del.icio.us hosting account suspended?

I was trying to save a link to my del.icio.us account and I kept getting this error message each time, several times. Even as I write this I still get the error message. That has to suck for them, and for me.



So that lead me to wonder if Web2.0 and New Media companies have fail over, disaster recovery or load balance plans in place? I have committed all my links to del.icio.us, and if for some reason they were to go down I would be really pissed that I lost all my bookmarks. This is a wakeup call to make back ups of data you have stored on web servers. Looks like another piece of data to keep on my S3 account.

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If you ask me for my birth date I’ll lie

I was signing up for a free service yesterday on the web, not even sure what it was, and the required fields they wanted were my birth date, gender, and phone. So, as usual, I made up a birth date, the same made up birth date I always give. I always put that I'm female, even though I'm not, and I give them some phone number in Sand Diego that I used to have in the mid 1980's. Those poor people may have been getting calls because of me for years now.

But seriously, what value does a website get out of that. How many people do they actually think will give them their *real* birth date? Gender, well maybe. Phone, probably not. And what do they do with it? People are getting more savvy with their online identity. Unless you win the Ethiopian National Lottery of $250,000,000 , in which case people still fall for the "it will only cost you $2000 to get it" scam. Good thing the Powerball Lottery only costs us $1 to play :) Please don't give these sites your information. And if you absolutely need to create an account, make it up. That's what I say. How will they ever know?

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My blog is 4 years old this month

Well, it's half way through June 2007 and I realized that I've been blogging for over 4 years (not including the BBS posts I wrote in the late eighties early nineties). I actually started blogging in February 2003 on blog-city.com. I've tried to get the blog posts from back then but I wasn't able too. The best I have starts around 2004 somewhere. Anyway, I guess it's been some time, but nothing has been as consistent as this blog. I've branched out to others (here, here, and here) as I'm trying to figure out whats fun and whats business.

Now that I'm getting into other media types like podcasting and videocasting, blogging for me has become than just writing, it's performing.

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The New Media elite? Hardley.

I stumbled upon this blog off Valleywag.com today purporting to have a list of the who's who in New Media. I had to laugh my a$$ off reading the names. Here are some of my favorites:

• Michael Buhr, Sr. Director of Corporate Strategy, eBay (who is this guy and what does eBay have to day with New Media?)


• Â Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon (two questions, what does Amazon actually make, that is New Media?)


• Mark Weinberg, Director of Engineering, Zune, Microsoft (how does the Director of Engineering for the Zune qualify as a who's who in New Media?)

See, to me, people that are influencing New Media are people like Jim Long, Chris Brogan and CC Chapman. Even Cameron Reilly at The Podcast Network has a bigger influence on New Media than the people on the list seem to have. Are we just bandwagoning the term New Media?

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Photobucket has some cool technology

Matthew Reinbold gave me a pretty interesting demo of Photobucket at the Utah Tech Spotlight today. The site uses technology from Adobe, and aside from the normal sharing of photos, you can also upload video, and create mixes of photos, videos and music providing a basic movie making tool. It's pretty neat. I created a video with some stills and a video and stitched them together into one file. I also uploaded a small video and edited out a portion that was crappy. It all worked pretty good.

After spending a few hours messing around with it, the interface is pretty good (although filled with ads), the tools are fairly fast, not as fast I had hoped but it was ok. I was generally pleased with the way it worked and I was able to create my videos and was provided a link to embed in my blog.

What I don't like is the layout. The links to the various areas (i.e. photos, videos) are not where I would have expected them to be. They are at the bottom of the screen. I'm sure these are things that will be worked out in the future and doesn't make it any less of a product.

I have a Pro account with Flickr, and Photobucket offers a Pro account as well, but both cost the same. There are limitations on space with Photobucket but not with Flickr. I assume the limitation is because you can create videos that probably don't compressed like pictures. I could be wrong.

Anyway, check it out, its free, and there seems to be some interesting technology there. Thanks Matt.

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