In honor of Blog Day, I have chosen these five blogs as my Blog Day links.

My selection criteria are as follows:

1. I didn't pick anyone I know personally. I felt that I should be pointing my friends to blogs that they might not have seen before and would not be familiar to them.
2. I tried to stay away from "Tech Blogs". I'm sure everyone gets enough of that here already.
3. I tried to pick blogs from people "not like me". I'm still not exactly sure what that means, but like I said, I tried.

And so, in no particular order:

• Paul Graham: Okay, not technically a blog, but his essays are always interesting and he's able to express life as a geek way better than most geeks. Especially good are; Why Nerds are Unpopular, Hackers and Painters, What You Can't Say, and, an essay all high school kids should read, What You'll Wish You'd Known. Classic pieces all around.
• Ripples: post-corporate adventures: A great blog by a man who really knows how to enjoy life. His advice on surviving outside of the rat race is both helpful and accurate; he knows what he's talking about because he's actually doing it. If you have a chance to pick up his career guide, Danger: Quicksand, I highly recommend reading it. He also self published a paperback version with more material that you can buy from his site. It's the career guide on how to get rid of your career, and get a real life. I hope to follow his advice soon.
• (24)slash7: Yes, I know, it's a tech blog and I said I wouldn't do it, but it's a good tech blog, damn it, and I'm posting it! Her Ruby on Rails tutorial was big in helping me wrap my brain around the technology. A lot of her Ajax posts are also helping me get more into that technology and helping to blaze a trail for future Ajax developers. And another web designer who's focused on usability couldn't be all bad.
• Tobias S. Buckell Online: A science fiction writer and all around interesting guy. I read his blog all the time, but, I'm embarrassed to say, I haven't actually read any of his writing yet. I plan to rectify that when his first book, Crystal Rain, hits the shelves. Many of his posts are on the writing profession, most notably the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer Advance Survey, but he is also an interesting guy when he comments on his everyday adventures and observations. He also has CC licensed fiction on his site, something I'll have to dig into soon.
• DrBacchus’ Journal: Rich Bowen is a programmer and writer, most famous for his work on the Apache webserver. While this might seem like another tech blog entry, it's not. Most of his posts have to do with the act and art of writing technical books and running around on the conference circuit, while still being a husband and father and attempting not to go crazy. Some of my favorite posts include, British History, Memorial Day, and … and your neighbor as yourself. You can see now why I say this isn't just a techies' blog. There are many more posts that are just as insightful and enlightening, and I'm sure there will be many more to come.

  As a side note, Rich was also at the Ohio LinuxFest last year and will be speaking at this year's as well. I can't wait to hear his latest talk. If his other talks were any indication, it will be very informative.

Well, that's my blog day round up. I encourage you to read the posts highlighted here and if you like them, to add them to your RSS readers and follow along.

There's a big news item that says that Verizon is lowering their DSL price to an astonishing $14.95 a month! This is an amazing deal that no one else could beat!

Of course, SBC has been doing the same thing for years, at 1.5 Mbs instead of a measly 768kbs. And they've been doing it with Yahoo, too. It looks like Verizon's marketing department is better than SBC's, because they certainly got everybody talking.

I bet Yahoo's making a killing off of these deals. They're going to be the DSL content king soon. I don't see anyone else making these deals.

Now we just sit back and wait for sprint.yahoo.com and alltel.yahoo.com and watch the prices fall as they duke it out.

I love the idea of hosting a DoCamp. I think having a small group of tech-minded people over to just do stuff could end up being very interesting. I've got a wireless connection, a Linux server currently doing nothing and enough cool friends to make it interesting. The main problem is, I don't have enough room in my house to have a lot of people over.

I really like the idea of locking a bunch of techies in a room and seeing what comes out of it. I love that state of sharing and collaboration you get during the down time of a conference like OSCON.

I often have a personal implementation weekend, but it's just not the same.

Tech is like sex: it's never as fun by yourself.

Cop: So you were supposed to be Bono?
Slocum: Yes.
Cop: (looking up and down at 1st generation Korean-American Agent Jinn): And who were you supposed to be?
Jinn: The Edge.

From: Improv Everywhere Mission: Even Better Than The Real Thing

I'm really suprised I didn't catch this earlier. It's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I wouldn't believe it if it wasn't for all of thier supporting documentation.

In preparation for part 3 of Living the Life Electric, I did some looking around at different online bookmarking services. I personally use del.icio.us, but I had heard a lot of good things about Furl and Spurl. In the end, I decided to go with my old stand by of del.icio.us, but feel free to look at Furl and Spurl as well. The following should be easily adaptable to all three.

Can't Stand Losin' You

When we're out and about on the Internet, there are times when we stumble onto a website that we just know we're going to want to go to again. It could be an online forum that we want to keep up with or a blog that is particularly interesting (like mine perhaps?) It could be a good news site or game page. Whatever it is, we know that if we forget about it, we'll be kicking ourselves later.

This is where bookmarks come in. A bookmark is a way to save the URL of a website so that you can get back to it later. This is extremely useful whenever you want to get back to a webpage you've been to before. You can always hope a Google search will help you get back, but having an actual link to the page will make you're life that much easier.

Mmmm... Bookmarks

One big problem with traveling from computer to computer to do all of your online surfing is that you can't take stuff with you. This is especially true with bookmarks. Online bookmarks are basically saving a shortcut to a website and are traditionally stored in the computer's web browser. But, any bookmarks we save on one computer won't be there when we get on the next computer. Sure, we could use our handy-dandy email account to send ourselves emails of websites that we like, but that will get extremely unwieldy after a while. And so coming to our rescue is the online bookmarking service, del.icio.us. Yum.

First, a warning. Del.icio.us is ugly. It's useful, but it's so ugly, it must have fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Don't be perturbed by the ugly. Del.icio.us is our friend.

If you go to the del.icio.us homepage, there will be a link there where you can register. Now that you have an email address, you can sign up using that. So register and fill out all the information it needs.

After you sign up, you will have chosen a username. This can be anything you want it to be, but you should probably choose the same name as your email account. If not, that's okay too, but you'll need to remember what it was.

Now that we have an empty del.icio.us account, let's start filling it up.

Remember Me

Let's run through a little tutorial to see how del.icio.us works. We'll start by bookmarking this site (Don't worry. If you don't like me, you can delete it later).

So the first thing we want to do is to copy the URL. The URL is going to be the address that shows up in browser in a little text box at the top and starts with http://. Highlight that whole line and copy it.

Now, open up a new browser window (or tab) and go to http://del.icio.us/[your username] where [your username] is the del.icio.us username that you selected when you registered. This will take you to your very own del.icio.us page. Up at the top of this page, select the link that says 'post'. Paste the URL into the text box and hit 'save'.

You'll now be taken to a page where you'll fill in the details of the link. In the description, type what the name of the link is. For this example, type 'Living the Life Electric: Part 3'. You can leave the Extended field blank, but it's there for your notes on the link, like 'Great tutorial that I couldn't live without', or something equally flattering. But the tags line is where we'll work our magic.

Tag Reflex

A tag in del.icio.us is a way for you to easily find a bookmark after you have about 100 of them saved. By tagging bookmarks with simple keywords, you can filter through all of the clutter to find exactly what you're looking for. Another great thing about del.icio.us is that you can look at everyone else's tags too, kind of like a collaborative treasure hunt. You can think of tags as categories, so you're really putting each bookmark into a certain set of categories that will help you find them later.

For our current example, let's put 'tutorial web bookmarks' in the tag field. this will place our bookmark into the tutorial, web, and bookmarks categories. In del.icio.us, all tags are separated by spaces, so if you want to create a category for Grandma Ida, you'll want the tag to be called 'GrandmaIda', not 'Grandma Ida'.

After you hit save here, you'll actually be taken to the page that you bookmarked. This is del.icio.us's way of helping you out, whether you wanted it to or not. If you go back to del.icio.us's homepage, you'll be able to get to your bookmarks again by going to the Bookmarks link at the top of the page. You'll see now that you have one link saved and the tags you created on the right hand side. As you get more of them, you'll be able to click on them to bring up links that are only in that tag category.

Share and Share Alike

Now that we've added to the pool, let's look at what everyone else is bookmarking.

You can look at a certain user's bookmarks by going to http://del.icio.us/[thier username]. For example, http://del.icio.us/firstclown will get you to my links.

You can look at what links are in my tags by just adding a tag to the end of the link. http://del.icio.us/firstclown/lifeelectric will get you all of my links tagged lifeelectric and http://del.icio.us/firstclown/computer+linux will get all of my links tagged with both linux and computer. You can combine multiple tags with a + in the url. http://del.icio.us/firstclown/library+unread+book will get you books that I want to read from my local library.

You can also browse tags from every user using del.icio.us. http://del.icio.us/tag/breeder will get you everything tagged breeder and http://del.icio.us/tag/band+punk will get you punk rock bands. Try some of your own and see what you get. Always remember to try variations on your theme. If a tag of 'breeder' doesn't get you what you want, try 'breeding' or just 'breed'. You never know what someone will name their tag, so try everything you can think of. Sometimes people will spell things wrong too, so a search for geneology might bring up things that a search on http://del.icio.us/tag/geneology might not.

At the bottom of every page, there is a 'popular' link. This will show you the links that are bookmarked the most for a given tag. Here are the most popular links for the 'genealogy' tag. Pretty cool? You betcha.

Now, whenever you're at a computer, you can go to your del.icio.us site and look up your bookmarks. And you only have to log in when you want to save a bookmark.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of Living the Life Electric.