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Spent a bunch of time in the past few days pruning and organizing my feeds, and catching up on some blog reading. When I started, my feed inbox was at about 65,000 unread items. I’ve got it down to a much less daunting 22,491 unread items now.

I read about 400 feeds (well, the 65k unreads number tells you that I don’t *read* them all). If you’re interested in my reading list, and you don’t mind how dated, ugly, and messy it is, then by all means take a look. (Im working on improving it, and will post as update when it’s better.)

Information R/evolution is a five minute video telling the story of the transformation from a world of categorized information to a world of living information the we all enrich continually. It’s from the same guy (Michael Wesch) and in the same style as "Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us."

When his "Web 2.0," video came out I wrote that

Perhaps the so-called ’social web’ isn’t about connecting people, but about information conservation: If a person chooses to do something — no matter how small — it’s inherently interesting, precious, and valuable.

I still think that’s true, and I find more support in this new video:

Here is "Information R/evolution" by Prof. Michael Wesch:

Hap tip to the information aesthetics blog which is a great source for "data visualization & visual design."

I just registered on a shopping web site (to get some staples delivered). I clicked through to skim their privacy policy because some types of shopping sites share info in ways I’m not comfortable with. One section to pay attention to is "Using Personal Information." This one was pretty standard - not great but nothing unexpected. I was happy when I saw the following sentence/offer, as when given the chance I opt out of most mailings:

If you prefer not to receive this type of information from us, you can contact us at 1-877-723-3929 or online, click here.

So I clicked though. Dead link. "Sorry, there is no Safeway.com web page matching your request."

That’s encouraging. Thanks a lot.

(I hacked around for a bit and was able to find the correct link to update your safeway mailing and privacy settings.)

I submitted a session proposal for the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. There are about 600 proposed talks and panels. Only a fifth of those will be chosen. Though there’s an editorial aspect to the selection process, the primary factor is democratic. So, if you would, please take a moment to review the description of my session and vote for it if you find it interesting.

You need to register on their site before you can vote, but it only takes a second.

As the description says, the talk is based on a book I’m writing with Matt Sweeney. (Yes, writing a book. An exciting prospect, but a challenge, too.)

Here’s my talk’s page on their Panel Picker application. And here’s the description:

The State of Professional Front-End Engineering

An immense body of theory and practice in the front-end engineering discipline has evolved in the past decade, particularly in the past four years. This talk draws from my forthcoming O’Reilly book, separates signal from noise, and codifies the state of the art of Professional Front-end Engineering.

Thanks!

StartUp Camp 2 is this Monday in San Francisco.

Startup Camp is an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the various members of the startup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup where its the attendees that drive the agenda (in true unconference fashion).

I’m really looking forward to tasting the excitement in air and seeing all the cool projects. 100s of people have registered - it should be fun. (But the real reason work’s giving me the day to attend is so I can be on hand to help people realize their dreams using YUI.)

If you’re there, please come find me and say Hi (even if you don’t need YUI support).

I’ll keep this short: I’m looking for a few top-notch front-end engineers / web developers for some interesting and challenging projects. If you think that’s you, please drop me a note at nate at koechley dot com.