Technically Speaking

Yes, I have been around. Busy, busy. Miss me?

Check out my Tumblr blog

My Twitter stream

My Facebook

AIM (rexdixon2006), Skype(rexdixon1), etc.

Yes, even still keep a MySpace page going.

And somewhere out there I have a Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster account(s)!

Technically Speaking, if you can’t find me, you haven’t tried hard enough – because I’m pretty easy to find! If you didn’t get the GeoCities vibe, you missed the boat sometime back in ‘99.

I decided to do a fun little experiment of sorts over the weekend. I wanted to see if a tumblr site could actually get traffic. Wondering if people actually would read other people’s opinions on snippets of news stories. Now many of you have tumblr sites, and if you do, you probably are wondering if it’s worth clipping some news you saw and leaving your 2 cents.

Here are some results I thought I’d share from statistics that I am pulling straight from MyBlogLog. Now while your results could vary, I think by looking at the stats below, Tumblr can be a traffic driver or rather your tumbl could very well be read by many.

Yes, there was a perfect tie for the #2 spot of read posts yesterday. It seemed that people were equally enthralled Microsoft screwing over their fired employees (TechCrunch post), and MySpace China. Think that one was due to Rupert’s daughter’s picture? Not sure, but the offclick’s indicated that even though it was tech dominating the read, somehow the other bay area house snuck in there at the #3 offclick site.

One of the more interesting things I found was articles that I thought (I guess I shouldn’t think!) would be interesting to people, were not. Such human interest stories as the Iraq Veteran getting a gift pulled due to a marijuana conviction in 2005, even though that was re-tweeted by someone – it never seemed to gain much traction as a read story. In fact, you could almost considered it a buried story.

The sad thing is that this is a real person’s true story of having something taken away that he fully deserves, at least in my opinion – all veterans of the Iraq conflict deserve anything America can give back to them. No matter what past violations they may have committed. Sadly enough, the stories that ranked over this one were only interesting for a minute such as the Food Network star that F-Bombed in front of the King and Queen of Spain, that $700k house in SF from the day before – this must be quite a deal or something – and even George W’s visit to a hardware store where he was offered a greeter job.

Two more stories that started to surge and just went flat were the guy that was working 50 jobs in 50 states all in one year’s time, and the 11 year old kid that killed his step mother with a kiddie shotgun. Both of those stories were surging, and somehow at the end of the day, just fell out of contention for the top spots. Very strange how a story can start to take off, and just die.

Technically Speaking, I guess I do not know what people like to read about, or can only guess what might be popular or interesting. So far today – a story about saying good-bye to former employers I found in the LA Times is #1, while the #3 read story is providing the #2 offclick. Interestingly enough it’s a search site(Kosmix) I wrote about here.

Rex Dixon’s Tumblr, is where I have been putting more of the interesting items I surf across throughout the day. It’s nice to be able to leave a quick remark or thought about something and move on. Everyone should have a tumblr site, as we all scan a variety of sites, some of us scan the same sites, but we all have a niche bunch that some people will never find out about. Tumblr gives you a way to easily share all that.

As an example, this morning I found the Cave House that was for sale on eBay originally here. From there, I found the official Cave House site which has over 35 pages of pictures.

Last night I found a really cool article that Duff McKagan wrote in the Seattle Weekly. Did you know that he was a blogger now? Interesting. He writes some good stuff btw, on many different topics. Of course I find the disturbing items also, such as another puppy mill that was found in Missouri.

The nice thing is that you can see all the different items that I tumbl on my tumblr site to the right. So if this blog isn’t updated for a few days, have no fear, I’m probably just fine as long as you see entries on the tumblr blog. In fact, it’s much easier to leave a quick thought as you surf than having to write an entire blog post.

Also, as of last night I added Disqus commenting features to the tumblr site. So you can leave a comment on such items as whether you agree or disagree with Andreessen starting a VC fund right now. Of course this was @BRoodman who suggested this, and I’m glad that Disqus had easy instructions to add this quickly.

Technically Speaking, first there were blogs, than there was social networking, than came the 140 character micro-blogging that made twitter famous, FriendFeed provided a stream of data and now there is so much content out there – you only have time to leave commentaries – which tumblr provides. What’s next? Why not leave a comment to answer that question!

Well after re-loading the exports, the blog is mostly back. I’m calling it done. A lot of the old categories and tags don’t match up, but the posts for the most part are all intact, so that feels done to me.

I’ve been doing a lot of quick commentary type of posts on my tumblr blog lately. I’ve also discovered that blip.fm is pretty cool, though I have been too busy the past couple of days to play around with it too much. I believe it was down for a bit today, which means – it’s getting a wee bit more popular than it was before I started playing with it.

Technically Speaking, have a great weekend – So who do you prefer? JD Fortune or Michael (re: INXS)