10th Anniversary

Ten years ago I joined Blogger.

That doesn't make it my oldest blog, but it is a milestone for my affiliation with the Google empire.

There isn't one of the services shown in this image I haven't at least tried during the last decade. Many I still use on a daily basis.

Google has become the AOL of the 21st century and web 2.0. But to be fair, it's AOL done right, or at least better for productivity.

Someday soon I expect Blogger entries to automatically show up as posts to Google+. Eventually all of Google's widespread services will interconnect. I'll be able to link to videos at YouTube, pictures at Picassa, documents from Google Docs and you'll be able to find them all using blog search. While the current debate is centered around Google+ versus Facebook, the larger debate will be over a Google identity versus a Facebook profile and which will become a more ubiquitous passport to every website and service. And the biggest winners in that debate will be the advertisers.

Jeber's is dead, long live Jeber's

After many years of posting to my blog at jebers.com and evidently far too many updates to the WordPress framework, that site is totally broken. Years of posts have been lost, site functionality is completely borked (a technical term meaning damaged beyond repair) and I have run out of ideas as to how to restore it to its former self.

For now and possibly well into the future I'm redirecting jebers.com to this blog, one I've been using almost as long as the former jeber's site. It doesn't appear that I can import any of the posts to the other site into here, they're just gone.

I went through this with another blog not long ago, one that was pretty popular if my host's stats can be trusted. It was a traumatic loss at the time but I've gotten over it. No doubt I'll get over the loss of jebers.com as well.

I've also lost a lot of trust in the WordPress platform and my host, 1and1. Since Google owns Blogger I doubt I'll encounter the same problems here I'm experiencing on my 1and1 site. I may even move my tech blog over here. Why not. I've pretty much become a commodity of Google's anyway. It almost feels like I'm back in the 1990's and Google is AOL.

For a blog, content is king. When my content disappears I get irritated. If Google can offer the kind of stability others cannot, then I'll put my trust in them and divorce myself from WordPress and 1and1.

So let me welcome those of you who have bookmarked jebers.com and are wondering how you wound up on jackcarlson.net. I appreciate your interest and support. I welcome your comments and feedback.

Jebers.com may be down for the count, but Jeber will survive.

Dear readers

Just a quick note.

In the next day or two this blog will have a new URL: www.jackcarlson.net.

As soon as the DNS records update the old URL will redirect to the new one. You will want to update your bookmark for this blog.

Thank you for continuing to read and respond to my blog.

Jack (Jeber)

I'm still alive, I think

I've just been a bit distracted.

There's this new service called Google+ and since I joined up a couple of weeks ago I've managed to log out of it for several minutes at a time.

Realizing that real-time conversations beat the heck out of blog posting (then waiting sometimes forever for a comment or reaction), I've cut down dramatically on the number of blogs I maintain, from more than 8 to just four. Now when something comes up on a social network that I want to expand on I can blog about it in whichever blog is most appropriate. And since it's highly likely that Google will at some point incorporate Blogger into the Google+ family of related sites, this blog is the most obvious one in which to expound on topics first raised in Google+.

So this blog will cease being my "everything that interests me" blog. That honor is bestowed upon jebers.com, my primary personal blog. I also will begin keeping jebersblog.com updated more frequently with tech tips and discussions, especially about Macintosh, since my MacBook and iPad have become my primary computing devices. I'm keeping my jeberjabber.typepad blog for purely sentimental reasons. While not the first blog I started, it was the first blog I started (in 2004) that still exists.

Stick with me, folks. I think the year ahead is going to be one wild ride for social networking and the ever growing Google empire.