am going to vote in a few hours, and having spent time preparing articles, today turns out to be very good! Yesterday I produced many stories (some short, some very long) and I’m planning to try to do the same today. So far this year has turned out to be by far the best and most productive year since I became an adult.

People who attempt to slow me down or sadden me are failing. I reckon they already realise this and can evidently see this.

I wonder why Bob Cringely has been so quiet lately. Health problems? Threats?

Let’s wait and see.

“Good question,” a friend has opined. “Those pushing AI [sic] are a very dodgy bunch. So I would suspect threats if anything…”

Quoting further: “Bob was on a roll for a while recently. However, what he was saying was going very strongly against the fantasy story that some very powerful, monied interests have been pushing.”

HIS blog is turning 22 this year, unlike the site which is turning 25 next year. With 2,884 blog posts, it’s an average of just over 100 per year though a lot more lately. At this current page it’ll exceed 3,000 by year’s end.

I still remember my first-ever blog post. My aunt commented on it. Weeks later I set up a blog for my friend, who would blog for nearly 20 years until he died in his nineties.

“Blogging” per se started centuries ago, but some people define a blog based on some particular features, especially digital hallmarks.

In some sense, my first site was a bit like a blog and that was in the mid 1990s.

ODAY, after 18 years (this blog started in 2004), I am publishing the 2,222^nd blog post. Over at Techrights we’ve just exceeded 34,000. TuxMachines approaches 170,000.

We’re made it!

didn’t think we’d get here, but here we are. The “over 9,000″ jokes seem like only yesterday (I can still recall the IRC conversation about exceeding 9,000 blog posts) and since then, one grand (1,000) at the time, we kept climbing higher.

We have a large trove of material left to publish, but we’re pacing it down somewhat so as to not overwhelm readers. It’s strategic, too.

This past week we worked on developing a new CMS (a very simple one, but also very lightweight). We can’t wait to take it live. It’s probably safe to say that Techrights will still be around a decade from now; if the World Wide Web perishes, we still have IRC, IPFS, Gemini, and daily plain-text bulletins that can be dispatched in all sorts of ways. In a way, we’ve already secured our future.

This post will be the 33,999^th one. Next up is the “real” 34k.

VER the past couple of weeks we have made major visual changes in Tux Machines, including modernisation that keeps up with new browser technologies like CSS3. Traffic in the site is growing fast and we hope to gain readers who are as passionate about Free software as we are.

YING is a crude term, I admit, but when something circles around the toilet’s spiral, then you know it’s inevitably dead. Based on some Web statistics I prefer not to name, while Twitter boasts expansion in the number of registered users (this number can hardly even decrease), it sure seems like fewer registered users log in or are being actively followed. This can be also felt by many existing (and sometimes long-lasting) users in the form of communication, participation, and “engagement” as marketing people like to call it. Before I joined Twitter I had posted a fair deal in Identi.ca, but ever since they moved to a new version of their software a lot of people jumped over to Google+ and other platforms. Having a lot of technical issues, including downtimes, contributed a lot to this. I am now the most prolific poster in Identi.ca, but how important is this platform anyway?

Now, some might say that Twitter et al. are the next MySpace. I would concur. And moreover, the likes of Facebook and Google+ are queued to follow. Facebook staff — not just outside investors — are reportedly dumping their stock this month. They would know. Yes, they see what’s going on inside Facebook.

My hope is that the next generation of social network will be self-hosted and communally-federated. The Diaspora project gives me hope that we already have the necessary code and some deployed platforms (pods) with reasonably good adoption.

HE site known as “Digg” did something worse than negligence; it’s destruction. The Digg which Kevin Rose had created sold us all out when it sold core assets for half a million dollars, apparently just meaning domain name (and no code that will actually be reused). FSDaily became bigger than Digg overnight. The site was sold to some NYC-based company, which as its first step decided to throw to the garbage can many people’s volunteer work (like over 10,000 submissions from me, over 13,000 comments from me, etc.). So perhaps hundreds of millions of pages are just gone, incinerated. This is a deja vu for me; Netscape/Propeller ended up just throwing away all the content because it doesn’t seem to make a profit for AOL.

The attitude here shows total disregard for the time and effort people have put into various Web site, never mind preservation of valuable public record.

For the disgusting decision made by the new owners of Digg.com, I honestly hope they quickly go out of business; no, not that they would go bankrupt and end up in the streets, just whatever can bring the old site back. What they do is unethical (they require Facebook for login, which in itself is comical) and they show zero respect for those who helped created Digg.com, at great cost to themselves and for no profit.