For a couple months, I've been noticing a strange pattern to the spam I've been getting like, 'IZ IN UR INBOX, MUCH 2 BUY'. I never really cared to investigate the trend, but finally got it explained to me from Doubting Thomas. If you haven't heard about it get ready for LOLCAT I don't know if its headed for mainstream media or if it already peaked, but I sure would like to be able to compute the power of a fad and its expected duration.

Viral web trends make millions of dollars for the few who learn to capitalize (prey) on them. One of the first big hits I remember is Hot or Not, what fun to post a picture of your geeky friend and watch everyone dis them. This one was so big, it's still around, they've managed to turn it into a dating site. Who can forget Hamster Dance. The web has changed, content is added by the masses, not created by the few. Fads now start, peak, and die before a newspaper column could make it to print.

A little information about LOLCATS :

Wikipedia the first reference is on February 27th 2007. there were 13 edits in March, about 70 edits in April, now it is getting around 10 edits a day, on June 6th it had 50+ edits.

Flickr has 3200 LOLCAT and 3800 LOLCATS the first time the tag was used was March 2005. The first use of this tag with the IM IN UR line was in Novermber 2006.

Myspace LOLCATS started in early November 2006.

Technorati has about 100 posts a day now with LOLCATS.

So what do you think, has this fad peaked ? Does it have legs ? Is it time to look for the next thing or jump on this band wagon ? I do love the internet.

The bluefish follow the squid into Peconic Bay every year, and after they've finished consuming all the cephalopod they can find, they stay in the bay to devour every piece of bait, baby fish, and piece of tin that's comes within feet of them. A couple weeks ago Audrey and I went to the beach and there were about 8 people surfcasting, I joined them and immediately hooked up, the bluefish were coming in about every third cast. At one point I looked down the beach and five of us in a row were hooked into 4-5 lb. fish. After about a 15 fish the light was diminishing and we went on home.

I'll eat about any fish fresh caught, but once blue fish makes it to the freezer there isn't much chance it is going to be consumed in our house. I believe I've discovered a great solution, Smoked Bluefish. It's really pretty easy if you have 10 minutes an hour for 6-8 hours. I used my weber and pretty much followed this recipe. I'm having the last of it now for breakfast 10 days later and it is very fresh, I'll have to see if it freezes and rethaws, this may seriously reduce my Alaskan Salmon bill. There are a couple things I'm going to do differently with the batch of bluefish I'm catching this weekend, first less salt, second leave the skin on the fillets, third cook it at a little lower heat (this is hard to regulate in my weber), all of these things should keep the fillets a little moister. Bluefish is full of Omega-3 fatty acids which is possibly one of the most important compounds in living a healthy long life.

So I may often be late to the party, but I can drink fast enough to catch up. Judith Meskill has inspired me to photo blog. Thomas does it too, so I started using my Flickr account and the Flickr Feeds and built a quick little php script to display the Photo Blog on the left column of my blog.

<div style="width: 240px">

<? $feed=getFlickrFeed('52576524@N00'); ?>

<h3><?=$feed['title']?></h3>

<? foreach ($feed['items'] as $num => $photo) { ?>

<div style="margin: 5px; padding: 4px;">

<b><?=$photo['title']?></b><br />

<a href="<?=$photo['l_url']?>">

<img src="<?=$photo['t_url']?>" style="float:left; margin:3px;" border="0"></a>

<?=$photo['description_raw']?></div> 10: <div style="clear:both"></div>

<? }

function getFlickrFeed($id) {

$handle = @fopen("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?". 15: "id=$id&format=php_serial", "r");

if ($handle) {

  while (!feof($handle)) {

    $buffer .= fgets($handle, 4096);

  }

  fclose($handle);

}

return unserialize($buffer);

}

?>

Sometimes I'm late to the party, sometimes early -- usually that means I either end up helping setup or cleanup -- I never looked good in lampshades anyways. I never had a myspace page, admitting this probably won't help getting me that killer job enhancing their search capabilities that just should up in my Linkedin Mail Box. I didn't pay it much attention when my friend Brian Alvey started his blogging company. I probably have 5 photos on Flickr and 2 videos on YouTube. To top it off I got my first Atari 2600 when in 1998. So now I've started Social Bookmarking -- I became inspired by Jason Calacanis and his use of Delicious Widget.

I see a lot of websites I'd love to blog about, but I never wanted to do a 'finds of the day' or 'today's links' without making them topical or related to a story. So now with the help from del.icio.us I have links of the day on the side of my blog and when I want to do a post about say Poker - probably in July when the WSOP main event starts - I can get all the bookmarks and my notes (easily collected with the delicious firefox extension) and make a blog post. In case you are wondering, No, I will never Twitter !

After 10 years of surf casting and 5 years fishing from a boat I am just starting to get a handle on the Peconic Bay. I am certainly still a novice, but I don't feel hopeless when I go looking for the bite. Occasionally, I even offer new information to the veterans that I know. Despite starting to feel comfortable, the bay always keeps me on my toes -- this year I was completely prepared to start the season right and catch a mess of squid, I was anticipating my first attempt at frying calamari. Well this year, the squid didn't come anywhere near the places that I would fish for them. To the veterans this is a common occurrence, to me a major let down, as the patterns I expect are thrown off.

This winter one of my Heroes, a true veteran, John Mazzaferro, passed away. I never got to fish with him, but we did go clamming a couple of times, in the past couple of years I learned a good deal from him about the bay, but not nearly what I should have. Science and Technology have made great strides to aid the fisherman, but watching and listening to people like John Mazzaferro proves to me that fishing is an Art Form.

Goodbye John, the paintings of the bay that you narrated to me, your kindness and graciousness will long be remembered.

I've now spent a year with two different virtual workforces. I've learned a lot about my own motivation and seen numerous situations that can easily demotivate an individual. The lack of water cooler socialization makes common courtesy and constant communication critical factors in maintaining a professional work environment that encourages productivity.

Complicated Hierarchy - either documented or inferred, a manager that allows one member of the team to manage tasks of another member runs the risk of a hidden power struggle that can destroy the strongest chemistry. These power struggles become obvious in person, but over phone calls and emails the subtleties of inter personal relations do not become apparent.

Poor Communication - obviously poor communication will destroy a non-virtual work force as quickly as a remote one - however an unmotivated worker in an office environment usually finds something productive to do to make the day go by or out of fear. If you don't find out every day what everyone in the team is working on it is likely some of the team is working on nothing.

Secrets - If a team is being divided with projects that the rest of the team isn't privy to you'd better have a good reason. In an office environment the uninvolved members can group together (and regardless of how you feel about gossip) unite with common speculation, in the virtual work force resentment and paranoia easily spring up without any recourse for the isolated workers.

Undocumented Tasks - It is critical to a technology company to be able to have a very light and flexible work plan -- especially in Internet applications, as a traditional manager I would frequently ask programmers to quickly work out a feature or fix a bug verbally with no documentation -- body language clues would let me know that we were on the same page and this approach usually worked. Too frequently in the last year I've gotten one line IMs to do a quick task with no knowledge of the scope of that project, or seen my name in a passing email that listed me as working on task that needed to be far more defined before I could get started.

Without group interaction to make sure everyone on the team is working towards the same goals it is very easy to have poor work load distribution and duplication of learning code that is unnecessary.

Let me say that I AM a big fan of the virtual work force, if managed properly it can accomplish far more without office politics, loss of commuting time, and work place distractions. These and other benefits can truly motivate the new technology work force, contrary to the expectation that self-motivated virtual employees need less structure, quality management is MORE important and more costly in time and infrastructure than in traditional companies.

This morning Audrey and I went into the back yard to pick the first strawberries of the year. Picking fresh berries in the morning to mix with yogurt and honey is cathartic, too often my morning routine involves stressing out about all that needs to be accomplished. We don't have very many plants so the strawberries might last 3 weeks - maybe be 6 or 8 breakfasts.

These may not be the best berries I've ever tasted, but I'd rather have these then the largest, juiciest Florida berries. I cultivated the soil, planted the berries, added our own compost, kept them watered -- there are no chemicals or pesticides.

Picking berries has always been a favorite summer activity, we had 8 or 10 rows of strawberries on the farm growing up, and often we'd go to self pick strawberry fields to get enough to make jam -- Cultivated strawberries are great, but nothing compared to the wild berries in the roadside ditches of upstate New York. Every year I'd watch for signs while riding my bicycle to and from school -- every year I'd gorge myself on the tiniest berries and every year I'd get Poison Ivy covering my arms.

Next month the raspberries come into season -- my love of raspberries far outweighs my love of strawberries and my adventures to find wild raspberries growing up equaled that adoration.

I mean really, who keeps a vehicle for 14 years? So far the only person I've run into was the neighbors landscaper who is keeping great care of a 1978 Stake Rack. I started filming the wrecker putting my truck on the flat bed and I could barely hear myself think because his music was to loud, but when I heard Willie Nelson it brought a tear to my eye.

I met Brian Alvey in 1987 around a pool table in my college dorm. His wit and charisma drew me in, during one of our introductory conversations I mentioned to him an excellent sketch in the halls of the art building which looked to me like a medieval hunter with a skull on his head. Being the late 80s I was struck by the head shot as great D&D style art. Brian said, "Really ?, I drew that". Three weeks later in his dorm room, I accused him of stealing the drawing because I still didn't believe it was his work -- until after he showed me his sketch book.

I like to joke that Brian introduced me to Art and I introduced him to Computers, and he got the better end of the deal. Even though the Warrior System didn't get very far on my PC Clone, and I left Texas too soon after we met, I never lost the desire to work with Brian and the last year has been remarkable. AOL is losing a true visionary. I am overjoyed that after 20 years of "becoming respectable and respected", he is in the position to pursue his passion of comic books with all of his energies, I am sure he will do for comics what he did for blogs and online publishing will never be the same.

I went to my first Meetup last night, I think the New York Tech Meetup was a good venue for my first web instantiated real world activity. The forum was for 5 new ideas to be presented to the group (~350 people). A good crowd was on hand, it was good to get there early even though the event started late. The good seats filled quickly. I'm not really up on who's who in the internet world -- that's why I'll be attending more groups like this, but sitting next to me were Esther Dyson and Robert Tolmach. I am sure the room was littered with names I should know.

The presenters:

1) VentBox - A social site dedicated to finding people who think George Bush is a weenie. The highlight was when the founder described that he wanted to build a 'Swiss Army Knife' system on the web -- tons of attachment none of which are the best tool for the intended job.

2) Gatsb - A flickr meets twitter mobile phone picture geo tagging thingy - Scott tried very hard to excite the developer about his own product.

3) Mouse and the OLPC - 2 Mouse employees and two High School kids have had a chance to play with the OLPC and start thinking about global support for these devices -- what a great platform Meetup is for a socially conscious technocentric community to encourage the next generation.

4) Houseparty.com - 5 stars for having a real business model -- this company is off the ground and running - not sure why he demo'd something that is already a live and vital business, perhaps a warmup for doing a VC run.

5) Hitchsters.com - One suit and a sidekick - neither of which knew what platform or codebase their 'Idea' was built on.

Then came announcements. I like announcements, as a new person to the group it let me see who was looking for talent, who was looking for ideas, and who was selling things. Scott Heiferman event organizer and founder of Meetup said he is doing away with announcements because there was obviously too many. Here is my idea -- charge people for a mention, and give them a table in the back. In between each presenter Scott can read two sentences about each vendor. I love going to expo hall at conventions and will gladly stop by the tables after the event to talk with the 'vendors'.

There is no reason today to use any other tool to build a resume. In the spirit of full disclosure I share a common employer with the founders of Emurse, Gavin Hall and Alex Rudloff. They have been asking for a while for any feedback, I finally set down and used the product - I'm very impressed.

Emurse takes the mechanics, layout, and formatting out of the equation and lets you focus on the content of your resume. The entire site has a logical hierarchy and task flow. AJAX and CSS have been layered into this product completely for ease of use and never get flashy or cumbersome.
!!continued!! A great use of CSS is the tool tips while building your resume. At first they might appear cheesy and annoying, but if you actually read them, you'll find they give some great advice. They help make you stop and think about what you are saying about yourself. It's as though Emurse has given you great tools to speed up the building of a resume, and then put up a flashing caution sign, "please take your time" -- well played.

One thing that could be improved is the flexibility of the resume output, there seems to about 10-12 topical headers that you can choose from -- I'd like to make my own heading "Geniuses I've Apprenticed With", but there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to do so. I also found a couple of areas where the formatting of the resume didn't work like I expected and I question why they would go with wiki style formatting (probably for ease of coding), that could easily chase away non-tech geeks who want to put their own tweeks on the content.

There are a ton of feature packed into this site, stats, hosting, email, web badges, I won't go into all of them, the ones I've already used have been very handy. Perhaps too many features, one set of screens that should be rethought is the public side of the statistics system. It is impressive, but only a real web log junkie like myself would understand that much of the raw data they are displaying are search engine spiders indexing your resume.

SEARCH ENGINES SPIDERING MY RESUME ? Let me say it again. This is fantastic. While most resume sites bury you behind memberships and make the recruiters pay large sums to access their databases. Emurse puts you in control of your distribution. If you want to be found, you will be. I found over 1000 Emurse resumes with a simple Yahoo search. Even if self promotion and high visibility are not your goal, the ease of switching styles, templates and outputs formats makes this the only resume building tool a savvy job seeker should ever use.

Special shout out to Mike Propst for a really crisp professional design, if you get a chance, a media kit with better buttons and badges would make blog post like this look a lot nicer.

Lots of hub bub in the SEO world about Matt Cutts telling the world he is going to do something about Paid Link Farming. It seems the chickens have come home to roost. In the late 90s Altavista was doing tons of research about the composition of the internet. One interesting study I remember was the bow tie theory of linking. It stated that there were tons of sites that did nothing but link to quality content on one end of the bow tie, a small amount of sites in the middle that had quality content and linked to other quality content, and a ton of sites on the other end that had content and linked nowhere. Altavista spent so much money on research that no one wanted to fund them to put this data into action.

Upstart Google based their entire algorithm on studies like, eradicating link farms and giving us link popularity, they were so successful that whenever you do anything on a web site the owners will ask is this going to affect my Google Page Rank (Juice), when they should be asking am I creating a believable environment that has quality linkages to other good content on the web?

It's a little unfair to call Google a "One Trick Pony", many of their services are marked improvements over their competition. What made google great was giving us a better search experience through innovation. For 5 years they've relied on one over arching principle whose time is up. They need to innovate, not try to monopolize mind share with outdated principles - bandages like getting people to report who is using payperpost.com will and should fail.

Google has created a monetization for 'page rank' and published their popularity index. Website owners should not be penalized for capitalizing on their own fame. Some people do this through paid links - the quality sites will have full disclosure about sponsors and users know when they are being sold the Brooklyn Bridge.

One last thought on this topic, Jason Calacanis you are the poster child for full disclosure, shouldn't that include your relationship with everyone on your blogroll. The giant ad for ThisNext on the side of your blog? Would you really have that on your site if it wasn't your buddy Gordon Gould's product? Not all sponsored links are paid, actually the most insidious are nepotistic. Google how are going to hunt that down? Are we going to have to add yet another tag to every outbound link. Don't try to police the web through scare tactics and informants -- please go back to innovating.

Update: Jason has added to his Bio his relationship with ThisNext, evidently someone else called him on this since the payperpost podcast.

Or written the great american novel, or created the computer companion that I design when I was 12, or done any of those history making things that highly influencial and successful people do. I think it is because my brain looks like my laptop's desktop - often overly cluttered. Just this weekend I was trying to figure out how farmers gear up for Easter. Egg production just doesn't seem to me to be something that you can hire part-time chickens to help out with during the busy times. I grew up on a farm - I would even give pretty moving pep talks to the hens, but I never could convince them to double their production. I'm certain this type of information is just not needed inside my cranium, but I can't seem to find the trash bin.