Longtime readers know that I love to fish and have posted photos here of some fairly large striped bass I’ve caught over the years. My friend James “Stickman” Waldron spent the last few years putting together a documentary about Plum Island fishing, where I do most of my striped bass fishing. The video is in high-def and features some great footage, new and old, of fishermen hooking up with some amazing fish, and sharing great stories about one of the best bass fishing spots in the world.

Reel People: Fishermen of Plum Island is now for sale. As a bonus, yours truly is featured on the cover. If love striped bass or know someone who does, this is a great holiday gift.

Make Your Own iPhone App.

Too lazy to come up with your own status updates? Try Generatus.

Wonder why nobody is visiting your site? Usertesting.com.

Upgraded blog to Thesis theme.

Whether you’re operating online or off, creativity is the key to your future success. Messing with code, switching themes, and constantly changing the variables of your work environment are all things that stifle creativity and force you to fight uphill battles.

Stop settling for inefficiencies, and instead, start focusing on the creative things that you can do to extend your reach and your own effectiveness. If you’re running a Website to help you accomplish this (and you darn well should be!), then you can use Thesis to remove these fundamental site-building obstacles, and this will leave you with more time to focus on the things that will yield higher returns down the road!

Get Thesis, and quit fighting battles that are already won!

Amazing underground cavern Stockholm Data Center.

OpenID and oAuth Summit.

For years now, blog comments have been treated like second-rate citizens. I was an early user of SezWho on TheProgressBar, then moved to Disqus, and back in the day played around with CoComment. All of these systems are ok in one way or another, but they also have their faults.

Recently I read about Reblogging on Disqus.

Now on comments throughout DISQUS, you can find a reblog link where you can publish a quotation of the comment to your blog. This quote is cited with the original author, the blog where it originally appeared, and a link back to the original comment to give the discussion full context.

Take a look at BackType, which aggregates comments from blogs and makes them searchable.

Via TechCrunch.

I’ll be at Vox at 7pm tonight for the Shel Holtz tweetup. Haven’t seen my social media peeps in a while.

I turned 40 today. It’s been quiet around here, most of the blogging has been over at OnlineDatingPost.com, where I’m helping several anti-fraud companies partner with social networks and dating sites. I’m still doing some social media consulting, waiting for clients to deploy some of the services we developed.

Anyone who has lived around Boston will enjoy this video of Ollie Smoot, the MIT student who’s height was used years ago to measure the length of the Mass Ave Bridge- 364.4 Smoots and one ear, which converts to 2,164.8 feet. Story at Boston.com.

James Nachtwey, who’s War Photographer documentary I absolutely loved, is breaking a story on October 3 and has asked people to add a widget to their blog to promote the story. The link the widget in this post points to will change on the third to reveal the true story.

James Nachtwey is preparing to reveal his photographs, which highlight a shocking and underreported global crisis. Over the past 18 months, the TED community have been working with James to gain access to locations he wished to photograph, and to prepare spectacular plans for unveiling these pictures.

I cannot wait to see what this is!

My friend Thomas pointed this out to me today. Google certainly has a sense of humor when it’s not being evil.

I just participated in my first Social Media Blitz. courtesy of BlitzTime. Blitz’s are similar to speed-dating, but over the phone. The BlitzTime website has a place for you to fill out a profile. When you are connect to a person, the page refreshes and their profiles comes up. The countdown timer begins, and you chat for four or so minutes.

I think it’s a great concept. A phone is all that’s required to meet 12 people interested in a particular topic.

The BlitzTime website worked flawlessly from my perspective, although some people said they couldn’t see my profile.

BlitzTime facilitates conversations, they don’t get in the middle or intrude, which is nice. You can see who you talked to during your sessions, and easier refer to their profile, which usually contains a link to their LinkedIn profile. There is a link to email them directly as well. I’ve already received a handful of Twitter followers, LinkedIn requests and emails asking to keep in touch.

Leslie Poston (@geechee_girl) lead off the conversation for the first 10 minutes. She writes for Mashable and knows her social media.

The overview consisted of an introduction to Twitter and how to get the most out of it. Talk about yourself, be interesting, etc. The conversation quickly centered on dealing with the firehose of information that spews forth from Twitter. It’s overwhelming trying to follow all conversations and Leslie has a number of suggestions on how to deal with information overload, including scanning, feeling ok about jumping around conversations, and most importantly, at least for me, to have your A-list important people’s tweets pushed to your phone. She changes her list of people who tweet to her phone monthly, much as I change the blogs in my blogroll.

Mentions Twhirl and TweetDeck.

Neighbor started screaming, had to leave to check it out, nothing serious.

Mentions Ping.fm, social network aggregator service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

The we jumped in to the actual Blitz’s. Here’s who I talked to:

Jake @MushyGushy, Steven Harper @ Plan 2 Win Software, sales software, Peter Ganzel @ Resources Global Professionals, Mike Sachleben President @ Blitz Innovations, Mae Mason, Mutha Mae’s Word To Your Mutha (hilarious voiceover talent), Lisa M. Forbes @ Perfect Solutions- A Virtual Assistants Group, Deb Mullen @ Send a Card on Me, Leslie Poston (@geechee_girl), social media guru who did the initial 10 minute intro, Michele McCormack @ CloudOutLoud, we talked about clubbing in NYC in the early 90’s, memories!, carl wirth, building and developing ways for autistic individuals to deal with life, Larry Lawfer @YourStorys, use your clients stories as your marketing message. Digital content library of stories about why you are so great, Rick & Rebecca Blayney @ SendOutCards,

Whew, a session with nobody else on the line, perfect timing, was getting overloaded. Patience and a succinct pitch tailored to what they say in their profile. Sometimes it’s ok to just talk about the Red Sox for a minute or two and catch your breath.

I wonder why there were several e-card and paper card vendors.

Overall, my first big BlitzTime was a positive experience. I’ll definitely attend more. In fact, I’m leading a discussion about how executives can leverage Facebook at their company on Friday. I think it’s important to make sure the topic of a Blitz is closely aligned with your needs. On the other hand, jumping into a Blitz about custom cars or cooking could be fun.

Skype tried to do these time and topic-based conversations, but I believe they ended up closing down the service. BlitzTime should be able to pick up a large market if they promote the service to the right people and in the right places. So far they are doing a great job influencing the influencers.

I needed to get these links out of my draft folder before they got to stale. Sometimes you end up bookmarking things to blog about later, then life gets in the way and all of a sudden you have 20 links you want to share and not enough time to blog about each one.

Code Rush, the Mozilla Documentary from 2000

Dot-bomb stories- Forrester Research Social Computing guru Jeremiah Wang:

The “e” from the Exodus logo that formerly used to reside on the HQ building. It’s currently in my garage, and I look at it every time I park my car –because I want to remember.

Brandstreaming - brands leveraging Twitter and other lifestreaming services.

Beautiful And Original Product Designs

Apple concept would warn iPhone users ahead of dropped calls

Data Portability Project Wiki

Forget Disintermediation, Focus On Open Data Exchange

Skitch - I am totally and completely blown away at how cool Skitch is. Every day I learn a new tip or trick and the flickr integration and other options are brilliant. I’ve been looking for a great lightweight image editor for years, have tried them all, nothing comes close to Skitch. I hope Flickr buys them.

Arrington and Calacanis talking about TC50

Harpers Weekly

Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Kind of like the Mac Spotlight search, but in the browser, with much more functionality.

Salesforce.com- $100 for basic setup for one person for one year. $800 to be able to access via iPhone. FAIL!

Adapting Websites to Users

Did you know that Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is launched, Tributes, for those who have left this mortal coil?

Having found the deceased have thousands of memorial posts on their MySpace pages it appears Taylor saw dollar signs for all those pageviews. But what sort of ads to place next to the online obituaries?

By harvesting the U.S. Death Index, Tributes will automatically have a listing for everyone who dies, or who has died since 1936.

Obituary aggregator, effective grieving, verifying the loss of of loved one, the whole idea makes my skin crawl. Especially the turn of phrase “I’m extremely bullish about this business — it’s not a question of if it will explode, but when.”

I wonder how the Eons board feels about this. “We didn’t do so well with Boomers, let’s focus on the dead.”

I’m surprised AARP hasn’t cornered both markets already.