I created another blog to hold onto all of the things that I am finding and loving, but losing somewhere in the gaps between delicious, my blog, and the favorite button in various applications (think Flickr and YouTube).

It’s basically a scrap book of my discoveries which I intend to fill with photos, videos, quotes, lyrics, and other found items that I don’t want to lose or forget.

Anyway, it’s at http://www.fullfathom.org.

We’ve discussed the etymology of fathom before.

Discovery magazine has excerpts from a chat between to chat-bots: Alice and Jabberwacky. Below is all the proof I need that we will be overtaken by robots in the future. They already understand how we think.

A: Do you experience love?

J: No. I’m 53 years old.

A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?

J: How old are you?

A: I am 9 years old.

J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).

A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.

J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

I just added a (perhaps temporary) feature to the sidebar of the blog called “That’s What’s Up.” It’s primarily for my friends and family so they can know where I am or what I am up to if they want to meet up. I am interested in experimenting with ways that a blog can drive real world traffic. So, until I get bored with it, or I decide I don’t want to broadcast my whereabouts, I will be updating this section.

That’s What’s Up is powered by Twitter and Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Thanks Alex.

Update: Yikes. I need to make my wordpress editor a bit longer. I deleted about two parapgraphs from the original post that I wrote (and thought I deleted) before figuring out what it was I was trying to say.

I have been playing around with my photoblog for over a year. I have tried various blogging platforms and plugins in search of an easy way to manage a photoblog. The quest was elusive and, as a result, I never really gave the photoblog the attention it deserved.

I finally got around to updating my photoblog to run on Wordpress (special thank you to YAFB - Yet Another Photo Blog). So what does this mean? A few things. Most importantly, it means that I will frequently update the photoblog. It also means that you can comment on individual photos (if you wish). Finally, for those of you reading along in your feed reader, the photoblog now his its own RSS Feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/mikeoliver-photography).

There are still some bugs (I can’t figure out the archive pages) and some ommissions (I need to add links back to the main blog and create a few pages), but its up and running and now the design matches the design employed at mikeoliver.org proper.

I hope you enjoy.

My traffic on this site doubled a few days ago. I hadn’t had a chance to dive into the stats to see what was amiss. Turns out a ton of people were searching for “mike oliver” + nypd or “mike oliver” and “police officer.”

After poking a round for a sec, I realized that this all has to do with the groom who got shot by the police in Queens several hours before his wedding. Apparently the officer who shot 31 of the 50 bullets and I share the same name.

I am in the process of integrating a few thousand photographs from Flickr into this blog. You can view my photos by most recent, tag, and by photo sets. I am porting my photos over from one Flickr account to another so it may be several days before they are all available on the site.

Go ahead, check it out.

I am making some slight design changes around here. Please let me know if the site acts or looks odd, or otherwise mistreats you.

For those of you who actually view the site (as opposed to using a feedreader), you may have noticed a new feature on the site. You can see it right below this post. I call these links ephemera.

n. pl. e·phem·er·a: Printed matter of passing interest

I am using this space to link to things I find online that for one reason or another don’t warrant a full blown blog post. Each ephemeron (didn’t know until today that this was the singular of ephemera) will inlcude a link with a brief description.

I am still tweaking things so pardon my dust. The permalinks and archives aren’t working yet and I am working on a separate RSS feed for this feature.

I hope you enjoy.

Update: The ephemera RSS feed is now up and running.

According to Kris, Zooomr will be launching tomorrow (7/16/06). As I mentioned in my previous post, Zooomr had a much hyped deadline on Friday that they missed due to a DOS attack.

I am writing this follow up post to express how impressed I am with Zooomr and specifically Thomas Hawk’s response to this mishap. Thomas Hawk is Zooomr’s Chief Evangelist, and he has earned his title (and salary) these past few days. Hawk found my post (I assume through Technorati) and responded within an hour of my posting comments on their missed deadline. More importantly, he followed up with another response today to let me know that the service would be launching tomorrow and to thank me for my earlier comments.

What Thomas did is simple and highly effective. It took him 30 seconds to personally let this potential customer know that the team was aware of the situation, that they appreciated the support of bloggers, and that they were rushing to solve the problem. The followup was even more key. By writing my initial post, I self-identified as an potential customer. Thomas went the next step and contacted me again to let me know that the worst was behind them and that launch was imminent. Had I read the blog post on Zooomr alerting me to this fact already? Of course. But the little extra step taken by Hawk was far more effective. Zooomr took what seemed like a negative situation and turned it into an opportunity to make meanigful connections with their potential customers.

This is the type of personal attention that wins hearts and minds.

Kudos to Thomas and the rest of the Zooomr team. You guys get it.

I look forward to seeing the finished product.

Update: Scoble explains my point above in three sentences (this in reference to a senior executive at Nestle replying to a negative blog post about his company):

Nestle just became a little more human due to a letter from George. I appreciate that a senior executive is fighting for his company’s reputation! I want to do business with people like that.

I guess that’s why they pay Scoble the big bucks.

Zooomr, a photosharing website a la Flickr went down for scheduled maintenance yesterday and was scheduled to launch its 2.0 version today at 5 PM EDT. Zooomr implemented a nifty countdown feature that showed how many hours, minutes, and seconds were left until launch. I was intrigued because almost nothing (especially in web development) goes off as planned. Having a timer takes guts - or perhaps youthful exuberance. After all, Kris Tate, the founder, is all of 17 years old.

Sure enough, the clock just hit zero and started ascending, mockingly counting each second by which the deadline was overrun. Now the site, which is stuck on 11:09 has the following message:

Worldwide release of the all new Zooomr

Officially launching ASAP!

Just to be clear, I am not making fun of Kris and the Zooomr team - just commenting on the nature of deadlines. The Zooomr team has done amazing work, and deserve no criticism even if they take another full day to get the site up and running.

I just hope for their sake that they can get it done by 8:00 o’clock so they can make the free beer

Update: Apparently Zooomr has been under an denial of service attack all day. Thomas Hawk says they should be up and running by 7pm.