Happy birthday, TGray!

#1) That graphic makes me want Dunkin Donuts. #2) That exchange _is_ a classic. Love the Eck. #3) The Eck will always be an A. :)

That's due to Twitter not growing actual users, but instead, spammers. As more people follow more accounts, clearly they don't have enough time to click through the % of URLs they might once have.

I don't necessarily think live blogging is the answer, but live tweeting is out of control. Take the time to take notes, summarize your thoughts and provide us the highlights. In fact, that's a lot of what I wrote about tonight when I suggested how you could take notes and post quickly. How to Blog Live Events and Publish With Lightning Speed http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/03/how-to-blog-live-events-and-publish.html Don't blame the tools. Blame the people. :)

As far as blog spam goes, Warcraft gold is the #1 topic, by far. It's easy enough for me to delete comment spam when it comes through Disqus, but when they end up on my old Blogger comment-enabled posts, it's painful to go one by one, so a lot of them have unfortunately made it through. In December I jokingly said to Twitter that I was giving up: http://twitter.com/louisgray/statuses/1064213938 "More than half of the English language blog comment spam I get is for World of Warcraft and where to buy gold. Maybe I should sign up." So no... you're not alone.

One would have to put their head in the ground to not see the echo reverb as you call it. Scarcely is there a time where a worthwhile story comes out and it's not covered by all the "me too" news bloggers. It can be a drain for those of us married to Google Reader, and I believe it's only getting worse, as the flailing economy reduces the number of new technologies and companies coming to market, while the number of blogs reporting on it increases. Among many, it becomes a game of how fast you can recap somebody else's story. Maybe you'll provide a link. Maybe you won't. I am seeing social media start to make its way into boring old businesses that don't rely on Silicon Valley for everything. There are three steps: Understand, Observe, Do. It is happening, and the social media we've relied on for so long to help us waste each other's time just might become useful.

The storage community is quite small. I've been lucky enough to be at the same storage company (BlueArc) since 2001, but even during the last eight years I've seen companies rise and fall, competitors come and go, and people with them. At times, SNW seems like a massive reunion, not just for me, but for colleagues, partners and others. Often, I can watch folks I know simply move from booth to booth between years! That also is partly why I think it makes sense to be more about promoting the users and being transparent, rather than distrustful of competition in what at times has been a quite combative industry. I'm glad sites like yours exist and that we have forums to engage. Maybe we'll bump into each other at some upcoming event, but may we both keep our respective logos! :-)