Giving props to my Peeps

This weeks props go out to my Sister In Law V, Cameron Reilly and the band Metallica.

Sister-in-law V, thank you for introducing my girls to the wildly popular book series by Stephenie Meyer; Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse. They can't put them down. I bought several copies, of each. Apparently you should read these books too.

My next prop goes out to Cameron Reilly, founder and CEO of The Podcast Network. I can't possibly know how much work goes into running a service like TPN. I know Cameron has many people helping him and it shows in the quality of podcasts and vidcasts his network hosts.

I've had the pleasure of hosting a podcast, The Jazz Show, on TPN for a while now, and I've given Cameron more than his fair share of headaches I'm sure. But one of the things that Cameron has taught me, by example, is the sheer will to succeed. He runs a global business. He lives and works in Australia but a majority of podcast's are produced by people in other countries. He's a great mentor, coach and example. Get to know Cameron. And if you have a podcast you think would fit in with the rest of the shows, let Cam know.

My last prop goes out to the band Metallica. I recently watched the DVD Some Kind of Monster, which is a documentary of the band and the making of the album St. Anger. Even if you're not a Metallica fan, this movie is a must see. It goes behind the scenes of the worlds biggest heavy metal rock band of all time. See the contrast between the youthful "I can do what ever the hell I want" to the matured "I have a family and I need to set my priorities".

Having watched this movie some 10 times, (mostly for the music), I've learned a great lesson from these guys. You may become a rock god, in what ever you do, but everything comes with a price if you don't stop and occasionally smell the roses. It will come around to bite you in the ass. You will have to make a choice, and the choice may not be what you want. Thank you for letting me see the human side of your life.

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Moving my feeds to a Life Stream

Just like Steve Rubel, I've been creating a Life Stream. It's actually more like a big bucket that collected all the various RSS feeds where I submit content. This includes Flickr, my blog, Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us. I have others, such as blip.tv, but I'm not sure I include them all.

I want to be part of all the really cool social networks, but I also wanted to give everyone who cares a place to get all of my various posts. Thanks to Tumblr and Feed Burner, I've pretty much solved the problem.

The only real drawback is Tumblr doesn't allow for comments. I'm ok with this because Tumblr's not really an interactive tool it's a Super Aggregator. If you want to comment on my pictures, click through to them. If you want to comment on my latest blog post, click through to it.

Tumblr also provides a mobile version of your site. If you go to www.thomallen.com/mobile on your PDA browser you get to see a mobile friendly version. I can also publish to my Tumblr with my mobile device. Very cool.

Now I have one RSS feed, but the ability to send people where they want to go. Steve mentions using Tumblr for a specific feed or subdomains. For example, you could go subscribe just to my Flickr photos at photos.thomallen.com. This would point to my Tumblr that just displays the photos. You could do this for Twitter or any other number of sites that publishes its own feed.

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My Hotmail storage is at 5GB

Not sure when this happened, since I hardly use my Hotmail account once I started using GMail, but it looks like I now have 5GB of mail storage, on my free Hotmail account. Interesting. Maybe they needed to increase the amount to make up for all the spam that gets through. Which is one of the major reasons I stopped using my Hotmail account. But 5GB, that's a pretty good amount.

Maybe I should be saying anything. I might find myself back at 10MB or something. I noticed on the Live front page it still says free Hotmail accounts get 2GB of storage. I must a member in good standing.

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Coming out of the closet

Oooh, I know that will get some click through's. But in all seriousness, I'm confessing my addiction to Galactic Fiction. I term Galactic Fiction as TV and movies around Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG1 and Atlantis and of course Star Wars. Now this may not be some earth shattering announcement, but there is a reason behind it.

For years I've read if you want to be a successful blogger you should write about the things you're interested in. To that end, I'm starting a new blog, one that is about my addiction to Galactic Fiction. I'm just a fan. It's my perspective. I don't plan on scooping SciFi news, there are plenty of sites for that. I don't want to start a SciFi bulletin board, there are thousands of those.

So there you go. I've confessed; come out of the closet. This should be fun. It's all in fun. I love this stuff. New blog is GalactiFi.com. I hope to write Star Trek style stories here books.galactifi.com.

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No secret Internet browsing with MyBlogLog widget

I really like the MyBlogLog widgets because it shows who's been visiting my blog (if you're a MyBlogLog member), and it also drives traffic from various websites that I've visited because my link shows up in the widget.

But today, I got to thinking, as I'm randomly visiting websites, I may not want everyone to know I've been there, for what ever reason. There are a couple of things you can do to prevent this.

Log out of MyBlogLog. The MyBlogLog widget can't track you if you logged out of the service. So, if you don't want to show up on someone's widget, make sure you have logged out.

Hide your avatar on the MyBlogLog widget. If you put your mouse over your avatar on the MyBlogLog widget a red X will show up. Clicking that X will hide the fact you've been there.

You may not care if your avatar shows up on a MyBlogLog widget, but for what ever reason you want to browse in stealth mode, remember there are some solutions.

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