Writing

Among other things, my wife Amy is a writer and a poet. I love it when she writes, especially when she chooses some sort of structural framework for what she writes. This year she decided to write a series of posts using the alphabet as a guide. She started off with the first post titled The Year of Living Alphabetically where she describes what she is doing. “I had a new idea this past week about structure that I’m hereby officially announcing I’m going to implement this year. I’ve done lots of reading about goals (rather than work toward actually achieving mine?) and one of the consistent tips is to make public announcements and create accountability to others and enlist their support in your efforts. So, my new idea is this: I’m going to use the 26 letters of the alphabet to create a weekly theme based on each letter, cycling through the alphabet twice in a 52 week year.“ ...

In response to my post The Dynamics of Full Disclosure , Jeffrey Kalmikoff – one of the co-founders of Skinnycorp (the dudes who do Threadless ) wrote an add-on titled On trust, transparency and disclosure*.* Jeffrey came up to Keystone and spent Jewish Christmas with me and Micah Baldwin – we talked about a bunch of fun stuff, ate chinese food, and played a lot of Rock Band. Good stuff Jeffrey.

A meme that regularly goes around the blogosphere is “full disclosure.” When someone blogs about something they have a financial interest in (e.g. an equity interest in a company) or something they benefit from financially (e.g. affiliate fees), should they include a “formal disclosure.” I received the following email today: “I appreciate all your book recommendations over the last several posts. It’s a great service. However, with full disclosure being the norm these days, you might want to mention that you benefit from book sales via your Amazon affiliate status. Pardon me if you have previously done this.” ...

For those of you that just got a flood of posts in your Feld Thoughts feed, that’s because of me. Yeah – I wrote a bunch of posts over the past few days, but I forgot to update where FeedBurner was pointing to grab the feed when we moved over to WordPress. I’m loving WordPress.org, but still futzing around with a few things. The feed should be better, but if you notice something messed up, tell me.

When Automattic acquired Intense Debate a few months ago, I committed to Toni Schneider and Matt Mullenweg that I’d convert my blogs from Movable Type to WordPress and become a WordPress fanboy. After the acquisition they sent me a bunch of stickers (along with my Automattic stock certificate). I’ve been dutifully putting my stickers up on lamp posts, doors, and computers all around the country. As of right now, I can also say that I’ve converted this blog over to WordPress. ...

As you probably noticed, for the past three weeks my blog has been up and down. The week of November 20th, Feld Thoughts came under a large distributed denial of service attack. While we’re not sure who began this attack (or why) we have finally been able to mitigate it enough to get the site back online thanks to ViaWest. Now for a little history as to what happened and how we combated it. ...

Thanks to the guys at Lookery for making Feld Thoughts their site of the week . As an endless obsessed data weenie, I’m enjoying seeing the data and demographics that Lookery is tracking for my site . Neat stuff.

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.” ...