I regularly get the "why do you blog" question.  I also regularly get "thank you for blogging" notes (thank you for the thank you notes.)

I’m a fan on Andrew Sullivan – he has a magnificent article in The Atlantic titled Why I Blog.  He nails it.

Thanks for the link Dave.

As part of Automattic’s acquisition of Intense Debate, I committed to convert all of my blogs over to WordPress.  The process has begun and should be done soon.  In the mean time, I’m on a quest for all the great WordPress plugins.  I’ve already got the Lijit Search, FeedBurner, and MyBloglog plugins queued up.  If you’ve got other recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

It’s Friday and there’s a remarkable amount of interesting stuff that came out of my morning "catch up on blog / email" routine.  I was going to write a couple of different blogs, but then realized that I didn’t have a lot to add to any of them other than "read this – it’s interesting."  There are a few "linkblogs" that I follow, but I find many break down quickly and become just "lists of more stuff."

I’m curious – if I started linking to the top few things (up to five – of any sort) that I read each morning with a brief description, would this be interesting to you dear reader? This is coming from the set of 500 or so blogs I scan via FeedDemon each morning.  Please give me feedback – do you like this or is it just another ponderous set of links to ignore.

Let’s try it and see.

Rock-and-Roll Fantasy: A fun article in Newsweek about Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy – the two founders of Harmonix – and how they are changing videogames.  They also got a well deserved mention in Time’s 100 Top Techies.

A Sporting Gesture Touches ‘Em All: This is a beautiful story about something that I expect would never happen in baseball, but happened in a college girls softball game. 

Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds: I brought this up as an example at a CU Silicon Flatirons Roundtable I was part of yesterday.  I got it slightly wrong – the punchline is that the world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020.

More Signup Power: Bill Flagg of RegOnline talks about how he has continuously optimized the RegOnline signon page to maximize the conversion rate.  Web services companies – take notice.

Tomorrow’s Forecast: Cloudy Skies & Sunshine: Jud Valeski – the CTO and co-founder of Gnip (one of our new companies) writes about his first blush experiences with Amazon Web Services (AWS for those of you in the know.)

Or Arabic, or Chinese, or Dutch, or German, or Greek, or Italian, or Japanese, or Korean, or Portuguese, or Russian, or Spanish?  Last night my Ross-my-IT-guy enabled translation of this blog into those languages via Google’s page translation service. 

I have no idea how well the translations work (since I don’t speak any of those languages), but if you are curious about how he did this, he blogged about Using Google Translation on your site.

One of my favorite things about blogging is that it lets you (if you have the courage) think out loud.  As a blogger, you get to try out a bunch of ideas in public.  As a blog reader, you get to see how other people think.

We’ve been working with Kevin Menzie and his gang at Slice of Lime for a long time (since it was just Kevin and Jeff.)  We’ve even got a small investment in them.  They’ve got some of the best ideas and insights of anyone I’ve worked with on the web design front.  I’ve encouraged Kevin to blog more aggressively about what he’s thinking and how they come up with their ideas.

Kevin has started doing this with his posts What Legos Can Teach Us About Web Standards and The Elongating Tail of Return Path.  

Great stuff – keep it up Kevin!

I received the following the other day from Micah Baldwin, who is now running business development at Lijit (and is a deliciously hysterical person when he wants to make a point.)

If I hear “Tell Brad his blog loads way too slowly” one more time (it has now surpassed “Are you too legit to quit”) I will shove a hot stake into my eye. Just thought you would like to know that you will be the cause of my soon to be eye-patch.

Since this is the 4,271st time I’ve heard this in the last 173 days, I promise I will do my best to have some performance improvements implemented by 2008.

Feel free to ignore this post.  Or – you can just laugh at the picture of a bunch of lame people trying to play Rock Band (the only one who wasn’t lame was the singer.)

However, I think there will likely be a reunion tour, much to Katherine‘s chagrin.

If you were wondering why Facebook’s search function is so lame, Katherine has some thoughts on this.  Just don’t take her on in Scramble – she’ll destroy you.

I love blog comments – I think of them as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere.   I haven’t been able to get an accurate count of the total number of comments floating around – my guess is that there are somewhere between 1 billion and 10 billion.  That’s a lot of comments.

I’ve also talked about The 80-19-1 Rule in the past.  In blogging, the 1% are the bloggers, the 19% are the commenters, and the 80% are the readers.  However, up to this point, the tools for the 19% suck. 

One of the TechStars companies – Intense Debate – worked on a comment replacement system this summer.  They’ve officially launched and are now up on about 1,000 blogs, including Feld Thoughts.  Give it a spin and tell me what you think (in a comment, of course.)

Debbie Weil grabbed me at the New New Internet show and made me answer a question about blogging.  Even though it is only 60 seconds long, I did manage to get the word “shit” into the interview. 

“… likable, rumpled and forthright” indeed.