What if Frontier had gone Open Source in 2001? I wonder how the landscape would be different now. The mission statement is quite nice, “to turn the Web into a fantastic writing environment.” Hat tip: Timmy.

Ping-o-Matic Announces A2B GeoLocation Support, rock on.

Coldforged has an entry title image replacement plugin that lets you have titles like mine (done previously) that also has word-wrapping. I think I saw an approach somewhere (was it b2evo?) that actually broke each word into a separate image. For me the length limitation isn’t a limitation as much as a sanity check, if I’m writing titles so long it breaks my site I should probably shorten up a bit. I’ve also found caching isn’t worth it, every title here has been completely dynamic for about a year now.

I just installed Windows Media Player for Mac. Doesn’t that sound wrong? Sometimes Microsoft’s naming and branding really throws me for a loop. Is there a Windows Media Player for Linux?

Rubhub, the hottest XFN aggregator around, has been redone. Check it out and get XFN Friendly.

Have you ever noticed how milk tastes better when you’re drinking it with something that’s just a little bad for you? It’s a beautiful balance.

I’ve been testing out a spam plugin that has been very effective. You can get Spambot Stopper on the WordPress support forums. It’s very simple, for more advanced protection check out the Combat Comment Spam page on the Codex.

I finally got internet hooked up at my house today. I ended up going with Comcast mostly because MJ sweet talked me into it. I just ran the speed test from DSL Reports on it and it came back 3469 down and 230 up. That’s over three megabits downstream, crazy! I could get used to this. Now I can finally get start getting things done from home again. (I had internet before but it was a patchy wifi connection that wasn’t reliable.)

I had the pleasure of lunch with Jeff Veen earlier today. I attend his and Doug’s Blogger Redesign workshop earlier this week and it was excellent, I’d recommend checking it out if you get a chance. I found out most of Adaptive Path’s material is published under a Creative Commons attribution license, which is very cool.

Anatomy of a WordPress Theme from Ryan the rockstar.

Another WYSIWYG plugin for WordPress. I think we have three now.

Top 100 American Speeches. Hat tip: Dan Hersam.

If you’re having trouble getting the new Firefox you can always get it from Download.com. (Needless to say it’s really fast from the office.)

Reger is a blogging system with different types of logs for every activity from running to what clothes you wore. It basically lets you attach certain types of data to posts and then graph it out. What’s neat is something like this could be implemented as a plugin for WordPress using custom fields.

Mary Hodder’s session on Core Values of bloggers is pretty interesting. They’re discussing trust and identity online, also editorial integrity and money. Excellent moderation. People who happen to be vendors can still give valuable feedback. For example, Brendon Wilson works for PGP, but he had something valuable to offer to the conversation about encryption that wasn’t tied to his company’s product or any specific vendor. I think everyone here is smart enough to smell a demo, as someone said earlier. Lunch was very interesting, talked a lot with Matt Shobe from Feedburner. The list: democracy, attribution, transparency, innovation, personalization, accessibility, honesty, creativity, who people are, editorial independence, connectedness. Bad: power law economics, lack of attribution, anononimity (good and bad), whuffie-hoarding, links for money.

I’m in Robert Scoble’s session and there was a minor episode between Bob Wyman and Dave Winer and a few people left, but I think things have calmed down a bit. What’s really striking me right now is how loud it is even though no one is talking. The clatter of everyone typing makes it sound like it’s drizzling outside. Lawrence Lessig is a very loud typist.

The Podcasting session by Adam Curry just finished up, it was interesting but I get the impression that they’re needlessly complicating things by recreating constructs that already exist in HTML. Wifi is terrible, I’m connecting through my cell phone and I’ll try to blog everything through that. I do have a few of the tiny WordPress stickers so if you want to show your WP pride here at the conference drop by and ask me for one. Dave Sifry tried to mention Technorati when he had the mic and got smacked down, so I’m going to avoid mentioning WordPress myself (even though it is and will always be totally non-commercial) but I think it’s free for other people to bring it up. Anyway, MJ is going to smuggle me in some nutrition so I better get back to that.