Welcome, Camilo!

Loyal readers of this weblog may have noticed that we haven’t exactly kept up with the original three-to-seven posts a day pace that I first established in that heady summer of 2002. I’ve been busy with my new job and my other blogs and my other contributors have their own blogs and pursuits distracting them as well.
Hey, I don’t think we’ve even posted about Google’s new blog search tool (which I’m not impressed by, yet).
So, here’s my solution: new blood.
Please welcome Camilo Ramirez as a new contributor to this weblog. Camilo is a Colombian economist recently relocated to the Bay Area, with a passion for online communities and a desire to understand what is the the future of our virtual interacting environments. Camilo’s background includes math, environmental studies and media, and he is currently watching how ideas and communities evolve through the interaction and transformation of values and customs as new ideas and applications emerge.
Since moving to the Barea, Camilo’s been making the rounds of geek dinners and blog conferences and blog dinners and geek conferences and he is full of interesting ideas and insights about the future of blogging. He and I were carrying on a fascinating email correspondence when I asked him if he might be interested in putting some of his thoughts down here at RFB. He agreed, and I am pleased to welcome him to the team.
This weekend I’ll update the sidebar to add Camilo to the contributor list. I may also rethink what else appears there. Perhaps some of the other blog entries from the Telegraph publishing empire would be valuable. There was a time when I used RFB as my everything-blog before it reverted to being just a blog about blogging and a blog about blogging about blogging (but never a blog about blogging about blogging about blogging).

Liza, let's flip the switch

Let’s update the modules and flip over to your awesome design and then ask readers to beta test it for us on their browsers?
I want to get all the Mediajunkie blogs up to the best possible standards of 2.661 installs, and then think seriously about MT 3.0 vs. WordPress vs. Scoop vs. Drupal.
I’m starting a new job in July. It’s a blogger’s dream job and I’ll give more details about it when I can but it’s somewhat political so I have to play some cards close to the chest.
The cool thing is that early next week (after a lot of sleep) I’ll be done reviewing galleys and my book will be in the can and I’ll have three rules of robotics:
1. Promote the book.
2. Do my new job, unless conflicts with promoting the book.
3. Write full time/blog, unless conflicts with the new job or promoting the book.
The cool thing is that to a large extent 1, 2, and 3 will all be the same thing or will all be about the same thing. My book, the consulting, the blogging will all be proofs of each other’s concepts. It’s hard to explain but I just saw a sample design for the book’s site (the blog will end up in a subdomain) and it looks really good.
Craig Newmark wrote a great foreword! He and Scott Heiferman and Howard Rheingold all gave me very kind quotes for the back cover.
Om Malik (of GigaOm and Business 2.0) wished me well and offered to help publicize the book.
Mike Bazeley and the Merc is apparently writing something about JD and me and others using wikis or blogs to solicit input into books in progress.
I’ve seen almost all the chapters and the fun thing is people could just skim the pull quotes and get a lot out of the book. It really is almost like a symposium with many people contributing their voices to the message.
Why am I talking about The Power of Many? Mainly because I’m nearly done and I’ve been on a semi-hiatus while I wrestled with deadlines and I expect to do a lot more work on my weblogs and community sites in the next few months but I will probably give the POMblog right of first refusal on material that overlap with RFB, just ’cause – the book man. I mean blogs are cool, but wikis are the new blogs, anyway, aren’t they?
So, let’s give RFB that facelist, move it to Scoop, offer a diary feature and the ability for the readership to select the best submissions for inclusion on the home page. What say ye?

Editorial discussion imported

OK, I think I got everything. Assuming it looks OK, I’ll be deleting the separate editorial blog soon. In the meantime, to catch up on the conversations of Blogistan’s contributors, load up the Editorial category page.

My new book project

Today, my publisher approved a book I’m going to write between now and next March tentatively to be called The Power of Many with a subtitle of something like How Craigslist, Howard Dean, and Match.com are changing the ways we connect.
As with my canceled blog book, I am hoping to do this book in a bloggy way, tracking links in a blog, inviting others to comment, kibitz, and contribute, and networking like hell when the book is closer to comnig out. It should come out in June or July, timed to when the election is heating up.
I’m pretty excited about this project, as it is a chance for me to progress as a writer from teh tech-documentation ghetto I’ve been laboring in for a decade to more narrative style nonfiction. In the meantime, between the book and the campaign I will probably ease back even further posting to RFB, except as a way to let steam escape.
I did change the Collaboration and Community category recently to “people to people” and I may occasionally blog related stuff there, particularly when it connects to blogging and social software, as some of my book will inevitably do.
I’ve also started a new blog for the book itself (The Power of Many that will have to remain password-protected until the book is listed in Books-in-Print, in early February). You are all welcome to read it. The username is book and the password is sesame.
If any of you guys would like to have posting rights to the blog (post relevant links, or just ideas), just let me know. I suspect Rayne might and I bet filchyboy will be an excellent resource for the dating chapter! (The book isn’t just about politics and democracy and Dean.)

Radio Free Malkovich

Malkovich Malkovich

RFB badge

Hey, look at the left column of this blogorrhea blog. There is a kinda cool badge for RFB that I guess the blog owner made?

Shelley to the rescue

Looks like Shelley Powers has addressed the exact trackback-ping-not-rebuilding-the-archive-page and thus not-showing-up-inline-automatically problem I was just noticing: Weblogging for Poets: Adding Trackback entries to individual archive pages
BTW, we’d better get password protection going here soon, or make a conscious decision to leave this site visible to random visitors, because Andrew lists it among his RSS subscriptions and I am profligately pinging Burningbird’s Weblogging for Poets entry with this post.
Speaking of which, thank goodness for our metablogging headlines on the RFB home page. It enables me to quickly scan a few of the leading metabloggers and is often the first place I notice a breaking blog story.

More trackback problems

I saw that “life – listed chronologically” sent a trackback ping to Rayne’s latest post but it doesn’t show up on the archive page. My theory is that the page is not being rebuilt automatically as it is when comments are posted. To check this, I will rebuild the page manually. If the trackback appears, that will confirm my diagnosis of the problem. If not, then I’ll have to keep digging.
If I’m right, does anyone know how to wire things up so that incoming trackback pings automatically rebuild the relevant archive pages? I’m not sure if they currently rebuild the index page, or if that page just gets regenerated so often that they tend to show up there fairly soon.

Tweaking the sidebar here

I figured the link back to RFB proper should be bigger and easier to click on, so I sort of combined two sidebar-title/sidebar elements from before.

Template access

filchyboy, you now have access to the templates at RFB. Anyone else want in?
Please everyone check around before trying out changes. Best to demo them over here first as Liza will be doing.
filchy, i didn’t give you config access. Do you need that?