I was surprised when I learned that Hunter S. Thompson had killed himself yesterday. You see, in all my years, I’ve never read anything he wrote, poked around who he was – never even bothered to watch Johnny Depp impersonate him.

That is, not until yesterday anyways.

My new thing with my podcast is to do a quick intro and then play some music. Yesterday, I was briefly inspired to kick things off with a quote from someone who had said something witty and biting about music and I came across this bit from Hunter S. Thompson:

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”

I didn’t actually go with it because I realized that anything worth quoting was probably too long to use as a lead-in to my podcast.

So I went with something else. And today he’s dead.

Strange coincidence.

Scoble: “…appliances like these could disrupt Sharepoint's business. The Sharepoint team should take this very seriously. Sharepoint should add a few simple blogging features (for instance discoverability, RSS, permalinks).”

…and let’s say it together:

MICROSOFT OFFICE SHOULD ALSO ADD A FEW SIMPLE BLOGGING FEATURES.

MICROSOFT OFFICE SHOULD HAVE A “SAVE TO WEB” FUNCTION THAT LEVERAGES THE METAWEBLOG API.

NORMAL COMPUTER USING PEOPLE NEED AN EASY WAY TO GET THEIR STUFF ONLINE.

I’m not talking about Ecto, Blogjet or even Frontpage. Those are all web tools. I’m talking about personal content management tools - and what better place to start personal content management than within the tools that are most often used to create the content in the first place! Radio has a feature called “upstreaming” which is totally on the right track – but not simple enough. Rework upstreaming as  “Save to Web” for anything I want from my most used content production tools – like MSOffice – and then I think we’re definitely moving in the right direction.

(Background here and my followup here)

Mozilla Foundation: "...the problem is mostly the fault of domain name registries and registrars that let people register homographic variants of existing domain names."

Yup. Sounds almost right.

More specifically, this is what you get when test-beds and immature specs are run against production systems. IDN isn't baked yet - not from a policy perspective. Any registry running these things in production systems isn't doing anyone any favors.

Yes, I know Tucows has been selling IDNs since the initial NSI test-bed was announced. It was a bad idea then and I'd be much happier now if we hadn't jumped in as quickly as we did. With that being said, we've got a huge install base to support, so its not like we can simply turn off these domains...that would turn off the internet for a lot of people. Also, we've got a pretty good track record of being very conservative when it comes to implementations like this. I'll have to check with James to specifically find out whether or not we fall on the side of the street that's doing favors for Mozilla or not... :)

Mark Evans: “…a cool wireless device with a built-in MP3 player would find a big audience.”

Close. But no cigar. Awareness of the problem space isn’t quite there…Scoble thinks that Motorola has found the magic. Closer again, but also not there.

None of these gizmo’s make it easy enough. Self-apparent enough.

iPod enough.

I have 26gb of “legit” MP3’s (in other words, I have 26+ gb of MP3’s and CD originals in a closet to back them up…) and I want to listen to them on the subway, at work, and most importantly – at home throughout my days...

I don’t want to have to sync a device in order to listen to them. I want to load a playlist or something equally trivial.

I have more than 9gb of pictures – I want to be able to view them in a similar manner. Easily, on demand – brain dead simple, from everywhere.

In other words, make it as easy for me to show other people my digital photos as it is to show them my analog photos (and no, making prints doesn’t count – I’m taking over 1000 pics per day when I get going…I mean slideshow…) Same for my music.

Make it easy.

Pretty please?

Jeremy Wright: “I’ve been an avid BlogLines user and evangelist for more than a year. … The only thing I care about is that they don’t pull a BlogRolling and screw the service up.”

I realize that we’ve had some ups and downs over the last year, but screwed up? Jeremy makes this sound so…permanent…terminal even.

Ouch.

Bob Wyman: “ the number of blogs we monitor at PubSub.com passed over 8 million.”

PubSub is claiming that they’ve got the biggest searchable index of weblogs. Good for them. I’m more interested in the quality of the output, and here, Bob and the Gang get top marks. I use all the services, but for different purposes. For sheer volume, PubSub can’t be beat.

But there’s another gem in Bob’s note. He reasons that if they’ve managed to index 8 million weblogs in one year, that the total universe of weblogs must vastly exceed the universe of 10 million that seems to have emanated first from the Perseus weblog survey.

“That would put the minimum blog census at 16 million while there are probably more than 24 million blogs. Personally, I would bet on the higher number.”

I’ve always had a problem with the Perseus data because it leaves out vast chunks of the blogosphere. For instance, it doesn’t count hosted weblogs like those running on MovableType or Wordpress. But is the gap this big? 24 million is an awfully huge number.

Here’s the rest of his analysis;

“The many pundits, journalists, etc. that have recently claimed that there are only 10 million blogs are clearly underestimating. At PubSub, we are very well aware that even though we've managed to find and monitor 8 million blogs during the year that we've been providing our service, there are many more blogs that we haven't located and some that we haven't tried very hard to find... For instance, we don't handle Chinese, Japanese and Korean very well at present and thus haven't made much of an effort to track down the many millions of blogs that use those character sets. It should also be noted that we only monitor blogs that have RSS or Atom feeds and we can't monitor "private" blogs that don't publish their feeds or that require authorization to read their feeds. Even with these limitations (to be addressed in the future) all indications are that the rate at which we discover new blogs is not slowing. Thus, I'm very confident that there must be at least two to three times as many blogs then those we've already discovered. That would put the minimum blog census at 16 million while there are probably more than 24 million blogs. Personally, I would bet on the higher number.”

Blogware Admin: “Blogware will be undergoing some maintenance on Tuesday, February 8th from 2200 hours UTC to 2300 hours UTC (that's 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. for those of you in Eastern Standard Time). We expect that the downtime should be only fifteen minutes, but it will take place sometime during that hour. Thanks for your patience.”

For the few of you that latched onto me as your reseller during the beta period, Random Bytes is pretty much the only place where you can get information and updates about the status of the system. We’ve got a pretty decent communications infrastructure built up to make sure that our resellers and partners are in the loop. This helps them keep people like you in the loop. Problem is, I continuously forget that there are a few of you that count on *me* as your “reseller”!

Anyways – as the note above points out, we’re doing some upgrades this week that will help iron out a few of the posting and performance issues you’ve been noticing over the last week. As Kim says “we’re gonna make this thing sing!”

Datamonitor: “Google would be able to use [its accreditation] to see which names actually do drop and a re-registered. It would then be able to reset the PageRank for that domain, meaning the new registrant would have to start marketing the site from a clean slate.”

Now this sounds like a plausible explanation for Google’s recent accreditation. If true, it serves as a great example of how the market will tend to regulate itself despite the best intentions of the regulator. If Google starts resetting page-rank, the resale value of many of the domain names fueling the secondary market will, I expect, become essentially nil. I’d also expect Google to wipe other parts of their index as well – like the Image and PageCache.

John Keegan: “The question is, how do we save Trackbacks? How can we tell if an incoming trackback is authentic? While there are many methods in use, they seem to rely on crude methods of content analysis. There is a better way: Analyze trackbacks as if they were email, using the same proven and available spam prevention tools available to email servers.”

John Keegan has come up with some excellent suggestions that outline how weblog publishing tools should implement the Trackback protocol. All excellent stuff that I’d love to see implemented in Blogware.

I can’t help but wondering how much of this is catch-up vs. solution. In other words, spammers continue to stay ahead of the technology curve with email, why will it be any different with Trackbacks? Not sure, but I’m hopeful anyways.