Poking through my referrer log

I love poking through my referrer log. It's endlessly fascinating. There are the people searching for ways to get pot in The Sims, for Braitenberg vehicles, for popular sites, for my paper, for people, for quotes. There are the links from the Google intranet (you think they of all people would be smart enough to obfuscate referrers!). A link from a site I can't read and people I've met and others I haven't met at all. Apparently Metabuzz made an appearance on blogdex and popdex, which is neat, if circular. More when I get around to digging it out.

Bloggy, with low visibility

Went to Dave's Thursday night meeting. The idea of providing New Hampshireites with blogs is awesome, I think it could have a real impact if done right. However, I was unable to convince Dave of the value of trackback. Maybe it doesn't work as well as it should, but I continue to believe it is important. Blogs should be like a conversation, damnit, otherwise they're just ineffectual spouting off.

In all the excitement, forgot to mention I saw Mitch Kapor talk at MIT about Chandler. It was a little disappointing, really, not much I couldn't have found out from reading the site, and the room was very poorly ventilated.

Name dropping

Survived my second night of hitting the Jupiter Weblog Conference after-party scene. I've met all sorts of interesting people, like Steve and Scott. Also put a lot of names to faces, like Dave and Doc. It's always strange when people you know of online turn out to be more than pixels.

Fun sites

Figured I'd take a break from all this lame serious stuff and link to some of the fun stuff I've run across lately, like the giant lava lamp, in passing, answer bus, the lawsuits against reality tv. Some of these were found in Geeklog, which was kind enough to link to me. Speaking of blogs, the searches for "marijuna the sims" have tapered off. And I continue to enjoy the meta discussions on Seb's Open Research.

Raison d'Etre

So, I'm starting a blog. Call me a sheep. But I have good reasons, I swear.

1. Learning I am very interested in the Internet's power to transform social discourse, and blogs are a critical component in that. The best way to learn about something is to try it. Yes, I will be throwing my own thoughts into a growing sea of blog reflexiveness, but some of it is quite good. Of particular interest are efforts to tie blogs together, like Daypop, Blogdex, Metalinker, and TrackBack. These play a role in a project I call Metabuzz
   
2. Voting Because so many sites (most notably Google) rely on incoming links to determine a site's popularity, I consider this a way of voting for my favorites.
   
3. Memory To help me out when I go senile.
   
4. Outlet I have things to say and no longer have a college paper to take it out on. It will be nice to say things with permanence and structure and put them somewhere other than e-mail and away messages. In fact, one of things I want to find out is if I can attract an...
   
5. Audience Who reads these things? Does anybody comment on them? Only one way to find out.