After seeing fellow Portland writer Steven Walling’s post Changes Afoot, it occurred to me that I should update my status to reflect my recent changes also.

I am no longer covering the weekend news beat at ReadWriteWeb.  In my situation, the amount of time I had to spend writing and covering breaking news during the weekend was not conducive to a harmonious family life.  I do hope I can continue to be useful to RWW in the future, as working there has been one of the great experiences of my life and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude.  It’s hardly possible to properly thank Marshall Kirkpatrick and founder Richard MacManus for the opportunity they have given me.  Working with the whole RWW team has been a worthwhile experience for sure.

Right now I am continuing to work as a freelance writer and have begun to specialize in social media and community management.  I have been writing various articles for newspapers and magazines as well as online, but have also recently been looking for a “real job”.  I love freelancing, but the feast-or-famine nature of it is stressful now that I have a family to support.  I have come across at least a couple of exciting opportunities recently and for now I am keeping my options open.

I am determined to do what I am passionate about for a living, that’s just how I roll.  This is a exciting and challenging time for me, I’ll keep you posted.

This thing actually kind of sucks because I can’t add links when I post this way (from the “Hi, douglas. Whatcha up to?” box in this theme). What’s up with that and why didn’t I notice it before I installed the P2 theme? I guess it’s because I don’t really post here much.

My personal blog was supposed to be a real thing of beauty, my ticket to blogging super-stardom. In reality it’s kind of a piece of crap. I try to do this shit for a living and frankly this site doesn’t pay me, so I don’t work on it much.

Well anyway, just testing this out writing things nobody will ever read.

How’s your mother? Tell her I said hi.

This is an excellent presentation from Digital Journalism Camp PDX 2009. KGW Live @ 7 producer Aaron Weiss and StrangeLoveLive.com producer Mike Gebhardt (@drnormal) show us their best software and editing tricks to produce, edit and post videos on the Web.

I had occasion to remark yesterday about how cool I think Web archiving startup Iterasi is. My wife, owner of our small multimedia company, had discovered that one of the Websites she designed and built for a local sign company had been changed. There was apparently a spat between the owners about money and someone did not want to pay for any more Website changes or updates. They were happy with Robin’s work, they just thought they could save some money on Web maintenance.  You know how that goes, right? Some secretary or intern has a Facebook page and maybe a cool blog and convinces the boss that they can update and maintain the company site for a lot less money. Anyway, the end result is that Robin can no longer use that site in her portfolio because it’s a mess now. Most people I bitched to about this problem told me to try Wayback Machine, an internet archive for researchers, historians, and scholars.  The Wayback Machine is great, but there were no matches for this particular local small business site.  It’s not really that big of  deal, she has plenty of good Websites for her portfolio, but I feel kind of dumb for not archiving it myself.  This whole mess could have been avoided if we had archived the entire site in Iterasi.

Some of you may be unfamiliar with Iterasi and what it does.   I am not going to review it here for you now, but I will tell you it is one of my favorite internet apps ever.  Rick Turoczy described it best when he called it “your own personal Wayback Machine”.   Admittedly, I haven’t used it much lately, but that’s going to change.  I mostly use it to archive my own writing for various outlets and other projects.  You can check out my public archives here.

As fate would have it, call it some sort of cosmic synchronicity if you will, I was reading my favorite local Portland tech blog Silicon Florist today and the headline read: PositivePress: Iterasi uses Web Archiving Technology to Track Traditional and Social Media Coverage.  Sweet!

Basically the company has “retooled” its technology, updated its site and added some functionality for tracking and archiving traditional and social media sites.  The cool part is that it’s using good ‘ol RSS to feed its archiving engine.  According to Iterasi CEO Pete Grillo:

We really didn’t have to look too far to find the best method to monitor and capture interesting stories on the Web. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is both simple and ubiquitous. It is simple in that it exists on virtually every news source, blog, search engine and social media source. Most browsers identify RSS feeds automatically. RSS has emerged as the de-facto technology used throughout the Internet to pass information. Think of RSS as the silk that makes the Internet into a Web. From simple tools like browser-based readers to complex programming tools like Yahoo Pipes, RSS is the answer to subscribing to information flow in the Open Web.

To learn more about Iterasi and its exciting new changes, be sure to check out the Iterasi blog.  While you’re at it, follow the company on Twitter @Iterasi and definitely go bug CEO @petegrillo for his latest omelette recipe.    His own personal archived pages on Iterasi are pretty darn interesting also, you can pick your way through those here.

At WebVisions 2009 http://www.webvisionsevent.com/ I’m the Tech in Room B119

Leah Buley; Good Design Faster

Make it great. Colleagues and clients always want results sooner. How can you deliver without compromising quality? In this workshop, Leah Buley will show you how to use design sprints and lo-fi design techniques to achieve remarkable productivity in relatively short time.

I am trying out this badass new WordPress theme.

CyborgCamp Wrap-up — Thanks For Coming!

Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg

10 Things You Forgot Gmail Could Do

G1’s Android Web Browser in Action

The wheels on the bus go round and round…