Talkie - the Niner Niner Weblog

And we have some great stuff to tell you about. A tour around this network, will give you some great entertainment as well as be informative. But in this world that is so information-dependent, it is important to find a way to not go into information-overload. We pride ourselves in giving you the information you need and want without short circuiting your brain and lifestyle. Make us your home page, or at least bookmark us in your top five places to visit everyday; we will enrich your life for it!

Today I stopped by the Boomer 2.0 blog. I have to admit, as a baby boomer myself, I am partial to this blog. I love this last posting. It gives the end-of-the-year awards to the top baby boomers in some of the most interesting areas! For example:

Al Gore received an award for baby boomer turned activist, not to mention getting a Nobel Peace Prize. Not too bad for a day’s work! Have you seen his film, “An Inconvenient Truth?” Really worth the time and one that is worth buying. In fact, buy it for all your friends too. What I really liked was the classy way the writers at Boomer 2.0 resisted giving him the baby boomer award for inventions and the whole “I invented the Internet” thing.

Homer Simpson and J.K. Rowling both received awards too. (Different awards of course!) But I think these awards show the best of what baby boomers are all about. In a same, yet different, area, Kim Cattrall (of “Sex and The City” fame) also received an award; perhaps it is for reaching a certain age (and hormone level) and managing to stay there for all eternity. And they thought Dick Clark had made a pact with the devil!

Finally, in a true act of class, Sting received an award. Like any true classic, I can remember when Sting became a household name, yet I can’t really remember a time when his songs weren’t always around. I would like to throw Phil Collins into that groups as well.

Take a look at the entire award “menu.” It is a good one to bring back some memories, create a few more, and recognize some of the greatest of the great baby boomers!

The Top Baby Boomers of 2007?

As you may have noticed, things have been a little quiet around here for a while.

While the blogs have still been active, we hope to announce some changes soon that will breath a little fresh life into Niner Niner and our network of 27+ weblogs!

Cheers,
- Shanti Braford

Ooops - I’ve been playing with WordPress Multi-user so that we can add blogs onto subdomains of NinerNiner.com.

I.e. “yourfavoritetopic.ninerniner.com”. I forgot to disable the Virtual Hosts directive after playing around with it the other day, causing My.ninerniner.com and Talkie.ninerniner.com to be inaccessible.

Ajax Blog had a chance recently to sit down with the breakout team of vSocial.com.

We wanted to pick the brains of the vSocial founding team and learn about: starting a new social networking site, building a large-scale, high-bandwidth web app, developing with Ajax, building traffic/buzz, life hacks, and more.

The numbers speak for themselves: vSocial has gone from 0 to 71M+ monthly page views, 270K+ unique daily visitors and 45M videos served a month … all in about 120 days!

Brad Webb and Mark Sigal of vSocial were kind enough to sit down with Ajax Blog for the following interview. Enjoy!

Can you describe how the company or concept behind vSocial.com came about?

The core platform behind vSocial was developed over the past three years (with vSocial’s other co-founder, Brent Oesterblad) as part of a general purpose social media platform for uploading and sharing pictures, music, movies and other rich media content items. Looking at the market mid-last year, it was clear that Internet video was about to hit in a big way, and we felt that we had a lot of “secret sauce” to bring to the equation so we opted to focus there. The underlying platform is quite feature rich, and we expect to roll more of it out into the market in the coming months.

(Cont’d…)

Read the full interview: How vSocial Went from 0 to 71 Million Page Views in (about) 120 Days

It would be nice if everyone was using The Better Browser, but unfortunately, that is not the case.

Not only that, but many are tethered to IE by the restrictions placed upon them by IT Departments that do not allow installation of even the most benevolent of softwares. (Firefox, that is)

It seems our k2-based WordPress theme on HyperGadget was not displaying correctly on IE.

In retrospect, I had seen this problem before. Oftentimes when images in posts are too wide (in k2-based themes), IE fails to show the sidebar or it’s displayed at the very bottom. We’ve all seen sites like this at one time or another.

We’ve managed to fix it up for now, but it was not fun. Hopefully we can work some CSS magic if IE will allow it… otherwise it’s off to image-resizing / width-height-specifying we go!

For a bit there, we were trying to run Talkie out of the WordPress trunk.

This proved to be a bad idea, due to permissions issues.

We’re now rocking the WordPress v2 Release Candidate 2, available from the nightly builds over at WordPress.org.

It’s nice, indeed. The Ajax is slick but you can tell it eats up a little bit more cpu. ‘Tis well worth it though. Looks ready for primetime to me, but I’m sure the WP core team is squashing a few remaining bugs before 2.0 is official.

BTW - omfg check this out. At this time of this writing, WordPress 1.5.x has been downloaded 897,178 times!

Welcome, Steve Lord of the United Kingdom, to the Niner Niner blogging team!

Steve is the 200th writer here on this tiny but ever-expanding weblog network of ours.

It was just a little over a year ago that Gabriel and I put together the concept of Niner Niner and began flushing out our initial prototype of how things would work.

We had some initial success with our first experiment in collaborative, tag-team blogging with HIPAA Blog. From there, things expanded as we gradually added more blogs to the network.

I’d like to thank all of our writers so far this past year who’ve helped make Niner Niner possible. I hope it’s been a worthwhile journey for all!

Special thanks to:

Christy Patrick

Laurie Barak

Sarah White

Nancy Callahan

Chris Bunting

Georganna Hancock

Tom Simpson

Harry Fuecks

Jim Moser

May 2006 be an even bigger and better year for all of us here in the Niner Niner blogging family!

The all-new shiny skin for VegasRevealed.com is now finally live.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas? Want to go someday, or return for more fantastic fun? Do you have a burning secret to tell from your trip to Vegas oh those many years ago?

VegasRevealed.com

is the place to go.

Just found the structuredblogging.org plugin that structures a Wordpress entry in a very logical manner, where you have specific fields for creating and editing a review that it then can format in a logical manner. Other than a couple of minor issues (the link checking doesn’t seem to be working, will need to look into that) and the lack of Advanced Editing options (needed to change the author of the post, couldn’t do it without turning the plugin off), this is a kick-butt plugin. This is available on the On Movies site right now and will be available on the rest of the sites on the next svn update for each one.

What is Structured Blogging?

Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that - formatting blog entries around their content.

To see what we’re talking about, check out the sample content on the blog.

On another level, it’s a bit more complicated - what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers - other programs, sites, and aggregators - better understand the content.

Welcome to 2005, Land of Big Fonts.

Say hello to the newly revised NinerNiner.com, designed specifically for the seeing-impaired.