No, probably not.

I’ve been rediscovering an old blues musician I haven’t listened to since high school. Strange how I could have imagined some special kinship with the blind son of a tobacco farmer from North Carolina. Therein lies the power of music I guess. I love how his mischievous spirit comes across so strongly in his voice.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to the magic of YouTube: Sonny Terry.

Thru-You.com is my new favorite Web site. Check this video out first.

The title says it all.

(SOUTH PASADENA, Calif., March 2) Thursday March 5 is going to be Social Media Day here at Tumbleweed & Co. I am going to devote 12 straight hours to building my follower/following list on Twitter. I’m going to make comments on heavily trafficked sites like a crazy person. My main reason for doing so is merely to see what happens. Stumbleupon. Digg. Twitter. Delicious. Everything is open and fair game. Stay tuned for results.

[UPDATE (03/10/09): Sadly, this did not happen. I could blame taxes. I could blame a lot of things. But I'm still keen on the idea and will post what happens when I finally execute it.]

The other day I wrote somewhat cheekily about going to Popurls.com to quickly find something to write about. Here is someone talking about the more serious side of pinching original content from other Web sites. Lorelle on WordPress has declared this to be the Year of Original Content, as well as declaring war on plagiarism.

Is it better to post often even if you don’t always have much to say or to wait until you actually have something substantial and noteworthy before posting? What do you think?

When my reservoir runs dry and I feel I have nothing else to share with the Internet, I find myself heading over to popurls.com with the idea that I will find something there interesting enough to inspire a new train of thought. But most of the time I just end up piddling around and jumping from one site to another instead of actually doing any writing. A continuously replenishing font of links to news stories, blog entries, promoted pics, and scavenged videos, popurls.com has quickly become my aggregator of choice. (I will conveniently gloss over the fact that it’s been around since 2006, and I’ve just discovered it this past month.) Warning: a fair amount of the presented material is ribald and definitely NSFW. Excuse me for a few moments, while I go dig up something interesting from my new sandbox.

[...digging...]

I’m back. See, it only took me a few minutes to find something I can quickly regurgitate and, in doing so, pretend I’ve had an original thought. I’ll even include the video below, so you can watch it from the comfort of this very Web site.

“Can you believe we’re losing weight just by talking on the phone?”
From Internet Lurker

What did you learn from watching this video? That there was a surplus of wicker in the 80s? That there was a scarcity of commercial acting talent in the 80s? I learned that every age has its cure-all tonics which make wild promises about healing dyspepsia and shedding unwanted pounds. Sometimes they just come in the form of a two-piece weight-loss suit made completely of silver lamé.

A couple of things make me hesitate to believe that the man selling this book can, in fact, help me become a millionaire:

• The title of his Web page is The Art of Thought by Graham Walla. The last name of the book’s author is actually Wallas. Now, I’m not saying that one measly typo means you’ve lost all credibility in my book, but if you’re promising that your product can make me a millionaire, you better dot all your is and cross all your ts.
• The man hawking this book is wearing a Captain’s hat in a photograph he willfully posted on his site. (Also: unbuttoned shirt and sailor’s scruff ≠ millionaire)
  

  He obviously owns his own yacht.

• He probably does own a boat. And most likely, he lives on it.

I would save the $17 he is charging for the book. Instead, you could spend a couple dollars more and buy yourself one of these–and look like a million bucks.

This site promises to tell me all about my name, yet it’s got nothing when it comes to the origin of my name. It could tell me, however, that my power animal is the Sphynx Cat. And I thought it was the Snow Leopard.

It’s mostly useless information, like the fact that my name is  01010100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01000010 01100101 01100001 01101101 in ASCII binary. Just enough futility to slap some ads onto.