Category — Miscellaneous

Do you live in North Carolina? In the South? Anywhere? Are you interested in things like blogs, online video and podcasting? Do you want to see ‘net celebs such as Robert Scoble, Anil Dash and Chris Rabb up close and personal?

Then you should register for ConvergeSouth. I’ve gone the last two years (at least, maybe more), and it’s always been well worth it. I get new ideas, I get to make new friends and catch up with old friends. There’s interesting conversation, even music and a barbecue!

It’s Oct.  17-18 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Go here to register. C’mon, do it now. You know you want to. (Oh, did I mention? It’s free!)

Jason Calacanis, an Internet entrepreneur, says he is retiring from blogging. Simultaneously, he has launched a limited subscriber newsletter. You might want to join it, if it’s not too late. Click here.

In his email to that list yesterday, Calacanis explained why he is retiring from blogging.

One hundred of you responded with amazing suggestions to my email last night. After that I realized that blogging is not longer the medium for me–email is. 100 amazing suggestions in 12 hours from a pool of around 500 email subscribers. That’s 20% response rate with really considered words and no drama.

This is really interesting (and it’s not April 1, so I assume this isn’t some kind of hoax or prank, though you never know). Calacanis was co-founder of Weblogsinc.com, one of the first big commercial blog networks. It was sold to AOL in October 2005 for a reported $25 million or so. So Calacanis is someone who really knows blogging and has been doing it for a long time.

You can still a lot of his online movements, of course. In addition to the email newsletter, there’s his Twitter stream, his photos on Flickr, and more in the right sidebar of his blog.

Update: Scoble says Calacanis is playing us. Could be right.

Happy Independence Day!

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. …

Here’s the entire text of the Declaration of Independence.