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… when you’re watching this video.

10. 9. 8. 7. 6…

Here are the ten people to whom I’ve given the most gold stars on Twitter:

After reading a couple of blog posts on a comment system called Disqus, I want to give it another shot.

The Twitpocalypse is upon us, and a whole lot of things have broken…

Apparently nobody cares what you had for lunch. Nobody wants to hear about your bodily functions (or so I hear). So what else is Twitter good for?

A handful of questions about Twitter

It’s taken a bit longer than I’d hoped, but it’s here. And it’s good. If you’ve been holding back for any reason, please download Internet Explorer 8 today.

Look! It’s different!

Last year was fun, but I don’t think I’ll be doing NaBloPoMo again this year. Maybe I’ll focus on writing one solid blog post this month instead. :)

Google’s messing with search engine results again, but this time it looks like they’re trying to take on Wikipedia, not Digg. At least they’re calling their editable search engine result experiment SearchWiki this time around. It still looks a lot like it did last time I reported on it (here and here). Check out a bunch of screenshots from this iteration here:

You can do market research. You can study focus groups. You can try to start a Facebook group or roll your own online community. Or, if you are Robert Scoble and Seagate, you can invite your fans to meet you in Times Square for a free hard drive.

I’ve been using Google’s “Edit Search Results” since I blogged about it yesterday, and I have a couple further observations.

I Googled something a minute ago and noticed that my SERP looked a little different…

Every once in a while someone asks me what cool software they should install on their computer. Invariably, I say something like “check out the OS X tag on my blog.”

Apparently I’ve been lying to everyone, because I looked at the software categories on my blog the other day and realized that I haven’t been posting much there at all. So I decided to do something about it.

In case you’re wondering, I’m a huge nerd. There’s a good chance you’ve already noticed, but if not, you should check out this amazing tag cloud. It’s a visualization of my online bookmarking and browsing habits — courtesy of wordle:

We’re going to set a world record! Download Firefox 3 on it’s release date to do your part (that’s Tuesday the 17th, if you haven’t been paying attention).

Brightkite fails miserably at the one thing they should do best. Twitter and Pownce already do a better job as a microblog or a stream of consciousness publishing platform. Brightkite is, or should be, a platform for facilitating real life interaction. But how well does it work?

It’s tough to find a good example of “text only” typography on the web. Most designers eventually throw in the towel and use images… So you can imagine my excitement when I saw the site for Seed Conference 2008.

The @colorwars are taking the Twittersphere by storm. It’s time to choose a team, kids.

I think Twitter is a huge experiment in human interaction. What does a group of users do when given a service (for free) which does essentially nothing, with no real direction or constraints on its use? They play. Yesterday I got to witness a Twitter microevolution firsthand.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is that it doesn’t attempt to place bounds on, or even really define, how the service should be used. Keeping track of my gas mileage is just as valid a use for Twitter as letting people know when I post to my blog.

My MySpace and msplinks related traffic doubled today. It must be that school’s been out for a while and they’re getting bored.

@dacort has a really spiffy script for generating Twitter stats.

And all I can think is, “But I had something interesting to say!”

I have a server hosting a handful of sites. A combined total of about 6000 visitors per month. In the last year, seven URLs have accounted for 58% of all error pages on that server. You’ll never guess what they were.

I’ve got a ribbon for all y’all — see it at the top right corner of my screen. If you can host the image on your own server, that would be cool, otherwise feel free to link to mine.

A couple of thoughts on National Blog Posting Month.

To everyone: I’m not quite sure how I feel about NaBloPoMo…

This guy named Farzad Fard owes Dave from the Scooter Lounge a lot of money. It looks like he makes a habit out of writing bad checks and screwing people who trust him. Read more about Farzad Fard…

I think this thing needs a bit more contrast… And it’s looked the same for a while, so I’m kinda tired of it. I wanted to get it done before NaBloPoMo, but school and work conspired against me. It’s almost done though: check it out and let me know what you think…

One of my favorite features of the Better Gmail Firefox plugin is the “smart read button”. When you select a message, it says either “mark read” if it’s an unread message, or “mark unread” if you’ve already read it. Or at least that’s what it used to do. Apparently the updates to Gmail broke that feature. I’m a bit bummed, someone will come up with a fix soon…

I love Firefox. Really, I do. It can be speedy. It can be extensible. But apparently it can’t be both at the same time… All my development plugins make it slow, and all my browsing plugins make it even slower.

Answers to a few questions from my server logs:

ISPs need to stop taking down blogs because of legal threats. it just riles up the blagosphere.

Blog Action Day 2007.

It’s an interesting insight into tech culture.

Apparently I’m 88% addicted to the blagosphere. I think that might be an underestimation…

It turns out that Ed at Sherwin-Williams is a douche.

A while back I mentioned that MySpace and msplinks do dirty things to links. This bugs me a bit, so I’ve been trying to figure out ways to mess with ‘em.

All of my reports have flatlined :-(

I mentioned my newfound Twitter addiction a couple of weeks ago. My addiction has now been upgraded.

Useless Firefox extension of the day: Mozilla Firesomething. Try it. You know you want to.

When I get frustrated or stressed, justin hileman dot info gets upgraded. On that note…

A couple of days ago my coworker Jacob was looking through his server logs…

MySpace has been redirecting all external links in comments through msplinks.com for a couple of months. Msplinks turns any posted link into a redirect, supposedly in an attempt to cut down on spammer redirects and phishing.

The internet is really good at helping me avoid productivity. My new toy of the day: Twitter. It’s a really simple site where you post periodic updates answering one question:

justin hileman dot info has been updated.

If you’ve visited my MySpace profile recently, you’ve noticed that it doesn’t look much like a standard MySpace profile. Which I’m pretty stoked about, since the hideousness of most MySpace profiles approaches obscenity.

A while back I posted a couple of my favorite Firefox extensions. While everything I said there is certainly still valid, I’ve got some updates for the list.

Google acquired DoubleClick this month. which should be a good thing. but it looks like they acquired a conflict of interest too… they got quite the package deal

For those of you not already in the know, I have another blog… It’s called i <3 stella. I started it around the beginning my west coast scooter adventure last summer.

Artists and bands can now produce their own music on a laptop with a realistic budget and fantastic results. They can take charge of their own promotion and distribution through MySpace, Last.fm and Indiestore. The digital music revolution has lowered music production costs to almost nothing. So why does the music industry still hold so tightly to their feudalistic business model and unrealistic constraints?

Consolidation. Relocation.

At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, nobody should own the Internet.

A Calvin and Hobbes strip once concluded that “Verbing weirds language”. I would disagree. Since the advent of the digital age, it seems to be an indicator of success and popularity.

The story of the computer industry is, at its heart, a story about a couple of kids in a garage.

So I’m setting up a new (and by ‘new’ I really mean ‘old’…) laptop. I like starting from scratch. You have a nice clean slate…

I’ve been avoiding posting blogs for the last couple of weeks… “If you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing at all” and all that junk.