Welcome to Something for Nothing

The second season of MTV’s  America’s Best Dance crew premiered Thursday, June 19th and it looks like this is going to be a great season.  The only problem I see is that the time between season 1 and 2 has been too short. There hasn’t been enough time for the love fans have for last years crews to fade so it’s easy to make comparisons. Unfortunantly, we’re going lose some very talented crews this season before the audience gets a chance to know them.

Here’s a look at the top 10 crews. This also features some clips from last years winners, Jabbawockeez.

My picks for the night:

West Coasts Super Cr3w - They had a Ninja theme going that was exciting from the very beginning.
Houston’s SoReal - They exploded to a whole new level.
Washington D.C.’s Boogie Bots - A smooth blend of Kaba Modern & JabbaWockeeZ.
Philadelphia’s Phresh Select - These guys turned up the volume.
San Francisco’s Supreme Soul - Promises to bring the heat this season.

Bottom two up for elimination:
Los Angeles-based Fanny Pak
Distorted X from Texas

The judges have spoken, Distorted X is the first crew to go home.

You can see full episodes and loads of backstage goodies at http://www.mtv.com/ontv/dyn/dance_crew/series.jhtml

Rocky

Sorry I’ve been away from my blogs for a while. My family and I went to Hawaii. It wasn’t all fun, but can you really work too much in Hawaii? I did well on my presentation and enjoyed the conference quite a bit. It was also huge fun to be able to see all our old friends from when we lived in Hawaii. I’m back to blogging, but Thanksgiving is tomorrow so we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been working on a little Google Mashup of blogs and here’s a demo that I did for Las Vegas Blogs. I still have a good ways to go, but I think the concept is pretty neat. You can read all about my idea and vote for it in Idea Warz.

Let me know what you think of the mashup. Soon I’m hoping to get a beta page out where interested bloggers can start signing up.

I must admit that I’m addicted to blogging. I know, I’ve probably said it before, but it’s truer today than ever before. Sure, sometimes I don’t get around to updating my blog. What can I say? I am working at a job where we are moving into a new building, I’m doing my masters degree, I have 2 kids and I have a zillion other web projects going on too. However, that doesn’t mean that my heart isn’t in blogging.

In fact, the interesting thing is that when I go through the day about 2 times per day (on average) my mind will start writing a blog post. It’s like I’m writing a blog post of the experience in my head. I know that’s weird, but it’s what happens. It could be something that’s said on the radio or possibly something that happens at work. Oh yeah, and my kids often have me saying, “That would be a good blog post.”

Honestly, I don’t need to call home and talk to my wife to see how she’s doing. I can just pull up our family blog and find out how her day is going. It’s usually a pretty good indication of our state of being. If I view our blog and don’t see any posts. Then, I know I better get home quick. Things haven’t been tame enough for her to blog. Not a good sign.

Has anyone ever used MadKast? It seems like an interesting widget for your blog that could potentially help to spread your blog to more readers. I’m wondering if anyone else has used it and seen more readers come to their blog.

As many of you know, I’m an active participant in Cambrian House. Thankfully, many of my readers are also pretty active participants. Well, I’ve submitted another one of my ideas to the Cambrian House Idea Warz. It’s called Blog Mashing and I would appreciate everyone’s support in voting for my idea. I’m in the lead right now, but I can always use more 5 star votes to help me ensure a win. Thanks for all your support.

I must admit that I normally haven’t been really watching and waiting for the various Google Page Rank updates. Sure, I love when it goes up, but I haven’t really cared when the update happens. Well, ever since one of my blogs dropped from PR 5 to PR 4, I’ve missed having my blog a PR 5 and so I’ve been anticipating the next page rank update.

Now, I should admit that I haven’t really taken any serious measures to increase my page rank. I’ve just continued promoting my blog and blogging about topics of interest to me and I hope that it will pay off with success when the page rank update happens.

Well, tonight I finally decided to start a little search to see what kind of rumors were out there about the next Google page rank update (and yes I know it’s just really an export and that page rank is constantly updated). PR is an interesting and important measure for many people interested in advertising on your site.

Well, I found this list that showed the history of all the2007 google page rank updates (and other updates). Looks like it could happen any time. Let’s hope it happens soon and more importantly, that the changes are good for my various blogs.

2007 Waiting TBPR Export Estimation Jul 21 86
2007 Waiting GDPR Export Estimation Mar 19/06 582
2007 Apr 30 TBPR Export: Toolbar Pagerank Export.
2007 Jan 25 Algorithm Update: Algorithm Update. Reduce Googlebomb Impact
2007 Jan 25 TBPR Export: Toolbar Pagerank Export.
Estimated Jan 28/2007 Jan 25 TBPR & BL Export
2007 Jan 10 TBPR & BL Export: Toolbar Pagerank & BL Export.

Here’s the definitions:
TBPR Export: Toolbar PageRank Export - export of Real PR to the Toolbar PR 11 unit scale (no longer called a PR update as Real PR is updated continously and the Toolbar PR change is just an export of that updated value).
GDPR Export: Google Directory Export - export of Real PR to the Google Directory 8 unit scale (no longer called a PR update as Real PR is updated continously and the Google directory PR change is an export of that updated value).
BL Export: Backlink Export - export of a sample of the number of backlinks which is almost meaningless as it is only a sample number. This number can be seen with the link:www.domain.tld command (no longer called a BL update as backlinks are updated continously and the visible BL number change is an export of that updated value).
Algo Update: Algorithm Update - a major update in the Ranking algorithm that causes a large SERP change.
TB Program Version Change: Toolbar Program Version Change - a software version change to the Google toolbar that displays PR.
Days: Days between toolbar PR exports.

Sometimes when you look around blogs I think the most popular topic has to be celebrity gossip. That’s probably followed by politics and then technology is up there just because tech people like to do techie things like blogging.

Turns out, someone decided to go ahead and aggregate the most popular blogging topic: Celebrity Gossip into one place for all to read, rate and comment. It seems like the site is just new and so that is why there isn’t many comments or ratings. Hopefully that will change over time, because it is an interesting idea. However, I think there’s also another possibility. I’ve found that if I post to my blog a couple times of day (which is essentially required as a celebrity gossip aggregator), then the news goes by so quickly that people don’t get a chance to comment or rate.

The site is pretty well laid out, but I think it’s going to take them a lot of work to make the site valuable to people and get enough interactivity. Only about 10% of people who visit websites actually comment (although I think it might be lower in this case).

My favorite part of the blog was just seeing pictures of the celebrities:

Katie Holmes:

Fergie:

Paris Hilton

Jessica Simpson

I love celebrities.

I’ve been going through all my blogs and upgrading them to the latest version of Wordpress. I must admit that I think that upgrading blogs is a pain. Sure, the process of upgrading is really easy, if I didn’t have to worry about compatibility problems with plugins and themes. I was lucky enough to find a nice Wordpress Plugin called InstantUpgrade that does all the hard work for you. However, it wouldn’t work on my blogs that were still really old. I think it only works from 2.0 and up. Yes, I was that lax in upgrading my blogs. Upgrading is a problem when you have so many of them.

I do hate having to manually change the permissions for InstantUpgrade. If my host gave me command line access it would be a breeze. However, I don’t have that and so the manual file permission changes are a bit of a pain. At least now it’s done and I shouldn’t have to do it again.

Well, I do love the new Wordpress features. The auto save is pretty sweet and always makes me happy. I love the adding comments on the fly. I think there’s a few more, but I can’t remember what they are. Anyway, I think I’m at the end of the updates. Now, if I can just stay on top of updating Wordpress.

I’m really trying to figure out why this blog does so well with technorati, search, etc as opposed to my other Smuggle Me Blog. I really can’t figure it out. This blog was actually a throw together. Sure, I’ve changed that and made it into a good blog, but Smuggle Me got a lot more attention and even made it to a PR 5 blog. It has gone down to a PR 4 now, while this blog has risen up to a 4. It’s interesting, because I’ve treated both blogs pretty much the same. In fact, I think I’ve done more with my Smuggle Me blog than I have with this blog.

Oh well, this one is rising and has a great name that people love to click. I’m interested to see what’s going to happen with the next Google PR update. Should be interesting to see if any of my scores change. I really want to get one of these 2 blogs back to a PR 5.