Barney Pell's Weblog

Merging of ecommerce and social networking

The merging of social networking and ecommerce is heating up...

• Overstock.com launches "reputation networks" (see article below)
• buy.com acquires metail.com
• tribe.net reaches 1 million classified postings
• I also heard about a site called "shopularity", who are still under the radar.

Present Life of Mars, but will NASA keep the lights on?

Space.com jumped the gun with an article with the headline: NASA researchers claim evidence of present life on Mars.
The intro is below: 

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

More features on my new blog

After a couple hours, I've now exercised most of the tabs on typepad. I found it pretty easy to select various types of links to include and to control their placement, to upload a photo and bio for my about-me pages, and even to start publishing a list of my friends. 

My first post

Welcome to my first blog posting.  I just finished composing a blog all about first blogging experience, but then lost my content when I clicked the button to customize display of the editing page on typepad (What a shame). 

To create my first blog, I had to make several significant choices.

First, I thought I what kind of blog I wanted, and who would read it. I decided for now that my blog would be about whatever I was interested in, for whoever wanted to read it.  Yes that's vague and probably violates the first few laws of media publishing, but I figure I can always subcategorize or even split off into multiple blogs.

Having chosen to base the blog on anything of interest to me, I chose to name my blog "Barney Pell's Weblog", rather than something more random, thematic, or specific. 

• I was  lucky enough to have the URL http://barney.typepad.com still available.  Luke Nosek is sitting with me now, also creating his own first blog. He was jealous that "barney" was still available, as he had to settle for http://lukenosek.typepad.com, which is not bad at all.  Plus he will probably replace it with any of his thousands of domain names.
• I chose typepad as many people I know are using this or moveable type already (e.g. Ross Mayfield, Auren Hoffman, Joi Ito, Andrew Chaiken, Alex Jacobson).
• I chose the power user version, and mixed media with three columns, so I could use all the advanced features (just in case).

With that, I'm off to submit this and then see what other advanced features I can play with.  The main question running through my head is how quickly I can copy the cool elements from other typepad blogs I see out there, like lists of books and movies, links to other bloggers, lists of categories, etc.  I will categorize my blog-about-blogging posts with the "weblog" category, and use other categories for less self-reflective content going forward.