Ever since I got out of the habit of posting daily, I feel like I’ve hardly posted at all. I totally need to rectify that, so perhaps I will go back to posting daily. I’m doing pretty well right now, not looking forward to leaving town again this weekend, would really like some time at home! But all next week I’m working in the Fairfax center which is like 10 minutes from my house, so at least I will get some more sleep, if nothing else. I am having a hard time finding anybody else’s NAD pictures, surely some people took pictures during the College Bowl match? But the nice part is that I have added several people to various friends lists as a result of the conference, so that is fun.

I am considering having a hand grenade party for my birthday, or something. You can get a gallon of mix for $40 and that makes 5 gallons of drinks! (A quart of mix is only $10 and makes 1.25 gallons of drinks.) Plus the plastic yard glasses are $2.50 each and the little baby grenades they use as decoration are 10 cents each. So I could conceivably pull it off, right? Or I could just use one of the online recipes…apparently Midori is the main trick.

You know…I think I am going to try to wean myself off posting every day. I’ve missed four days so far in November and I feel bad about it, and to me that is a sign that I take it too seriously. I’m not DCist or Lifehacker, I don’t have multiple authors, there’s just me. So while I will still try to post daily, I won’t kill myself if I miss a day, because it’s not that big a deal. I think.

I had a dream last night about my 10-year high school reunion which is tomorrow. I suppose I should rent Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, too.

Weirdest comment spam ever. Came on a post that gets a lot of spam comments over at CyDyBlog. I thought about removing his personal info but I decided against it. He gave his name as Anikrichard, his e-mail as anlikivanna.80@mail.ru, and his website as http://wwwwww.com/.

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I started a new website a few weeks ago, it’s called Pink Blog. I created it after I realized that nobody had posted at My Pink Room since November or PinkBlog.net since October. I really liked My Pink Room, so with both of these being dead blogs it seemed to me there was a void in the world of pink blogging. Unlike PinkBlog.net, I am not using affiliate links on every post - I am really just trying to bring the best of pink products in blog format. I mostly surf shopping blogs for this kind of thing…I have always seen pink products on various shopping blogs and I always wanted to note them down!

So far Pink Blog is still just getting started, but I am having fun with it and I like how it’s shaping up.

Yay, more blog awards, the Blogger’s Choice Awards! I have made so many posts about the Bloggies and other award programs, I love nominating and voting, so I am excited to have this new venue for it. These awards are actually from the PayPerPost people, and the winners are going to be announced at their first convention, which is in Florida in June.

One thing that I am concerned about is these awards need a lot of publicity. There are a lot of PayPerPost-related blogs that are nominated - the PPP blog itself, Posties’ blogs, etc. I think in order to be true blog awards, you have to open yourself up to the entire blogosphere. Engadget and Cute Overload are nominated for Best Blog of All Time, and even though they have won a zillion awards before, it’s because they’re good. Actually, this is kind of the opposite of what I usually say, which is that the same blogs always show up in the major award fields. I guess I’d like to see more small blogs in the big awards programs, and more big blogs in the small awards programs. Or something like that.

One thing I am not comfortable with about the Blogger’s Choice Awards is the Digg-style voting. You do have to register to participate, but I don’t like that you can see how many votes a site has already gotten. You should be able to see what sites were already nominated so you don’t double unless you want to, but you shouldn’t be able to see who’s leading.

Apparently I post an awful lot. I came across this post at Weblog Tools Collection about the most prolific bloggers; at the time I left my comment I had the most posts of all the commenters - 3,751 in a single blog written by one person. That site referenced this one, where I am not quite as near the top, but I am still pretty high. Although I hardly think post count indicates whether one is prolific…wouldn’t something like word count be much more useful? What if I write a whole lot of very short posts, versus writing a few extremely long posts? (For the record, the Prolific plugin says I have written 809,456 words to date, not including this post.) And we haven’t even gotten into whether one’s writing is of value! But still…I do seem to write a lot. I’ve been blogging daily since April 2004, with about five days missed in the three years since then.

Also, I just got an e-mail from RID that said a package was misdirected and they won’t have my CI results for another two weeks. AUGH!

I know I said I wasn’t going to do any PayPerPost posts for a while, and that I was only going to write about things that interested me, but that last one was too good an opportunity pass up. How often do you get paid $25 for writing 100 words? Of course it doesn’t help that even though I am “taking a break” I’m still looking at the opportunity list. In fact I’m using InfoRSS to alert me to new opportunities as they are published - which is how I snagged the $25 post! As the number of Posties increases, opportunities are disappearing faster and faster, especially the high-paying ones. I feel lucky to have a PageRank of 6 so I can take the higher-targeted opportunities, which usually pay pretty well. (And if you saw the “hosting options” post in the RSS feed, just ignore that…I ended up not submitting it for payment after all.)

I’m up to $232 with PayPerPost, and I’m slowing down a bit. A lot of the opportunities just aren’t interesting me at the moment, or they’re not paying as much as I’d want for what they’re asking, so I’m just not doing them. I’m also more conscious of how my paid posts look to my readers - thanks to input from a few of them, I’m being more choosy about what I write about because I want to have a reason to make the post.

I think I know what I am going to spend the money on (my first payment is in three days). Xmas gifts are an obvious option, but I’d rather pay for those out of my own pocket. Paying myself back for the $200 voice-nav GPS system is another option, but I’m not sure. Currently tops on the list is a “let the punishment fit the crime” scenario - I made the money by blogging, and I think I’ll use it for a related cost. I really want a custom design for my blog - I’m happy with the one I have for my personal site, since I’ve worked so hard on it, but I’m thinking of buying a custom design for CyDyBlog. I wanted to go with Moxie, because I’ve been a BlogMoxie fan for years, but it turns out they start at $2000! They kindly referred me to some other designers who will better fit my budget, and I’m inquiring around to see who will do semi-adult work.

By the way, I do want to address one issue relating to PayPerPost, and I’m not getting paid to say this. I think Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is making a real fool of himself regarding PPP. The $3 million in venture capital hit PPP right around the same time that ReviewMe launched, a competitor to PPP that just happens to be run by Text Link Ads - a major TechCrunch sponsor. Since then, Arrington has been vilifying PPP left and right. He’ll deny this all the way, but I think if ReviewMe were not owned by TLA, Arrington wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about PPP. Just my opinion, unpaid for. (By the way, I have nothing against TLA - they placed the ads I have in the sidebar. I’m just talking about Arrington here.)

Am I advertising too much? I feel like I might be spending too much time at PayPerPost. At first I thought I would only make a few paid posts per week, but I’ve been doing it much more than that. I’ve made quite a bit of cash from it, but I don’t know how I’m feeling integrity-wise. I’ve been checking my stats and I see that I’m giving the advertisers their money’s worth - people are coming to my site by searching for things I’ve written paid posts about.

I don’t worry about it with my LiveJournal friends, because I created a filter to share posts with them. So the advertising is opt-in there (I’m not getting paid for it, I’m just mirroring posts from my site), and I do get a few comments on those posts.

But I don’t know how my regular readers feel about it. Do you care? Is it turning you off from my site? Would you prefer I did it less frequently, or not at all? I only know a very few people who read my site regularly - probably less than 10 keep up with me on a regular basis, with a few more who are occasional readers.

I know it’s my blog and I can do what I want, but I’ve been been blogging for five years, it’s my favorite hobby, and I don’t want to drive away all my readers. Please chime in - how do you feel about the advertising I’ve been doing on my blog?

Now that I have got Postie working for e-mail postings, and my theme widget-ready thanks to King Text, I am focusing my full attention on tagging with Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ve already eliminated categories from my theme, replacing them with tags.

Folksonomy is really moving forward in the direction of tags, rather than categories. I’ve been using a list of just a couple dozen categories for a long time, and I often found myself slapping generic categories onto posts rather than creating a new category for what I was actually writing about. I’d like to be able to use a tag cloud to see what I write about most, and to identify what posts are really about - “PayPal,” for example, rather than “internet,” and “assholes” rather than “people.”

Tagging 3500 posts is going to be a monumental task, because I have to read, or at least skim, every single post. So far I’ve worked backwards up to April 2006…but I’ve been blogging for more than five years. So this is going to take a while.