While I’m not around as much as I used to be or would like to be, evidence of my continued existence on this planet and in this internet can be found…

…if you know where to look.

Herewith, a brief rundown of those other places on the ‘net where I tend to pop up from time to time (even if those times are few and far between). If you have an account on any of the following services, feel free to add me as a contact, friend, or whatever the respective term is.

Update: Fixed all the links so they’re not broken. Heh. Oops. Should all work now.

• More likely to have some evidence of me poking around:

  • My primary website, eclecticism, which can be syndicated on LJ via woody_eclectic.

  • Flickr, where all my photography gets posted. Lately, this has been getting more attention than any other aspect of my online persona.

  • del.icio.us collects my daily" title="this is nifty links. This is the source for the (hopefully not too annoying) daily-ish linkdump that pops up here on LJ, and for the same (but more constantly updated) list on the sidebar of Eclecticism.

  • Library Thing is my book collection. The ‘reading’ tag is whatever I’m currently working my way through, while a quick glance at my author tag cloud will give a quick overview of my reading habits. Suggestions are always welcome.

  • Upcoming.org, where I post events around town that I might be either considering or actually dragging myself out of the house to wander down to.

• Not quite as likely to be actively poked at, but still often showing signs of my existence:

  • Amazon.com, where I occasionally shop and toss things into my wish list on the off chance that someone might feel generous and rich.

  • Last.fm tracks every single song I listen to. My current playlists are a little skewed due to a hard drive crash that lost about 90Gb (yes, gigabytes) of music, but it’s not completely off base. Yes, my musical tastes really are that varied.

  • I haven’t had as much time to keep up with Metafilter as I’d like, but they’re still one of (if not the) best linklog on the ‘net.

  • MySpace. Sadly, yes, I too have been sucked into the sucking black hell of MySpace. I don’t check in very often, but I do exist.

  • Much like MetaFilter, my Slashdot presence has dwindled down to very little. However, it’s still amusing to look back on the insanity of when I got Slashdotted. Yes — I’m that guy.

  • I used to be pretty active in the Yahoo chatrooms, but gave up on that years ago. There’s still a few friends in the Yahoo-verse, though, so I keep this somewhat up to date. Somewhat.

• Not really used at all, but I have an account and occasionally remember to check in to see if I need to pay attention to anything:

  • 30 boxes, an online calendar/time management system.

  • OK Cupid, home of stupid little ‘net quizzes.

  • Tagworld, yet another social networking system, this one jumping on the tagging bandwagon.

  • Tribe.net, one of the few of the early social networking sites to still be around.

Frozen ground beef panties?

Y’know, there’s some kinks I just don’t need to know about.

(Found on this Yahoo! News article.)

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Wow. Straight from Jay Allen:

Six Apart has announced in co-operation with Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and other blog vendors a massive joint anti-spam initiative based on the HTML link type rel="nofollow".

The initiative is based upon the idea of taking away the value of user-submitted links in determining search rankings. By placing rel="nofollow" into the hyperlink tags of user-submitted feedback, search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site.

[…]

It is important to note that while the links will no longer count for PageRank (and other search engines’ algorithms), the content of user-submitted data will still be indexed along with the rest of the contents of the page. Forget all of those silly ideas of hiding your comments from the GoogleBot. Heck, the comments in most blogs are more interesting that the posts themselves. Why would you want to do that to the web?

Now, the astute will point out that because links in comments/TrackBacks are ignored by the search bots, the PageRank of bloggers all around the blooog-o-sphere will suffer because hundreds of thousands of comments linking back to their own sites will no longer count in the rankings. And that is most likely true. But that inflated PageRank, which was a problem created by the search engines themselves, is the rotting flesh that the maggots sought out in the first place. If you ask me, I say fair trade.

In the end, of course, this isn’t the end of weblog spam. But because it completely takes away the incentive for the type of spamming we’re seeing today in the weblog world, you will probably see steady decline as many spammers find greener pastures elsewhere. That decline combined with better tools should help to make this a non-issue in the future. Every little step counts, some count more than others, and history will be the judge of all.

Very cool. Also very similar to a technique I was using a couple years back, though that was geared to blocking off areas of the site to ignore rather than affecting individual links. Either way, though, it’s a big step forward. I’m especially heartened to see the list of competing companies and weblogging systems that are participating in this.