King  Gary 

Thanks to Google Blog Search, when people search for ‘american idol sanjaya‘, my blog post on Sanjaya being booted from the show is in the top 2 search results. (It was #1 for about an hour, until someone else dethroned me.) I find it pretty insane that my blog can now attribute the largest surge of traffic to none other than American Idol - thanks FOX for creating the show! Don’t you know that I’m secretly targeting the American-Idol-geeks demographic for my blog?

Some interesting things that I noticed off the bat, were that my site immediately hit 60 concurrent visitors within 5 minutes of making the post, and that comments came in to the post even before I finished editing it (I made the post, published it, then went back to edit it since it’s a time-sensitive post.) I also sent the post to Digg (typically, I would wait until someone else submitted one of my posts before Digging it, but this was a time-sensitive post, so I just did it myself) and so far, I’m at 52 diggs and its the item with the highest number of Diggs regarding this issue. What I don’t quite get is why Google’s main search engine doesn’t use any of the pages indexed by Google’s Blog Search - a search for ’sanjaya’ on my site brings up nothing on Google, but it works on the Blog Search.

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Popularity: 24% [?]

The b5media meetups have concluded. We’ve posted some of the photos from the events on Flickr. There are also some photos of the b5media public meetup, courtesy of Babak. I’ve had a great time meeting the guys from b5, especially Aaron Brazell, Christina Jones, and Darren Rowse, all for the first time.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

After a spur-of-the-moment idea, I whipped up a ‘Life timeline’ page, which shows major events that have taken place in my life. I try to add a little bit of graphical flare with the little icons, too It’s just something neat that I will maintain for as long as I can, and hopefully others will have some interest in looking at it, too!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Exactly two months ago today, I came upon a post over at TechCrunch that mentioned a genealogy website to create family trees, called Geni. I skimmed over the article, and it really appealed to me because my family has been trying to get a family tree going for quite some time now. I’m estimating that we probably managed to get nearly a hundred people connected to each other in our family, at the most, which is quite a number considering my family is spread out across 4 continents right now (I’m not sure if we have any presence in Australia.)

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Popularity: 31% [?]

The mesh conference 2007 is now officially selling tickets, and is now a go, according to the founders: Mark (whom I work with at b5media), Mathew, Mike, Rob, Stuart, and of course, the official conference blog.

Ah, yes, I’ve got good memories of last year’s inaugural conference. It was actually during that time that I finally decided to start a blog and keep it for at least a month; my first posts are in fact, about the conference itself!

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Popularity: 25% [?]

King Gary recently changed from fixed to flexible width, meaning now, if you stretch your browser window, the contents of this site will stretch with it. This is particularly useful for those people with 20″ monitors - myself included, when I’m at work (thanks b5)!

I can’t imagine why most websites would want to be fixed; most people I know have their browser windows maximized (whether they want to or not, since it’s the default setting I believe) and so the site could use all that valuable screen real estate that is usually filled with whitespace. I know that switching from a fixed to flexible width comes with some headaches regarding CSS, depending on how many divs you’ve got going, but for most sites, it seems well worth it (especially for ‘content’ sites, where there are articles and other large bodies of writing that populate the website.)

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Popularity: 19% [?]

For some reason, my iPod’s battery has been practically completely drained every day. I’ve had it for nearly 2 years, and it’s never been like that before. I was going to take advantage of my AppleCare for it, to replace the battery, but then I just so happened to Google for ‘iPod turns on automatically‘ and I luckily found blog posts that also had the same problems. It turns out that I forgot to turn off the Alarm feature of my iPod, which was turning it on at 8 am every morning! I had turned this on sometime last December, so you can imagine the relief that I have now, now that I’ve realized what the simple mistake was.

It would’ve been nice if iTunes had at least had an icon showing that would appear whenever the Alarm was enabled - it’s all that I ask!

Popularity: 20% [?]

As some people know, I purchased a Nintendo Wii about a week ago (from Pittsburgh, PA because they are extremely hard to find here in Toronto!) I’m having a great time with it so far, and have a few events planned and had a few that have passed where we’ve used it to play some games, such as WarioWare, Zelda, and of course, some Wii Sports. I’ve had it for a week now, and so I began to ponder: what else could I do with it?

There’s that Mac Mini that I have…

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Popularity: 40% [?]

In today’s world of information overload, it’s hard to keep up with all of the news going on in the blogosphere and the world. For me, there are several ‘containers’ where I keep information stored so I can refer to them when I want, including Gmail for email, Google Calendar for my schedule, Google Reader for my feeds, and a lesser known online service, ListMixer, which I use to save links temporarily (think of del.icio.us, but the links only exist for a maximum of 30 days). As of last count, I’ve got the following number of items:

• Gmail
  • Inbox: 1 unread
  • Starred: 4 emails
• Google Calendar
  • 17 events or to-do items for today
• Google Reader
  • 3 unread items
  • 23 starred items
• ListMixer
  • 50 items

Slow over time, this stuff piles up, even though the oldest item out of all of these containers is from less than a week ago!

Starring items to give them priority

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Popularity: 20% [?]

I intended on making this post last Monday but was busy with other things. I blame the lateness on the fact that I enjoy working at b5media far too much!

Like the CEO of b5media says, I am the newest addition to the b5media team! I really look forward to working with everyone there, and I intend to learn a lot during my employment.

Now, first off, here’s a bit of background information and other spiel on b5media, straight from its website:

b5media (www.b5media.com) is a global new media network featuring more than 150 blogs on a wide variety of subjects ranging from entertainment and news to technology and sports. With content written by passionate people from all over the world and visited by more than two million unique visitors a month, b5media is among the world’s largest online new media networks. b5media is based in Toronto.

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Popularity: 38% [?]