Wow, so I actually did stuff both at work and on personal web projects this week. Now that I have a sort of pattern down: Up early, catch the train, work on personal projects on the powerbook, work, work more or read on the train ride home, then relax and do a little more personal coding 'till I've stayed up later than I intended. Repeat.

Thanks to this (and no thanks to one day down sick. Blech.) the Purity Survey got kicked off, I've done a lot of work on underblog, and I've raised my blog culture awareness a great deal in the last week.

Actually, that last bit is the most astounding to me. After reading blogs for several years and keeping one for nearly a year and a half, I had a vague picture in my head of the amorphous community of webloggers. Go to a site, follow a link, go to another blog, then see a link to another blog you frequently check. It gives one a sense of the dimensions and breadth of the community when you start seeing familiar signposts repeated.

At time though I'd wonder whether this was truly the full scope, or if I was in a blogger tidepool, a casual ad-hoc societal and incestual webring. In short, I wondered: Is this all there is?

Then came the Blogdex, an MIT Media Lab project designed to track memes, but which also helps verify the bounds and tastes of bloggers as a whole. In a nutshell, I feel like Zaphod in the Infinite Perspective Vortex, realizing that we are mostly, in fact, really hoopy froods.

Beyond that though, now the blogging community has a face. I know it has so many faces already, but they're all (mostly) created by people, and are semantically biased. This is more like a web audit for the people. I'm not explaining it very well, but I find it inspiring anyhow.

The upshot is that I'm thrilled with web projects once again. Underblog is a priority, then Randompixel will be shoved kicking and screaming out the door and back into gear. Then, well, there are exciting advancements with Metacookie that I'll be talking more about soon, and there's always another project after the next.

I hope everyone has a great weekend. I'll be seeing Depeche Mode and POE tomorrow, and I can't say which I'm more excited to see. Maybe if we're lucky POE's brother, a Berkeley native, will come down and supply the popular voiceover for "Hey Pretty," excerpted from his book, "House of Leaves."

What's today's downer? I left my cellphone in the shuttle to the train after work today, so I can't get it back until Monday. My long distance service has been turned off from my landline, and I can't call out to anyone who lives more than 12 miles away from me.

In the quest for a great weekend, these may all turn out to be good things.

Happy weekend to all!