Heading To Arizona Tonight for Spring Training Vacation

Excerpted from my post on Athletics Nation:
"At What Point Do They Stop Being 'Former A's'?"

In just about four hours, I'm leaving (on a jet plane) to sunny Arizona, to see the A's play for four straight days, from Friday to Monday, first seeing the club take on the White Sox in Tucson, and then three straight home games, in Phoenix, where they play the Giants, Rangers and Royals. I can't wait. This is the third year in a row my wife and I have been able to see Spring Training, and I hope we'll continue to go for years to come. It's a mini-vacation of sorts, one that wraps around the weekend so I don't miss too many days of work.

But while we're very excited to see the A's play this year, and I'm cautiously optimistic about our chances with a healthier roster, not to mention full seasons of Jack Cust, Kurt Suzuki, Travis Buck and Daric Barton, one of our biggest attractions this week will be seeing the recently-departed Nick Swisher.

While we'd seen Nick play hundreds of times at the Coliseum or on TV, we didn't expect to lose him so fast. One of the young stars of the team, we expected Nick to be part of the A's nucleus for years to come. We never really got to say goodbye, and tomorrow, with equal helpings of lung power and my wife being cute (at five months pregnant... with twins... but still cute), we hope to get the chance to do more than just wave and clap mildly in our seats.

Does this mean the blog will go silent until Tuesday? Absolutely not. But that's because I don't consider blogging work. It's fun! So, I hope to have a little more variation in our posting schedule, and you'll see a good mix of baseball in with the rest of our content for a bit. Go A's!

Subtraction Through Addition Making Me Even More Digital

Living in the Bay Area, and not preemptively well off, my wife and I own a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo in Sunnyvale. It's not the largest of homes. It doesn't have a backyard and isn't in a plush neighborhood. The kitchen is small. The elevator between floors can be an adventure, and our dining room is barely more than a table's width long. But now, with two little ones on the way, we're staring directly at this lack of available space and making changes - ones that are dramatically impacting my own possessions and moving me further into the digital world.

In our home, our two bedrooms can be summed up simply by saying the first one is ours, and the second one has primarily been a dumping ground for anything we didn't want visible. It, the smaller of our two bedrooms, has been the repository for laptops beyond their time, for my bookshelf, my old baseball card and stamp collections, and decades worth of Stephen King paperbacks, not to mention a vast collection of CDs I'd accrued since college.

But with the twins looming in the next 100 days or so, change is in the air.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I opened up an account at Public Storage, and each Saturday, my wife and I have been going through our worldly possessions, deciding to "Keep, Toss, Goodwill or Put in Storage". And each Saturday, I've seen a good deal of those things I used to call my most prized items be reduced to rubble. The bookshelf? Dismantled and tossed for scrap. An old 27" CRT television? Off to goodwill. Boxes and boxes of books? Put in Public Storage, with some going to work. My stereo, with a 50-CD carousel, dual cassette and AM/FM? To a friend, complete with CDs inside. I even took two booklets containing hundreds of CDs and gave them to coworkers, hoping I still retain borrowing privileges. And yes, we've gone through our closets a few times to get rid of clothes I know will never fit again.

Quickly, I've seen what I own largely reduced down to what I can wear, what I can consume, and that which will help me download. Given I'd already imported the vast majority of CDs into iTunes, kissing them goodbye was less a feeling of loss, and more of a technology transition. Similarly, seeing dead-tree books put into boxes made me wonder if I could instead be seeing the iTunes/iPod equivalent of eBooks debut any time soon. I don't think the Kindle is the answer yet, but we're close. And the beauty of going digital? It doesn't take up nearly as much space. Now, our biggest issues in the near-term can consist of where to keep all the orphaned wires from gadgets gone by - at least, until our two permanent visitors make an appearance.

5 Blog Candidates for Tomorrow's TechMeme Leaderboard

We all know today's A-List by heart: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, Scoble, blah blah blah... but there are many other bloggers I've found who are either delivering consistent strong stories with real focus, or have the occasional gem, who I believe with time, should be the leaders of tomorrow. Below are five who come to mind, who I think could be major players in future iterations of the TechMeme Leaderboard. If you have some you think I'm missing, and I know there's no way I have them all nailed, please let me know in the comments.

1. SheGeeks (shegeeks.net)

Corvida has until lately been a more prolific Twitterer than a blogger. But she's got a great writing style, enthusiasm and energy, not to mention a fantastic site name and look. In the last week alone, Corvida has touched on the debut of Socialthing!, reviewed FriendFeed, provided her view on Twitter projects and Google2Go. I hope she chooses to keep up the pace, and with some momentum behind her, I swear we'll be seeing a lot of Corvida in the future.

Subscribe to SheGeeks using RSS

2. Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen (andrewchen.typepad.com)

Andrew to date has been extremely focused on Facebook applications and trends, and the nuances of social network or social media. Having already attracted a few thousand RSS subscribers, largely on on the back of a major endorsement by Robert Scoble in January, which sent his subscription base from the 1,000 range to around 2,500. Sticking with development in this new age of application platforms will show Andrew's success to not be a fluke. Andrew can also be lauded for not spitting out a multitude of short posts. Nearly every item is well researched and full of detail.

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3. Charles Hudson (www.charleshudson.net)

Blogging since 2003, Charles is no newcomer to the world of tech blogging. But Charles, like Corvida and Andrew, isn't in the race for quantity - instead focused on being clear direct, with comments on FriendFeed's similarities with the Facebook news feed, how Microsoft is missing the boat in competing with Google Apps, and adding his two cents on this weekend's meme around what it takes to be a technology workaholic trying to make headway at a startup.

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4. Seek Ground (seeknock.blogs.com/seek)

Though relatively anonymous, "Seek" offers a strong signal to noise ratio, and the author is among the most intriguing in terms of how they opt to consume and report news. While today, Seek argues many folks are trying to make content to gain ad revenue, without thinking of consumers, it was just Saturday when Seek caught my attention for deleting all their Google Reader feeds and starting over - just like when they erased their blog and restarted about a year ago. Regardless of the change, SeekGround is an avid consumer of link blogs, and link aggregators, including Feedheads, LinkRiver and Twitter.

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5. Unraveling Obfuscation (obfuscation.wordpress.com)

Todd McKinney, the author of Unraveling Obfuscation, doesn't post as often as some of us do, especially those on the TechMeme leaderboard, but when on a roll, Todd can write with the best of them. In January and February, you could see comments on the engagement of Google Reader RSS subscribers, whether or not Network Solutions and Microsoft could be trusted, or how popular services are approaching the issues that come with spiraling user counts utilizing technology.

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How I Found or Started Using A Dozen Web Services

I was talking with a friend the other day about one of the Web services I use on a daily basis. When they asked about how I first learned of the site, I couldn't really remember. Did I get invited? Did I just log in? Did a friend tell me about it? No idea.

So, I thought I'd take a look backward and share how I found out about some things, or what the driving reason was to join others... and maybe you can tell me any interesting stories you have along the same lines.

(Presented in no particular order...)

1) MySpace (www.myspace.com)

I don't use MySpace, per se. I certainly don't have a MySpace page. But in 2005, when I was hosting the Oakland A's themed ANtics here (instead of on PhotoBucket), I saw a lot of traffic from random MySpace pages. Enough folks thought highly enough of the comics to post them in comments or their profile, so I got a dummy login and can now click through to see what people are saying about them. And this... I promise you... is the only way I ever use MySpace.

2) Facebook (www.facebook.com)

Like with MySpace, I avoided Facebook as long as I could. The social network seemed more appropriate for my younger sister, a college student, than it did for me. When Facebook opened up, I still resisted, but I couldn't help being lured in by all the talk of Mario Romero's Feedheads application, which tagged the most popular shared items in Google Reader. I got a Facebook account almost solely to use his application, and then ended up sticking around. I still don't consider myself a major Facebook user, but have gained a good number of "friends" on the site, and play Scrabulous with the family.

3) Feedheads (facebook.com/feedheads)

See #2, basically. Robert Scoble lusted after Mario Romero's excellent application, and his reviews were so glowing that I was willing to join a social network just to get it. The fact that this functionality hasn't yet been written into Google Reader directly still baffles me.

4) Twitter (www.twitter.com)

I first publicly swore I would never use Twitter, and then later, after asking the community's opinion, reversed my stance and joined the service. The honest #1 reason I joined? Because I felt in the wake of my highly visible argument with Mashable, that just maybe the entire event could have been minimized with a few well-placed "tweets" to Mark Hopkins. While we had tagged each other on e-mail, the responsiveness just wasn't as fast as it could have been with Twitter, and that helped me jump the shark, to avoid a recurrence, although admittedly the argument eventually made me a lot more friendly with Mark and the Mashable team than ever would have otherwise.

5) FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com)

It's funny, I can't tell you if I was ever invited to FriendFeed by anyone in particular during their closed beta period. But in a discussion on Robert Scoble's site about Feedheads being his favorite Facebook application, one commenter asked, "What do you think of Friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com), and their Facebook app ?", saying it did even more than Feedheads could. I went back to Facebook and saw the FriendFeed application did exactly as advertised. (Oddly, my Apple Mail tells me I got in on October 17th, the same day I first announced Feedheads getting its new name, while the comment's time stamp is October 18th.)

6) Spokeo (www.spokeo.com)

I had never heard of Spokeo until I met with their VP of Marketing at a Plug and Play tech conference last fall. The demo was enticing enough for me to sign up. (See my initial coverage here) The site's still interesting, and it's been fun to watch their development, but given the lack of interactivity, I've defaulted to FriendFeed for sure.

7) Reddit (www.reddit.com)

A few years ago, I was asked to be emcee for a local talent show. While there was no way I would have even thought of attending, let alone participating, the option to be in control was too much to pass up. I think the same thing happened with Reddit. I'd largely ignored the service, in favor of Digg, but when Reddit allowed for custom Reddits to be built, and MG Siegler of ParisLemon came calling with the idea for an elite Reddit, I jumped on board.

8) ReadBurner (www.readburner.com)

It's almost not fair to post this one, now that Alexander Marktl has taken it down, but I saw some oddities in my referral logs, coming from a server hosted on the Amazon Web service. I clicked through and it was amazing to find this incredible service without a domain name or any Google traction. (See the first story from January 7th here) For two months, ReadBurner shined like the Phoenix, but came crashing down to ash after the developer let real life get in the way.

9) LinkRiver (www.linkriver.com)

Another referral logs hero.

Adam Stiles had been using LinkRiver on his own site for some time, and I had largely ignored it, thinking it was one user's pet project. When overnight, it went from adamstiles.com to linkriver.com, I realized it was ready to hit the big time. A few e-mails later, and I was in touch with Adam to find the real story.

10) RSSMeme (www.rssmeme.com)

After ReadBurner debuted, other services came in the site's wake. None was more excitable than Benjamin Golub, who seemingly overnight crafted a link blog aggregation clone. Not hours after the site had debuted was Golub tweeting about it on Twitter and sending me Direct Message after Direct Message. Eventually, I said "enough" and checked it out. Despite initial rough edges, he's developed the site and grown its link blog base to the point that it is the unquestioned leader here.

11) Yokway! (www.yokway.com)

This was a fun one. Yokway! still isn't out, and won't be for a week or two. But I found a reference to the near-term appearance of Yokway! on one of the tech blogs I read. After I searched Google, and found the site was closed, I did another search on Google's Blog Search, finding one mention of Yokway!, in French, from February 1st. The author helpfully gave a backdoor access port, and a few clicks later I was in and checking out the service, which will be very cool when it debuts for real.

12) Athletics Nation (www.athleticsnation.com)

I include AN here as it's become a major part of my Web experience every spring and summer. I was visiting the Daily Kos Web site one day in early 2005 when Markos Moulitsas casually mentioned Sports Blogs Nation, and the Athletics Nation Web site. I clicked through and was dumbfounded... it was as if a light had been turned on and I openly asked where the site had been all my life. A single site... dedicated to A's baseball, full of knowledgeable fans. It was amazing. I've been an A's fan for 20 years now, and an AN fan for 3. Soon thereafter I became part of the site's editorial team and have contributed stories or comics since mid-2005.

There's no possible way I can dig deep into my e-mail or blog history and find everything. I do know that beyond these dozen services, I joined LinkedIn way back in 2003, on a colleague's recommendation. I was buying computers off eBay back in 1999, and was using PayPal back in 2000 to buy game tickets. Amazon shows me I ordered a set of books in 1999 using the same ID I have now, though I can see e-mails to my mother about the service dating back to 1997. There's also no perfect way to find out when I started using Google Reader or TechMeme, or the first time I ever started reading TechCrunch and Scoble... but sometimes it's worth looking backwards a bit to remember just how we started using these things, even if it now seems like we always have been.