Internetling

While others are fantasizing about Microsoft’s Yahoo offer, I’ve got something that’s even more important to talk about.

I started blogging last summer: a local SEO experiment. Didn’t work. Updating daily wasn’t a challenge, but slowly I lost my passion.

That’s when it hit me: passion is what drives blogging. Only with passion (or 20 Indian ghostwriters, which I sadly cannot afford) can one sustain a certain quality level through a long period of time. And so, The Internetling was born. A blog where I post what I like, and not what I have to. It changed the game a lot. I enjoy writing posts a lot now and always take time to proof-read and improve.

While I was not an active blogger back in 2007, I’ve been following many interesting blogs. I still remember how I gobbled up all of those articles, and the overwhelming desire to guest post. I was aware of course, that for these bloggers you have to write quality stuff and have authority. Well, maybe someday, who knows

Now, back to the topic. I want to tell you about a few who radiated this passion. And you, loyal readers (and those who hate me, but still subscribe for some weird reason) have them to thank for what The Internetling has become. I like The Internetling as it is, and am not worried about the growth. What drives me now, and this I learned from these bloggers, is the pure joy of blogging.

Oh, and if you were perhaps wondering, John Chow ain’t one of them

And now, you guys who managed to read all this trash above, I present to you:

1) Martin Reed of CommunitySpark

Promotion sure goes a long way: I first stumbled upon Martin’s blog when John Chow posted a paid review of Martin’s blog, Community Spark. This blog is about community building, administration and marketing. It is very nice to read, his style is very calm and his mind evidently doesn’t skip from topic to topic like mine. Recommended. I still read all the posts, although it’s been eons since I’ve commented. Hope this little review will make up for it.

2) Nate Whitehill

Now I don’t remember really how I first got to Nate’s blog. It was probably through some blogroll, who knows. Well, I’ve been reading Nate’s blog since the very beginning (end of January, start of February 2007). His blog has seen rapid growth last year and is showing no signs of stopping, but what I really like at Nate’s blog is that you can see how much work is involved: very down-to-earth! Of course, I never met Nate in person but he seems like a very nice person. Be sure to check his popular posts.

And Nate, if you’re reading this, show some love for us who don’t have Cinema displays – I can hardly see teh first post on my 19″ Sony

3) John Waraas

Well John, you’re famous now!

My first dose of Waraas was his post abotu buying a house (no way guys, I’m waaay too lazy to find it and link it). His blog has got lots of interesting content you don”t find on other sites. I won’t argue about his SEO techniques, let the slogan ‘Evil SEO‘ speak for itself. On John’s blog, you can learn a lot just by reading a few of the posts, plus his writing is really fun to read. Just recently noticed he’s a member of Sitepoint, like me.

4) Darren of Problogger

I think Darren has seen quite a few reviews, I can imagine. I like Problogger for the same reason most people like it: the good design (thank goodness he ditched the old one), the high, consistent posting quality, and frequency. Darren simply pwnz the other A-listers.

Right, Chow wins in the evil category, I admit that

Well, that’s it. Check out these blogs, every single one is very interesting and full of cool content. I hope these blogs gain even more influence – it would be very positive for the blogosphere. Keep up the good work!

I spend a lot of my free time surfing the internet and almost half of my income comes from here. That means I’ve got a lot of contacts, but little time to IM anyone. I tend to use email a lot, even when I’m on the road.

I used to be an Outlook Express user until 2004. I was new to the whole security thing back then and frankly didn’t care whether my inbox is safe or not.

My next e-mail client was Thunderbird. I’m sure lots of you also use Outlook, Spicebird or something similar for managing your everyday tasks. Well, the opensource alternative was fine and all, but there was a big problem involved.

With webmail, your e-mail stays on the server. E-mail clients, on the other hand (if you don’t specifically tell them), ‘pull’ your mail onto the computer.

And while this may be an advantage for offline reading: what happens if you (my case here) have 3 computers and 5 operating systems?

Ease of access is the keyword here, I suppose. With my Gmail, I have all the functionality I need, and more. It’s always there, and if I get some important mail I can easily archive it or forward it, thus increasing my web productivity.

If you liked what I said and want to jump n the bandwagon, simply sign up for some webmail space: Gmail or Yahoo!Mail will suffice, but you also have Hotmail, Inbox and Spymac.

Do you use webmail? Why (not)? Tell us!

My readers seem to know what they’re dealing with.

Windows 7 leaked. This new Windows version is actually planned for 2009.

It’s time for everyone to admit Windows Vista is a bad OS. Sure it works and all, but it’s still bad. Don’t tell me people couldn’t have come up with something better in 4-5 years’ time. The unofficial Longhorn release with WinFS had some potential, plus it was free of charge. Sadly it was taken down due to legal issues.

I am a Mac and Unix user and I feel sorry for the Vista users. No offence meant, but I urge everyone out there to at least give a try to Ubuntu or Leopard. Explore. See how powerful your computer really is.

Let us return to our subject. I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Windows Vienna or Windows 7 lately. Last time I heard about it was November. If I remember correctly, the developers are making huge core midifications, so this time it’s going to be something special.

According to a post by  Windows 7 blogger M. Dikici, the first Milestone isn’t very impressive. The GUI is still very Vista-like (remember the first Longhorn screenshots?).

Personally I am not much of a tester, I prefer polished stuff, so let’s wait for the second release and we will probably see what Microsoft is aiming at. I expect multiple desktops and much much more stuff we see on Linux today.

The only problem is, when it comes out, will Microsoft have something to impress us with or will it just rely on its heavy user base? What do you think?

I know the title’s pretty weird. There’s a catch to it, though. Our job is to increase our web productivity, right?

You probably know this situation very well: you just finished your latest web design, and you want to take a break and just goof around a bit, which in web 2.0 geek means using a few of these sites:

• Digg
• Reddit
• Del.icio.us
• Stumbleupon
• Slashdot
• Propeller

(I see no purpose here in linking to them).

These are social media news sites. The biggest problem is that many of them have similar content, because popular content becomes popular universally. That is where you loose time. Digg is pretty slow, and while the other sites are faster, they’ll treat you to similar content most of the time. So the question is, how do we pick out our favourite news items from a heap of social media news sites?

Welcome to the wonderful world of RSS. Many social media sites, if not all, provide you with a full RSS feed. If I like Digg’s Linux/Unix category, for instance, I’ll subscribe to it. That will become my content of choice. But why go through all that work?

Popurls is a great aggregator with ‘the latest web buzz’. Not only has it got all the news from the sites above, there’s also a ton of other source, blogs and videos, all on one page!

I’m wasting my time professionally from now on