Felocity

Newsvine has entered a private beta, and I'm more than happy to say people are going to be excited when it goes public. On the surface, it is somewhere between social networking, news, and a rating site. Beneath that however, there are also watch lists, soon to be celebrity writers and taggers, a complete tagging system that rivals the popular tag based sites like Flickr, and a pretty good shot at a business model which is going to turn some heads. So what exactly is it they do well? They certainly have the [news" part down.

Hitting the Newsvine front page is like the start of a visit to a typical web site such as CNN or MSNBC. There are categories along the top for all your major news items such as "Health", "Tech", "U.S.", and so on. The largest difference though is the icons that are attached to every post on Newsvine. Every article (either written exclusively for Newsvine or as a link to an offsite article) can be rated, commented on, or talked about in a live chat. The live chat is especially interesting and I'll actually get to that in a bit. Stories that get more positive ratings move up the vine until they start appearing on the front page, much akin to how "Digg](http://www.digg.com) handles popular stories. I'm not sure right now if comments help boost it up or not, but it's always possible.…

Courtesy of Mike I have been handed the musical baton Before I kick into the nitty-gritty and deliciously soft center of this meme though, I'd like to take a minute to speculate why this music related meme caught on in the circle of blogs that I read regularly. My first guess is that most of us are mac users, my second guess is, more than 70% of us have found a way to put our iTunes playlists up on the internet for the rest of the world to browse. Or, maybe we just like tormenting each other. I'm leaning more towards the second option. In any case, there's a lot to be said about the music on my computer.

Total volume of music files on my computer: For better or for worse, a Get Info tells me I have 17.88 GB of music in my folder. I had just finished cleaning out a lot of J-Pop that I don't listen to. It used to be somewhere around 24 GB. I can't say I miss the music I don't have though.…

I have no doubt that dozens of the other weblogs I read will be (or have already been) discussing the 6A acquisition of Livejournal. With this acquisition also came some subtle changes in their Privacy Policy. The most noticable one for me is the new statement:

bq. LiveJournal.com may use or share your personal information where it is necessary for us to complete a transaction, to operate or improve LiveJournal.com and related products and services, to do something that you have asked us to do, or tell you of products and services that we think may be of interest.…

I was excited about Movable Type 3.0.

Until I discovered that it would cost me $70 to use it. This killed 100% of my enthusiasm. The idea of published pages has been nice, but if I ever needed a reason to switch blogging software, it just showed up. Courtesy of guest blog entries, I have more than three authors, and thanks to the "mini-weblogs" I keep, I meet exactly five blogs. The author requirement locks me in to a situation where I am unable to upgrade because to do so would mean deleting authors, and that would mess up content.…

The concept of a Weblog has always amused me, all the way back to some time in 1999 when I adapted Newspro to add to my old journal on Hypermart. Sometimes I wish I had pieces of that journal around, as the earliest I have is Feb 11. Blogs are in a lot of ways IM's to the general Internet. It's like talking to yourself, and hoping someone out there overhears you and has something to say or add, starting a conversation.

Community based blogging (Livejournal and Open Diary to name a few) had once again shifted the perspective people held about blogs and their purpose. Commenting on people's thoughts, and finding other people became easy, centralized, and much more public. Now that it has happened, it is probably pointless to look back and ask if it was truly wise to create such a thing.…