Saturday night ramen, and some great blogosphere gems

Early on when I started blogging, I used to do this...

You know, just wander around blogs I liked. Maybe munch out. Keep reading. Noodle around some more on people's links to other people's blogs. Feeling like I'm gathering diamonds and butterflies.

It was the way I used to surf the Web in 1995, when Yahoo really couldn't find you without you emailing them and Google was a gleam in a mathematician's eye. People's pages taking me to other people's pages. It was being passed along in a handshake.

(How kerosene lamp, you are thinking. How candleight vs. RSS bandit, ignoring link blogs, Newsgator, Outlook, and other ways to save a blog consumer time while RSS-consuming!).

It's true, my meanderings tonight dug up old gems as well as recent ones. Kathy Sierra, whom I am sorry to say I haven't read in a while, proffered up some great ones - Code like a girl sucked me in first, then hi-res user since I've been getting out my old UI skills at work of late, and then the Oh Yeah of her post about Passionate Employees. If you have read that last one before, read it the hell again. I've been feeling like The Community Weirdo of late, and she brought me back to what it is that matters.

(I haven't had shrimp ramen boiled  in bulk like this since my grad school days. It still hits the spot. )

And then, I learned about fatblogging from Jason Calcanis, with its attendant fatspam, which reminded me I'd read something similar by Chris Pirillo 6 + months back along the same lines - he lost 50 lbs before the word was coined. But it's still grand (if you type www.fatblogging.com, it brings you straight to Calcanis' blog, so he must truly have reserved the name).

Now, I've been more (ahem) portly than I should be, and I've been both honored and mortified to capture that on video over the last 2 years. Before I could hide behind the fact most blogs were text and no one really cared whether my hair was a mess. Now, fuggedaboutit.

I suspect the wave of podcasting and video blogging and the vloggies at South by Southwest (that Irina Slutsky is doing and Robert Scoble is working with her on) will motivate us to get as thin as, well, Amanda Congdon.  (I'm hoping to meet Amanda in all her skinny-ness at South by Southwest at 20x2.org). Going back through Chris Pirillo's get-thin adventures reminded me that his wife Ponzi has one of the coolest "about me" pages ever. I can't do them justice, you just have to go read her. The one about eating sashimi with God made me laugh but was dead on. Ponzi has no need of fatblogging. :)

The blogosphere is expanding just like the universe, and new stars are being born in it all the time, and because I don't get to read like this enough, I barely get to read the folks everyone else reads. But at least tonight,  I'll slurp the noodles and enjoy the noodling process.

Cheers! Live it vivid!