So we posted this post about The Jonas Brothers mainly because my neice likes them very much. Then a very strange thing happened – we started to get lots of comments – and these were not your standard spamming comments, they all loved The Jonas Brothers…

But they are all so similar I started to wonder if it might not be a concerted effort by some nefarious orginization that was trying to help It’s About Time take over the world.

Check out the comments ( many more of the same ilk were deleted ) and let me know what you think.

That’s right, we are selling Collectiblog – the site, the domain name, the custom design, the database of content, the whole enchillada.

Want your very own collectibles website? Well don’t start from scratch! We’ll sell you an established collectibles blog with tons of content, a one of a kind design, and established pagerank and traffic.

The site uses WordPress so it is simple to run the site ( you don’t need to know html ) and it is easily portable – we’ll move it from our server to yours once payment is complete.

As most of you guys know we have been creating some Themes for WordPress that we are giving away under a Creative Commons License. Here’s a quick update on the response that we have had.

1. GreenRiver/ 10082
2. GinsengCoffee/ 8328
3. PaintedDesert/ 7442
4. GinsengCoffee/feed/ 1277
5. GinsengCoffee/word-press-themes/ 1075
6. sarchasm/ 897
7. blogs/themes/GinsengCoffee.zip 844
8. blogs/themes/GreenRiver.zip 778
9. blogs/themes/PaintedDesert.zip 761

Green River looks like a winner. Contact us today if you want to commission a WordPress Theme.

Joanne gave a speech at the local chanber of commerce the other day and was gracious enough to let Collectiblog re-publish it:

One day while I was scavenging through her pocketbook, I pulled out a gorgeous lace handkerchief, heavy enough that I knew something was in it. I carefully unfolded it and unwrapped what looked like diamonds and saffires.

If you have any interest in antiques and collectibles, click on over we are sure that you’ll enjoy it.

I have penned a new article about the blogosphere over on JTk. I think that blogging and the blogosphere is one of the most misunderstood issues by non techies because the mass media either misrepresents it or doesn’t understand it.

While the word “blogs” gets thrown around allot, it is mostly misunderstood and often mis-represented by the mainstream press. Blogging software, the blogosphere, and bloggers themselves represent nothing short of a shift in the paradigm of how regular folks use the web and of how news is published.

Click on over to read what I think about it.

Jay, JD, and I have been having a running conversation about tags – not html, rfid, or pet ID tags, but user generated categories for things like blog posts, web pages, photos, etc. I think that some kind of Folksonomy will replace, or at least enhance the way the we now currently google for information. Obviously there are a lot of issues to be overcome before then, but even with my cursory understanding of the issues I can think of a couple of approaches that the computer science types that I work with haven’t been able to completely shoot down.

We have a project in the shop that has to be able to tag pages so that you can do a lookup and find other related pages by comparing the tags. As simple as this sounds, it turns out that at any scale at all this can take quite a bit of computing horsepower.

So of course that got me thinking, how does Technorati keep up with a million blogs, a million different tags, and 14 Million tagged blog posts? With all of the down time that they have been having they may be struggling with the issue too.

I’ve been interested in tags, and more importantly, folksonomy since it first appeared on my radar some time last year. Wikipedia defines it thusly:

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification.

This phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information.

With Technorati the issue of tagging is mostly a phenomenon of users tagging their own blog posts, but the idea gets much more interesting with services like furl and Flickr. With these services users create something ( a web-page or digital photo ) and they can tag it. But I can tag it, too, as can you. With an entire community tagging things they have a much better chance of being defined correctly then if one person or entity has to define it.

Labor becomes very efficient when distributing the labor to the users tagging items, and takes advantage of a huge pool of specialized knowledge. Companies like Getty Images have employed tagging for years ( tagging all of their photos ) and it works well on the front end, but is very labor intensive. Paying dedicated taggers is not a sustainable business model when you are trying to tag everything.

While furl and del.icio.us are “bookmark managers”, and Flickr is for tagging photos, Technocrat for blogs, etc. what we need is an open, standard, architecture that allows and enables all of us to tag everything digital and provides an open framework so that everyone can take this info and develop uses for them that no one has even thought of yet.

There is a lot of talk these days about the emergence of media published by regular folks as opposed to the walled off “news organizations” that have provided us with “news” over the past few decades. Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine is a blog that covers this issue fairly well from a unique perspective. Jarvis straddles the line of blogger and media insider.

Big media still doesn’t seem to get blogs, they dismiss them while at the same time lamely trying to cash in on their trendiness, by, get this, having talking heads read blogs on T.V. They recycle tired leftover textural content that isn’t good enough for publication on their main sites, newspapers, and magazines and repackage them as “blogs”.

But blogs and news are only the beginning. Pod casts, while dismissed as “Wayne’s World for radio“, are a huge step forward for citizen publishers. Not only do they provide an easy way to distribute audio content, they “tag” that info with meta information so that this binary file full of audio information is searchable and categorizable. Video is next.

Back in March I blogged about the extinction of network programmers that decide when and what you get to watch on T.V. – How much cooler would it be to subscribe ( for a small monthly fee ) to Jack Black’s “blog” and get an RSS feed containing members only links to all of the audio and video he has created and released over the last month then it is subscribing to HBO to catch his show, and going to Tower Records to buy the latest piece of plastic released by Tenacious D? How many new artists, musicians, and comics will be discovered over the next decade because they self publish on the ‘Net?

I was talking to the guys the other day and said “every site should be a blog” and got the requisite sighs and rolling of the eyes. Although I was trying to be provocative, what I was really talking about is that every website should have the tools that blog sites do. They should be able to ping sites and software to notify them that they have been updated, they should have rel tags built into links, they should be able to do trackbacks, etc.

Blogging software empowers users with little technical skills to publish on the web. Bloggers don’t have to worry with FTP, HTML, CSS, etc. to publish – and while that upsets some geeks, so does most everything else ( like websites with images :^> ). I want the next Richard Prior to podcast. I want the next Pearl Jam to find its audience through its blog, I want the next Vonnegut to publish his book on the web one chapter at a time and get compensated through paypal.

I’ve been been skinnin’ Word Press alot lately for my own devices, and I started thinking, hey, why not make a word press theme and turn it loose. So I whipped up a little theme and posted it over on copacetix.

It is a simple theme based on the defualt Kubrik theme, but is a little denser with a smaller header graphic ( what is it with all of these huge blog headers any way? ).

Cheers.