Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

I have four daughters and really struggle with how much time they spend inside. The lifestyle we make our kids live is nothing like what it was when I grew up, and when our parents grew up. Gone are long periods of free time outdoors. In today's LA Times, Rosa Brooks has published an absolute gem of an article that gets to the root cause of the problem:

This is interesting: MoFuse has made their product free.  MoFuse takes your site's RSS feed (or feeds) and republishes them.  They'll split AdSense revenue 50-50 with you or for a $20 fee will let you make 100% on it.  Not a bad way to take you blog, Joomla,  Plone or WordPress site mobile overnight! 

The value of blogging is something that is very difficult to calculate.  Most of the problem comes from the transient nature of a blog (articles expire or get archived) content and the effect that RSS has on diffusing page views: it's very difficult to see who has read your article - especially when it's mixed into a post like I'm doing with Rohit Bhargava's blog right now.

Interesting: you can lose twice the weight by simply keeping a food diary. 

Open Source Content managers have changed the way websites are built. Tools like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Plone and others have made it easy to quickly set up a very functional website in a couple of hours.  So what's the most popular?  Hard to say, but Google Trends has an interesting measure of traffic related to each of the big three open source CMSes. 

Google Trends: joomla, drupal, wordpress

Well, T-Mobile finally decided to catch up with the competition. Unfortunately, not by improving their network or expanding service offerings.  T-Mobile has decided to join other carriers cashing in on SMS messages by raising prices to $.20 per message:

I have lived Windows free for the past year.  It's been... nice.  It appears lots of other people are making the effort to switch to something else - mostly Mac. The question is how long will this continue and will the next version of Windows stem the tide?
"It appears that Mac OS X could soon be listed in the double digit-range, while Windows could
fall below the 90% mark."

I've been missing working with the Opera Browser since I went MS free a year ago. They've just released a new version for Linux which gives us yet another great web browser option. What makes Opera unique is it's usability combined with features like speed dial, widgets (HTML widgets for you desktop) and possibly the best password and RSS integration in any browser. Opera is also a bit of a throwback - it contains full email, IRC and usenet capabilities, much like browsers that trace their roots back to 1994-1997.