Gawker’s new site Jezebel is pretty bad-ass, with perhaps the most bad-ass thing about it (besides its color scheme, which is a lot like this site’s) being that it shows the number of views for each article right on the index page. I wonder if that includes RSS views.

From their manifesto:

To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women’s magazine we’d want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don’t much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag.

Jeff Jarvis has a good writeup today.

Recently, my tumblelog got a lot more interesting to me than this one, so much so that I’ve thought several times about switching over altogether, like some of my friends have.

A tumblelog’s a more informal, scrapbook-style blog for sharing things, without all the social anxiety — and my friends at Davidville have invented a wonderfully elegant and intuitive platform at Tumblr to let you get your own in minutes. Please feel free to check it out.

A funny thing happened the other day. Our friends at Talking Points Media, who are working with us on the soon to be launched Veracifier, posted a clip from a recent Bush Rose Garden speech on YouTube in order to support a blog post on TPMCafe. They were trying to make a specific point, that Bush seems to be continually asserting that public opinion is with him, and had clipped the part of the video they needed off C-Span with the audio of Bush’s lines.

But then, a few readers started noticing the long shot of Cheney standing dejectedly in the shrubs, absurdly far from the podium. Soon after, the video was everywhere. Picked up by The Huffington Post, Wonkette, even AOL News, TPM had accidentally unleashed a political video nearly as funny and odd as the MC Rove clip of the week before (OK, nothing’s that funny). The average TPM video gets between 1,000 and 10,000 views. This one, within three days, had gotten almost 250,000 views.

I hadn’t seen this until now, but just a day later, someone had already set the video to music: specifically, Radiohead’s “Creep,” to hilarious effect. It’s amazing how a video that seasoned eyes like Josh Marshall and Rachel Sklar missed the absurdity of the first time around had this much potential — but that’s the beauty of the Internet. Get enough eyeballs on something, and there’s a good chance that synapse will fire for the right person. And they’ll do something about it.

And without a doubt, that cameraperson who shot the long zoom deserves a raise.

I really miss the days sharing an office with the Serious Eats crew when they do a thing like full-team coverage of National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. The picture below says everything… until you see the diagram.

The clearing of all other posts from the RSS feed is nothing drastic — I’ve just made some changes behind the scenes on the blog publishing side, and this is the first new post. But it’s as good as time as any to clear the deck a little bit.

I’ve been keeping a blog now for almost ten years. I’ve met too many very successful bloggers to think my blog is anything special, or that I’m any more or less happy for having the number of readers I have. But people who read it say nice things about it occasionally, and I’ve made a bunch of great friends through blogging. Lately, it’s become harder and harder to update, though, since I haven’t known what this site was for anymore. Over the years it’s shifted from a personal weblog to a home for random stunts; a place to reblog art and media stories to a place where I post about a randomly associated bunch of interests. And each time I’ve known so little about who was reading, except that there seemed to be more of them than people I know. Whether they’re regulars, random visitors from search engines, or just people clicking through from Jonah’s still popular Nike emails, I haven’t pored over the stats enough to know, since one thing I learned years ago was that paying much attention to stats only makes me self-conscious and unhappy.

The thing I wanted to do most of all was turn on commenting, and start finding out who some of you are. I haven’t had comments on this site in years. They’re back on now. And I’ll try to not make myself crazy if I see zero comments on most of the posts.

I’m also going to try to find a new voice here with the reboot. I don’t think I’ll be reblogging much. I haven’t in a while, just not enough time to do it right, though I still love the idea. All the old posts are still up somewhere. At some point, I’ll get an archive up and working, in the meantime, the old index page is still here.

I’ve started blogging over at the Next New Networks site about professional interests, so if you want to read my thoughts on things like video and online media, plus those of a number of smart people besides me, that’s a good place to start checking out. Here, I’ll probably be posting about the same things as ever, but a bit more personally than before. I hope you’ll say hi from time to time, and let me know how this thing’s doing.