you did it!

29 Jun, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments

In 6 days, we’ve raised over $5200 with the help of 70 people.

Damn Amazing. Thank you.

But it’s not over. This isn’t the finish line, hell, it’s not even the starting line yet.

23 days left to go in funding – 23 days to plan the project, get a way for us to communicate off the ground, setup interviews, work on outlines, compile research, and the like; so that when funding is over, we’re ready to hit the ground running.

I have ambitious plans for members of the Editorial Board. I want to offer those supporters transcripts of my interviews as I complete them, chapters as they’re edited, and generally bounce ideas/questions off of them based on topics or people I’m about to sit down with. Are you game?

We have 23 days left to raise cash for travel, transcription, editing, design, production, distribution, and oh … writing.

Now this is a real boy. It’s going to happen. We’re going to write a book together (Are you excited? I’m damn excited). So if you think someone should join our Editorial Board, invite them to back the project at $100, and let anyone else know that they can become an Official Sponsor for $25.

Visit the Kickstarter project page and support the project, if you haven’t already.

welcome to what consumes me, the remix

27 Nov, 2008 • posts i've written • 2 comments

First off, if you’re reading this, then you put in some effort to get here. As I write this on Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for you, dear reader. If I can beg for another minute of your time, can I ask for a quick message in the comments to let me know who you are so I can get to know you better?

Welcome to what consumes me, the remix. As of late, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the idea of aggregating and curating the best content I’m reading on the web. Everyday, I read through the updates of almost 250 sites in my Google Reader and share the items I find particularly interesting. I do this partly for myself, to go back, re-read and remember the good stuff, but also to share with like minded others (perhaps yourself). But beside just denoting this content, I didn’t do much else with it. Bringing that content into a publishing tool like WordPress allows me to better sort through all that information and present it to you. I’ve got a good deal of work ahead of me to truly make this beneficial, but this new site is a big step forward. I hope you find this new site useful, particularly the RSS feed of the posts I’m reading and sharing. What’s great is that using simple WordPress plug-ins, like one for displaying related posts, if you love one post, I can suggest to you another post, from across the social web, not just that single domain.

Some of the content here is not my own. Anything under “What I’m Reading” is an article, image, or video created by someone else, and you can learn more about that someone else simply by clicking the title of the post. I’m working on more ways to more prominently highlight the author and publisher of each post, and I hope to help send more traffic their way and turn more readers on to their great content through this site. If your content appears here, and you are unhappy with that, please let me know and I will pull the content down as soon as possible. If you’ve got any ideas how I can better attribute each post to its author, please let know!

I hope to do some more writing, myself, here as well in the near future. You can also catch some of my posts at MakeTheInternetABetterPlace.com if you’re feeling antsy. Thanks again for your continued attention.

About some of the technology behind the site:

Everything I’m reading starts at my Google Reader. If I like something, I share it. I run my shared items through Feedburner to condition the posts (I noticed that sometimes the Google Reader feed hiccups or adds bad characters). From there, I use a plug-in called FeedWordPress to actually insert those items, on the fly, into WordPress as distinct posts. When I first tried this, I used Tumblr as a test, but found that the RSS items were often duplicated. FeedWordPress has a great companion plug-in that weeds out duplicate posts. I’ve come to love WordPress since attempting this little experiment because of the robust and active community out there working to make things better. If I ever had an issue, no matter how complex, I could google it by almost any name and receive some manner of help. Go WordPress!