After many conversations with my better half I have decided to join her in doing this years 192 mile Pan-Mass Challenge bike ride in August. This will be my second year in a row which had something to do with the decision. I plan on doing this Cancer fundraiser as long as friends and family; you, continue to support me. Johanna very much wanted to do this years ride however she isn’t sure if she will do it ‘ever year’ (in a perfect world she will).  We both felt that consistency in my doing this event was the most important factor.

This was no easy decision to make, Johanna and I are now on the line for $8,400 in donations to raise. We are just over half way there and would greatly appreciate your support. I have no clue how to get to this magic number in this awful economy, I only know that I can try, if you have given in the past please consider CHOPPING that donation in HALF! Any amount will help.

To donate - > http://www.pmc.org/YL004

For those new to why I do this ride and learn more about my Son’s successful year long battle against Leukemia, click here.

The other reasons I’m riding:

1. I can help, I can do something that will chip away at this nasty disease that affects so many of our loved ones.
2. The overwhelming envy that i will feel watching and cheering my wife on, I’m not a good spectator.
3. I can.
4. My good friend Dave Tyler announced he is doing the ride. It was a sign.
5. Momentum, last year I was able to raise a lot of money, knowing they need it more then ever this year is a driving force.
6. Making a donation today, no matter how small, will make your day; guaranteed.
7. I can.
8. Having Ethan around after his cancer battle is like Christmas and My birthday rolled into one, every day. This is my way to give back.
9. I want to ensure no family goes through what mine went through.
10. Fuck you cancer.

Facebook fan pages are popping up everywhere in the Lotus community, might as well follow suit, anything to promote the fine blogging that has been going on over the years!

Let me know what you think. If you have ideas of how to enhance the page let me know, I’m always up for suggestions.

PS: A special thanks to Chris Toohey for the page suggestion.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Planet-Lotus/99056356846?ref=mf

-Yancy

Last year I throw out a challenge to the Lotus community to make the PMC charity event our virtual community charity drive. The Lotus community responded to the tune of $6,484.72!

Thank you to everyone that participated!

http://charity.planetlotus.org

Overall this year’s events will be almost the same as last years. For one, I will be doing two unofficial events. A marathon, completed yesterday and second, a 148 mile one day bike ride. Why two unofficial events you might be asking?… guilt. My wife Johanna was so motivate during my ride last year that she has signed up for this year. Given that we have 3 small children it would be very difficult for both of us to do it. In response I’ve signed up for those other endurance events so you’d know that I would be suffering along side her ;). So if you would mind my wife is riding, but it’s in honor of the same boy, our oldest son Ethan.

Given the economic climate and a newer release of Notes, I have lowered the Premium Sponsorship amount. Any donation => than $88.50 (based on Notes 8.5) , can have their post on the Donor List, located at http://charity.planetlotus.org and http://planetlotus.org customized with the URL and text (up to 140 characters) of your choice.

So, if you’re at all thankful for what Planet Lotus has done for your blogs readership, please consider this a way of giving back. If you’ve enjoyed reading what the site has to offer and how it offers it, consider this a way to give back.

Thank you in advance for your generosity and remember the economy is shrinking, but the number of lives affected by cancer is not.

UPDATE: Thank You to Kathy Brown and Roy Rumaner for staring off the 2009 campaign before it was announced!

Twitter Integration

Posts made to twitter.com/planetlotus will no longer show up on the main PL page. Instead it will now be use to post PlanetLotus content to those following… on twitter. If you’ve been following planetlotus you’ve probably noticed “What’s Hot” posts have been there for about a week now, other info on PL will be posting over time, events, downloads, etc.

ReTweets or RT: You can now retweet any blog post that shows up on the front page by clicking phone looking icon.

Time

The EST/EDT timestamp is gone. In it’s place is an abbreviated twitter style ‘about x hours ago’ value. (mouse over the abreivated value to see more detail). This new timestamp will be propigated around the site over time.

Other Projects

Have you seen http://www.planetbook.org? It’s been a fun side project to help readers find a good book. It aggregates posts from the 228 highest ranked Amazon book reviewers and posts them to the front page and twitter. I’m waiting for Thomas “Duffbert” Duff, currently ranked #22, to do a review of the review site. How awesome would that be! As of now there are 1,344 followers following http://twitter.com/planet_book not a bad start.

Broadcastr is plugging along.  If you know anyone interested in intranet micro-blogging (in-house twitter), please pass along the link:  Broadcastr.net.

And then there is http://planetsharepoint.org I’m sure many are aware of its existence however I hardly ever talk about it. As you can tell it’s more vanilla then PL and in a way will be over time the showcase for Contributr a product’ized version of the planet concept.

What’s next? 

Let me know below. Community ideas only make the site better.

UPDATES: just fixed the url for.. http://www.planetbook.org Another reason why going with com is good, just because its the defacto domain.

After putting a little thought into it, it comes down to two words, new and challenging. Yes, sometimes both are at play but really either of these is where the rush comes from. As developers we are always looking for that high, however we can’t always get it, making it better, making it more efficient keeps us going, with a reward in the final product.

New, new is obvious, writing anything new is fun because it’s void of the same old structure, new code is fun to write but what’s even better is the underlying framework in a new environment, or better yet something you’re convinced, per google, has never been done; or posted anyway. New could also be a paradigm shift, for instance that first time instead of parsing a Notes view you walked an xml file, or used a new language to walk that same Notes view.

Challenging, the challenge draws you in, or makes you step back, and look at it, you make notes on paper and then start typing, only to turn away to make more notes. Lately the most challenging things I’ve worked on take more time parsing in the car then they do writing. Imagine taking a picture, easy enough, now imagine going Ansel Adams on it. On your commute to work tomorrow think about the subject, the angle you want to shoot at and the angle of the sun… and then execute. Which one takes longer? As for the picture, is it rewarding? That’s coding.

I was going to write about one of those exact efforts, one that took hours to ponder in the car, a couple emails to my father (a Math major in college and an Oracle developer), and an IM with a friend, and i realized i had a hard time getting across what I was trying to achieve, so if you want in, here are the high level det’s. Essentially it’s a license manager:

• You want to purchase 20 user licenses (broadcastr.net).
• I need to give you a code that has those 20 licenses embedded
• You can’t figure out the code and make the 20 licenses, 200,000
• The software has to quickly return 20 due to translations are held up until the licensing is verified
• No lookup tables since it will add to overhead
• The function that processes the code is compiled.

It took about 2 hours to write, on the last of 4 other short lived 15 minute attempts. It just wasn’t coming to me, hence the reward when it became clear. How did I do it? Let’s just say you take the number and mix it up with a bunch of random numbers, add thing, subtract things, parse strings and then wrap it all in a bunch of hex values, some used, some not.It’s two functions, one to create and one to process, the latter being the only one in the product.

So there there you have it. The little project that got me thinking about the journey, the journey we all travel from time to time.

Safe travels.

Products developed by business partners play a vital role in the success of the Lotus brand. I have been working for one such PB for almost 6 years now and every day learn more and more about how it all works. This is why when Planet Lotus first launched I told those in charge at my employer; before they asked, that the site was not intention for our type of blog. Blogs written by product companies, as benevolent as they may be, and often are, are there to pass on helpfull tips, post industry news, propagate awareness of brand, awareness of products, communicate to customers and to generate new ones. If given a greater audience, the latter could easily get out of control.

Over the past few months, more and more blog post requests from such companies have been rolling in. The only way to submit a blog is to copy the text from the submission page, edit, and email. What strikes me is the clear warning that company blogs will be rejected, still they are sent; I’ve done my best to filter this. The more I got the more I realized how much information could be collected to help readers. The problem is I don’t want to meld this info in with the front page. So bingo, a partner page, just like the downloads, go crazy adding your content, I just don’t feel it’s the focus of the site; the main page.

So with that I announce the planetlotus.org/partners/ page. (feel free to suggest a better name).
This all sounds great, right? Wrong. I’ve begun to feel the rift. My ultimate goal is to protect the readers, those, like me that read every title and almost every post. So how do i distinguish who is ‘relegated’ to the partners page. It’s no small feat. I have spent the past three days trying to think of some iron clad way do divide the two. So below is my best attempt.

Before reading any farther please know that I am not anti product company, anti small guy, im just anti pitch from company real estate. There is a workaround. Start a personal blog off the corporate domain. One tied to you and only to you, if you like your name tied to endless pitching of a product then do so, im just as guilty as any else, however its my name that suffers and I take that risk. Just be aware these posts this still is subject to community complaints which can lead to removal.

Some company pages, and profiles have already been moved and renamed over the past few days, im am sorry for not telling you before had, I wanted to post his message so everyone gets it and can reference it at once.

If you’re like me and would like examples, I think these two serve quite well…

Front Page: Video demo of language support

Partner Page: Learn more - Take a Product Tour of IdeaJam

What fits into the Partner category?
A blog that is hosted on a company web site… that sells products.
And no, you don’t technically have to be a IBM business partner to be placed in this group.

What does not fit into this category?
Any individual’s blog, if their company and them is one and the same.
All services based companies and consultants.

Will there be gray area?
YES! and a little bit of site grand-fathering where unforeseen circumstances arise.
I won’t pretend that I have every scenario figured out, things will change but they will be done in the spirit of keeping this site as independent as possible.

What does it mean to be categorized a Partner Blog?
Partner posts will not show up on the front page, that is the only difference from a non partner blog.
Partner blogs will be selectable for the rss feed at myPL and they will be included in searches, etc.

How will it be policed?
I can’t possibly apply all these rules to all the different sites already posted so I’ll do what every police department in the world relays on and wait for phone calls, or in our case emails.

What about Bleedyellow.com blogs?
Depends on the blog but they all appear to be personal in nature.

Are you doing this to capitalize on and control advertising on the site?
YES, yes I am. Would you rather view ads in consistent places, ads that support the cost of the site, or would you like them surreptitiously placed within post after post, wasting more and more of your time in consuming all the information that is available at the site. Everything has a place.

Would you ever take action against an individual that never stops pitching?
Yes! But I would only do this based on feedback from the community. And remember some do it better then others, it’s all subject.

Where?
http://planetlotus.org/partners/  (any recommendations of a different name welcome)

NOTE: I have closed comments on this page. Please make them in the forum so they can be better addressed:

Comments: http://planetlotus.org/forum/index.php/topic,176.0.html

Update 01: I have reconsidered comments. I’d rather them be posted here then hijacked to another post giving half the story.

The winner of this years Inaugural Planet Lotus Blogger of the Year award will win the following prizes.

1. All you can drink beer and wine at the LS09 Sunday Night Welcome Reception
2. All you can drink beer and wine at the LS09 Monday Night Product Showcase
3. Your name at the TOP of the Planet Lotus Blog Roll for the next year.
4. Your own PL icon for the next year.
5. A engraved plaque donated by Dave Leedy…. details from his blog to follow.

Voting will end on Thursday to give time for the engraving. I’ll let Dave give the precise time and will post it to the front page tomorrow.

If someone has a 13px by 11px trophy icon lying around id much appreciate! yancy@teratechie.com

For more info head over to planetlotus.org/awards/

Good Luck!

An interesting thing just happened. Today I ‘added as friend’ someone whom I worked with back at IBM/Lotus. In the message I asked if he still worked with PeopleSoft. Just a handfull of hours later I get an email from a recruiter stating:

Dear Applicant,

My name is Charles and I’m a recruiter at COMPANY NAME REMOVED. Our records show that you are an experienced professional with experience in Peoplesoft. This experience is relevant to one of my current openings.

For the record I’ve never worked with PeopleSoft and it doesn’t show up on my linkedin profile, old resumes, nothing public. So, am I just paranoid or is it that I neglected to read the Facebook Privacy Agreement?

With only 2 weeks to go until Lotusphere I just realized I have to prepare for the shock of living out of my… phone, away from the comfort of my all powerful laptop. I’ll have the laptop, but my main mode of connectedness will be my smartphone.  So how to prepare? For that I turned to those available on the im.bleedyellow Sametime server…

Question: What are 3 must have phone apps you should have for Lotusphere and do you have any tips….In no particular order…

Chris Toohey:  The sessions database, gTalk and twitterberry. Tips… “I’m going to WAP-enable SOTU and get it out there that way, you can issue remote console commands via a wap browser to your server from your WAP browser-havin’ phone so, I’d def recommend THAT one, once it’s released :)”

John Head: Twitterberry, facebook, and personal calendar. Tips… “get a portable charging device, like the callpod fueltank. recharges most blackberries about 4 times before its dead. so the device stays charged all day “.  and “set the ringer to vibrate on the plane to Orlando .. don’t take it off vibrate to the plane home”.

Karl-Henry Martinsson: Twibble for twittering, Google Sync to synchronize calendar between Google and Blackberry, Google maps for the Blackberry (or any cell phone), and LS09 Session Database.

Paul Mooney: The Turtle Group Sessions DB, currency calculator and weather app. Tip… Learn the silent mode

So, its unanimous. Have an easy on-ramp to Twitter, the sessions database and put your phone on vibrate.

The best advice I can give requires a single document in the Journal database. Every trip I go on I prepare a trip ‘one sheet’. I usually name it “1111 Lotusphere 2007″ or “11111111 Lotusphere 2008″ to have it show up at the top of the list. Then, in order, I add…

Name of Event/Trip
Room number (just the number so if I loose the phone I don’t get any midnight callers).
Ped / both numbers (for Axceler.com) for the showcase floor
My Flight Numbers and times
Names and Phone numbers of everyone I’ll be there with.
Then a quick list for the hotel and where we plan to eat (and the menu :)….
Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel
1500 Epcot Resorts Blvd, Lake Buena Vista, FL, 32830
407-934-4000
Palm Restaurant (Orlando)
5800 Universal Blvd, Orlando, FL 32819
407-503-7256
http://www.thepalm.com
http://www.thepalm.com/menu.cfm?menu_id=324

Notice the single line address, this makes it easy to copy and paste into the google map app if you need to. Always fun if you want to check the route of the taxi or the Mears shuttle.

I then live out of this document. And make random notes for when i get back home. As far as applications go, I just started adding them so I don’t really know what I’m missing. Up until this point I have gotten by on http://m.planetlotus.org and http://m.planetlotus.org/twitter.php, hence the investigation into this topic.

No clear leader! If you haven’t yet voted get over to planetlotus.org/awards/ and check it out.

Remember, you can change your vote as often as you’d like, but the voting will end the Thursday, before Lotusphere. Not yet sure of the time.

The polls are open! - http://planetlotus.org/my/awards/

The premis is simply, vote for your favorite blog/blogger of 2008. The winner will be announced at BALD in Orlando and tweeted to the world. Prize yet to be determined.

I would like to start this first year off simple, one winner. Maybe next year it will expand to different categories, more collaboration on this in 2009.

This year, thanks to Nathan, there might also be MTV like categories, from our bleedyellow IM chat…”Best Lotus Meme, Best Single Post, Best Technical Post, Best Skewering of a Competitor, Best Flame War”.  This will come in the following days/weeks, hopfully in time for last minute voting.

Good luck and Happy New Year!

How about a Planet Lotus Blogger of the Year? I’m looking for ideas on how to structure the winner(s). Have you any ideas?

I will try and make this a part one of two, part one being the stats and part two being reflections, lessons learned, etc. I’ll try and write this up over the holiday break. For now the numbers…

Dec 20, 2007 - Dec 20, 2008

Active Blogs 310
Blog Posts 27,834
Bookmarks 1,174
Jobs 915
PodCasts 325
Downloads 62
Events 35
Clicks 1,306,520
Keywords indexed from feeds 241,111
Searches 47,908
Tweets 77,321

Jan 1, 2008 - Dec 22, 2008 - google.com/analytics

1,328,201 Unique Views
1,828,665 Pageviews
97,323 Visitors
88.54% (front page)

And my favorite stat of all… $6,484.72 raised from the Lotus community for Cancer research!

This is priceless. I was in search of a complex url, one with many different characters, so I did a search at ebay.com. The first thing that came to mind was Notes, and boy did i find something amazing… Apparently for a bid of $60 you can get Lotus Notes 6.5.2! It sounds like an amazing piece of software. I must warn you, after reading the details, “… There’s a lot to it, so you may need a reference manual that unfortunately cannot be supplied.“, you’ve been warned.

And what about the box you might ask? Well, you’re screwed; “Additionally there isn’t a box, but it does come safely and securely packaged.” all this functionality and no box! This could be the deal breaker for me. ”

The best part? If you’re new to “Lotus Notes”… the seller is available for questions after the sale, so free tech support, potentially FOREVER, you know, for when ‘Notes’ is unable to find ‘Domino’!… “I am easily accessible to answer all and any questions post sale date!!”

I’m guessing the motivation behind the winning bidder is this… “It is full and perfectly 100% functional and does some very intuitive stuff that Microsoft just didn’t consider.“.

….Notes 6.5.2 ebay post….

Happy Purchasing…!

I’m not sure how unique this concept is but I’m leaning in this direction with Broadcastr. Every solo project I’ve worked on this past year in some way has to be different. Broadcastr my most recent endeavor is doing just this, taking things we know and presenting them just a bit, differently. They don’t always start off this way, Planet Lotus started as LotusReport.com, a knock off of the Drudge Report for the Lotus community but when it became too time consuming to maintain I automated it, I then took that data and presented it way we’re all use to, an inbox. Now Broadcastr is taking similar twists and turns.

It started simple, a enterprise ready micro-blogging platform delivered as a VM. You simply download open it on a VM server and you’re ready to go. The authentication would be made simple by Domino LDAP. I also wanted to offer a hosted solution or at minimum a web demo. This proved difficult. I was educated by Nathan Freeman while trying to integrate Bleed Yellow’s LDAP server with Broadcastr.net on the concept of man in the middle attack. You can’t simply host an application where you enter your username and password on my site and I authenticate that info against your companies public (or secure) LDAP…. you would have to be very trusting to let that happen given the impotence of the Notes username and httppassword.

Just weeks into development I had a prototype up and running. The problem was you had to register at planetlotus.org and then go back and tool around a very open public site. It is, and was, a very forgettable demo experience, since I’m shooting for the enterprise this isn’t a very authentic approach.

How to demo it better? That started about 2 weeks ago while out at dinner. During a conversation on the project my friend enlightened me on the concept of Garden Walls. The concept is beautiful in its simplicity. In a nutshell, Facebook is too open. My family, high school buddies and professional contacts are all learning too much about me. A Facebook with Garden Walls would fix this, put up walls between the fart jokes and the professional contacts. My prototype needed said walls.

Today, the garden walls went up, now how to demo it? In steps a google search on a site i didn’t even know existed, to be honest I didn’t do too much research before starting this project. The site; Yammer, just launched in September and the front page had the solution, a simple request for a company email address. That was it. Base the garden (or in Broadcastr terms the ‘Market”) on your company email address. Soon you’ll be able test Broadcastr with your coworkers, or other yahoo.com, or gmail.com users.

Here comes the different business model. Something from the start of the project mixed with something learned later on. Yammer’s business model is to give you a base level micro-blogging platform in the cloud, but you have to pay to get additional administrative control and other features. The broadcastr.net demo will also be free (with-in reason) but the purchase will be for the VM version of the offing to be downloaded and housed inside your company. Once started on your VM server the web version’s data will expunged and replaced with a forward link to its new, on property, inside your firewall, location.

I wrote most of this blog post on the ride home from work today. I find it very interesting that Andrew Pollack wrote on this very topic, even mentioning “marrying the cloud“. If you read his 4 very insightful posts you’ll see that this model of dabbling with the cloud version and purchasing it as a VM addresses some of the concepts he raises.

Keep an eye on broadcastr.net for the new and improved offering. Invite your coworkers, speed date the cloud offering for your company and if you like it, marry the VM, together you’ll raise beautiful megabytes.

The list of features keeps growing. My favorite, a version of twitter that sits behind the firewall, in this case behind a successful Planet Lotus registration.  In short, search engines won’t pick up your posts and you can post freely from Loti to Loti, I don’t plan on making this module public.

Other new features, Group and Project support. That’s right, create a group, say Priceless Quotes, and post messages. Anyone following it will have your quote/post show up on their page. Image support is also up and running. If you’ve already checked it out, feel free to go back and upload your (twitter?) profile image. @username is also live, as is RSS feeds, posting urls, etc.

planetlotus.org/broadcastr/  Since the end game is a product you can download and use in your organization, some for the features lean towards enterprise use.
Features:

• Project Support, anyone can create a project, anyone can follow that project and post messages to its page.
• Group Support, post messages to your existing Domino Directory groups or create your own.
• Domino LDAP authentication
• Customizable post length, default is 256 characters, system admin can change
• Personal Groups, coming soon, create your own groups, manage the members and quickly post messages to @mygroup which in turn posts directs to @groupmember1, @ groupmember2, etc.
• URL’s will automatically be converted to a clickable url with the url as a name or can be overridden to defined value like “Link”, the tool tip will expose the actual url.
• @username. Post multiple direct messages in one post.
• Email addresses convert to clickable mailto links.
• Detailed views, most active groups, users, projects, most followed, etc.
• Ability to toggle use of image/avatars or generic more general icons. (defined by system administrator).
• Ability to view posts displayed like twitter with limited detail or more verbose information as seen on Facebook wall.
• View newly activated users.
• Full search of users, groups, project.
• RSS feeds of user posts, more feeds to follow. (the current feeds work,  are readable, just don’t link anywhere; yet).
• Installs as a lightweight ubuntu VM, not yet available.

Feel free to kick the tires. It uses your myPL login information.

http://planetlotus.org/broadcastr/

There are some missing pieces, rss, pagination, etc. They’ll get there in over time. Feel free drop the project “Broadcastr  Comments” an idea or two or if you have to “Broadcastr Bugs”. Maybe the application will help in making the application better.

Before you enter remember one thing, its Twitter meets Facebook “Wall”, it has some of each. Essentially you can use @yancylent or you can just go to my wall and post me a message. There will be other micro-blogging fusion going in over time, for example, posting to a “project” or a Domino Directory group, so everyone in the group gets the post even if you or they arn’t following, or everyone in your “Location” as defined by the Location (or Department) field in the Domino Directory person document.

I plan to have a hosted version available in the coming months and a version as a VM appliance sometime after Lotusphere. Drop me a line (yancy at teratechie dot com) if you’re intrested in a demo site for your company.

My vote goes to the candidate who pledges to force auto makers to add a “I have my high beams on” blue light to the front of cars. So there is no uncertainty.

Before I spend too much time building the prototype I wanted to throw the idea out to the community to see what you think.

Broadcastr is a light weight communications vehicle that takes the best of Twitter and Facebook wall and puts it inside your firewall. It will deliver as a Ubuntu JeOS, LAMP, VM Appliance that can be quicly started on any VM server. It will use Lotus Domino LDAP for authentication against the Domino Directory. I have posted a screen shot to give you and idea… Screen shot of Broadcastr.

The Overview

Your company is looking for a Twitter / Facebook wall type solution. (I will spare you from explaining why your company would want this). You simply start up this VM, answer a few questions and hit the url with a browser. The user base will be built over time as new users login. They will be challenged for their Lotus Notes http username and password and upon LDAP authentication a page will be created for them. The future of the users session will be handled by PHP and MySQL. The admin of the system will determine the life of the session. Since it’s inside the firewall, the default is set very far out so there is an illusion of SSO.

The page that is create will act as a wall of sorts. Anyone can write on anyone’s wall and since its a company only site anyone can follow anyone. This concept is broken out further, anyone can create a ‘project’. A project is identical to a persons page. Anyone can follow a public project, allowing them to read or pull feeds from broadcasts from that project page.

Similar to People and Projects there will be the concept of Lotus Domino directory groups.  Directory groups will also have their own page. Only the groups chosen to be pulled into the system will be managed over time. This will cut down on synchronization of the two directories in the background. Any person group from the Domino Directory can be selected and instantly anyone can post to that group and all members will receive that broadcast on their page.

I have a majority of this already completed. In posting this I’ve had to do a balancing act of how much to complete before making the idea public. I will error on the side that the feedback will trump all since its is that what i need to know right now. I hope to get a working prototype up on http://www.broadcastr.net in the coming weeks. The problem is the domino authnication piece (which is up and running). It’s asking a TON but I’ve put in a request to Bruce to cross pollinate ideajam.net or openntf.org for the LDAP calls. This way those registered at those sites can poke around on the prototype and be spared yet another registration.

What about DomCastr? Pure coincidence.  Every idea above including the name was in place before Dec’s announcement. I wish him luck! Bottom line, you can see from his post and this one, they are very different.

There is another fun part to this posting. The invitation to all of you to occasionally check in to watch the progress of the idea. My hope is to turn all the amazing knowledge I’ve gained from PlanetLotus.org into another successful idea/product.

There was a lot of talk about a month back about getting to the 300 blog mark on Planet Lotus. It is an exciting milestone but that number when it is reached only means that there is 300 ‘active’ blogs checked on an hourly basis. Over the past year there have been many sites dropped and activity, or lack there of, is the most common reason. One of the services I provide with the sites is the knowledge that the blogs listed are relevant, active and the information is what fellow Loti would enjoy reading.

Reasons for delisting range from:

• Request of the author… stage fright
• Sites that are not blogs; news sites that were just duplicating news provide by blogs
• Sites that require a log in to view their content
• Change in career and blog content.

Back to the term ‘active’. It can mean many things to many people. I go by the last blog post. If its been over a year since the last post there is no reason for my server to check it every hour. If the person wants to get back into it they can send me an email and I only need to change the publish field from 0 to 1 to start checking again, it’s that simple.

Now for the gray area, what about situations that fall outside activity and the reasons above, i.e., Alan Lepofsky :). It was easy to delist Gia Lyons, she blogged about social networking, she wasn’t on the site long and didn’t’ have the large core Lotus following… in comparison to Alan and Adam Gartenberg for that matter… What to do with those guys!?!?  I view then as part of the family and I don’t think anyone minds me keeping them listed for the near future. If Adam’s DB2 posts raise in volume, email me. I listen. You are my customer and if you think a blog no longer fits, I’ll look into it.

If you are interested in looking at the 18 delisted blogs, they can found here:  http://planetlotus.org/blogs/  select Sort, Blogs: Unpublished.