writing because some folks will tell you it's a control issue for you to want your divorce to be complete, in name and all.

I don't think so. I think you're right to want your name back. I think most women who take their husband's names, who have no children with the man and end up in divorce court, ought to not fight the guy if he asks for his name back. It's like a family hierloom from his side of the family. If it was his when he entered into the marriage, and there are no children who could beneft from his great-great grandpa's pocket watch, YOU GIVE THE THING BACK.

I think if you have kids, you do your children a disservice by asking their mom to become the person in name she was before she had them. No no don't do that. It fucks with kids' minds.

But if you don't have kids, tell her you want your name back. Or better yet, put it in the divorce agreement because her girlfriends are going to tell her to hang on to it, along with that pocket watch from your great-great-grandfather.

;-)

Dear Technorati

When I sent my beta review mail to you, Technorati, I asked for a way to have the main screen just a tiny bit customizable so that I can at least CLOSE the boxes (and keep it that way if I'm signed in) that I dont give a flying crap about. In other words, if you're going to now clutter the homepage with things that most of us don't care about, the least you can do is give us a way to get rid of that crap.

HERE are just some of the things I don't care about that you are sticking in my face when all I'm trying to do is a vanity search:

Top Searches This Hour
1. Itunes
2. Google Earth
3. Itunes 4.9
4. Tom Cruise
5. Google
6. Grokster
7. Bush
8. Iraq
9. Podcast
10. Necc

Special Event
There are 9,303 posts from 2,525 people about Live 8 right now.

Join the conversation

I just wanted to tell you, I don't want to join the conversation, not about Live 8, Tom Cruise, or Iraq. I want to use your tool to do what it used to do best: SEARCH BLOGS.

Why, oh why, when I search on my blog's URL do you keep giving me error message after error message. I just got it again.

Technorati, my most valued tool, has been useless to me for searching on information for my clients and myself for two days.


ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://technorati.com/search/allied.blogspot.com

The following error was encountered:

Zero Sized Reply
Squid did not receive any data for this request.

Your cache administrator is noc@technorati.com.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Generated Wed, 29 Jun 2005 03:46:41 GMT by www.technorati.com (squid/2.5.STABLE7)


Noc, my cache administrator, consider this your notification.

I would appreciate it if you would turn your tool back into a search tool first, and give me some options on HOW I WANT to experience the world live web--which is really cute by the way. I do like that.

However, my idea of fun and work might be different from yours.

For example, you might enjoy the nice layout and images on the first page of search results you return for me.

I, on the other hand, WANT TO SEE MORE THAN FOUR SEARCH RESULTS WITHOUT HAVING TO CLICK AND WAIT MINUTES ONLY TO GET ANOTHER ERROR MESSAGE.

You say you will show all of my most recent posts if I click: Show all 437 links from 333 sources » but you lie.

You just throw another error message in my face when I click it.

Technorati, I have always loved you. I know I have used you in the past, but I'm trying to tell you something here that will make both of our lives better...

...Don't forget what you are, Technorati. Lesser companies have failed to survive that single mistake.

-------------------
BONUS FEATURE

THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT ON MY TECHNORATI RESULTS PAGE NUMBER 1:

Most Popular
News: New Ideas in Global Health Get a $437 Million Assist - New York Times »
Movies: Batman Begins (2005) »
Books: The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection »
More in Popular »

MORE THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT:

Sponsored Link Matches
Google Ads

And EVEN MORE THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT:

There are9,303blog posts about Live 8 right now.

So, in case I haven't made myself clear.....

THE THING I CARE MOST ABOUT ON YOUR SITE:

Love,
jeneane

Still looking for that hybrid acronym...

That explains what I do working full time from home, business owner from home, and mom from home, by myself when george is on the road mom. The SAHM (stay at home moms) and the WM (working moms) have endless debates on forums and in chats on who's making the tougher sacrifice. Well I do what both sets do, and not only do I want the world to know that the kid part is hardest, but I also want my own stinking acronym.

SAHWAHM - stay at home, work at home mom.
SAHWFHM - stay at home, work from home mom.

The above two choices suck because you can't make words out of them.

WMSAM - (william sam?) working mom stay at home mom.
VCKTWM - vomit cleaning keyboard typing working mom. [Yidish I think]

PBJLHOCCM - peanut butter jelly lunchtime home mom on conference call. [Also resembles the sound made when a child vomits.]

NSWOSAHM - never stop working or staying at home mom

TWS - trick work sally

c'mon bunky--give me an acronym!

You Go, Guy.

I'm always up for a good rant--and Tom Murphy delivers on PR Opinions.

Blogs will not perform a slash-and-burn on the PR toolkit. Instead blogs are an important additional element. Do we think that blogs will turn an unnewsworthy press release into something that's newsworthy? No. Will blogs turn badly written content into well written content? No

.
Forget press releases; I'm just waiting for blogs to replace the throw-up can we've been using the last few days.

Meta Meta Redundancy and SAHWMs

I haven't been blogging because I've been writing about blogging offline, which leaves me more than a little spent and feeling as though I've already blogged, forgetting of course that a post is not a post unless it lands in a blog.

Mr. O'Connor Clarke, I hope, will not mind me singing his praises as THE GUY you want to pay to put on his strategy thinking cap and edit your most important 20 pages or so. What a pleasure having his expertise and assistance on this recent white paper, coming soon to a blog near you. Michael's got one of those brains that can shoehorn just the right concept in between two strings of thought to pull together a completely new (and oh-so-much-more meaningful) idea.

Yowsa!

In other news, I have decided that I am of the new breed. I am a Stay At Home Mom (SAHM) and a Working Mom (WM) which makes me a Stay At Home Working Mom: SAHWM.

Let's hear it for the SAHWMs! (pronounced saw-ems, which is what we fantisize doing to both clients and children on our worst days).

We aren't large in numbers, but we have the distinction of being the worst dressed women at the grocery store, at odd hours, if we leave the house at all.

I haven't left the house since Saturday--I mean not even out to the mailbox, because jenna started throwing up in the middle of the night Saturday and got blindsided by strep over the weekend. She appears to be on the mend on the meds.

While I was working on a TON of work this weekend, I had to write about 13 pages cold out of my brain, and I did this lying flat on my bed with Jenna off to the right, the small garbage can in between for me to heft under her chin while I patted her head and said nice things as she hurled and gagged and puked. Rinse out can. Time for suppository. Yes I'm sorry too. Has to be. Insert. Wash hands. Tuck in kid. Turn to Disney. Sound down. Back to the keyboard. Time for meds. Bribe and coax. Yell and threaten. Give meds. Tuck kid in. Grab can. Pat and coo. Wipe vomit. Rinse can. Wash hands. Back to keyboard.

I did this for 12 hours straight, though the throwing up subsided after the second suppository. Thank heaven for little girls and small favors.

This is what I do for a living. This is what I live doing.

I only wish I could double bill for nursing.

I love my kid so much.

Dear Feature Creepers

Two of my favorite blogging tools, Technorati and Blogger, have done me some favors I didn't ask for this week. Again. Blogger is infamous for this. It's like this: You don't like donuts but that's really neither here nor there because you usually don't run across donuts in your morning travels. Then one day you wake up to find that someone's put a donut on your face while you were asleep.

That's what using Blogger is like when they decide to improve things.

I don't like the "I'm to lame to live" new image upload feature. Yes, it allows even the most helpless blogger upload an image, as long as they pay for blogger pro, and at the same time, forces the bloggers who had been happy uploading them into their long-standing subdirectory and layng them out as they wish, into yet another pat process.

On to Technorati. I was part of the beta review bunch and sent a rather thoughtful email on my various likes and dislikes. I never got a response, so I don't know if anyone read it. But it was nice to be invited to participate and I love checking out betas.

I thought I made the point in my feedback that the most important thing technorati does--it's a search engine after all--is to provide search results, not all these fluffy 'current books' and 'what watchlists do I have today' everywhere I look.

So, when I do a search on my own URL as a blogger, you know, it would seem logical to give me those results -- not JUST FOUR of them, but maybe 10-20 at a time (or however many at a time we want to see on a page--let me decide) WITHOUT HAVING TO CLICK A LINK TO GET ALL FOUR MILLION LINKS -- A LINK THAT TIMES OUT BEFORE IT EVER GIVES ME THE REST OF THE RESULTS I'M LOOKING FOR.



By the way, who's Squid?