Check out this graph of the Dinosaur family tree:

Photo Credit: Graeme Lloyd, University of Bristol

This image, a so-called “super-tree”, shows the relationship of 440 of the 600 known species in the Dinosaur family. It was created as part of a study with the goal of determining the various rates of diversification within the tree. You can read a nice summary of the research at Science Daily. But seriously all the chatter about Social Graphs that use a similarly formatted chart and I have to wonder, who has one as cool as this?
 

I just upgraded this blog to v2.3 and I’m very happy about it. I’ve had RC1 running on a blog in development for a couple of weeks and I couldn’t wait to see if what I was seeing there was true.

IT IS.

WordPress 2.3 appears to make significant improvements in speed. I’d say the load time has improved between 30-40% (although I have no data to back that up), just seems that way to me.

So, thank you Automattic and all you wordpress developers for the new version. I’ve barely peeked under the hood and I’m very, very pleased.

Now, the one, um, oddity that I noticed is that the inbound link module on the Admin dashboard now uses Google Blog Search instead of Technorati. Since WordPress is quite the juggernaut in the blog platform space, I have to ask…

Is Technorati doomed?

What do you think?

It’s true, less than 30 seconds ago (it’s 11:58 PM on Sunday, August 5, 2007). While Scoble, and others are in a virtual love fest with Facebook, I just didn’t find any value in it.

Sure, I set up my profile, found some friends and joined some groups and for all that, the value returned to me was 0. I must be too old, but the way Facebook works with it’s walled garden and so-called ‘app-sharing’ it seemed to me nothing so much as a platform for chain letters (hey, friendX’s zombie just bit you, install the zombie app and bite more people to start your zombie army) in the form of shareable applications.

I’m sure that for avid users, this will be a slap in the face. I may even be labeled a Luddite or curmudgeon (which is fine, I am both at times), but my time is precious (to me at least) and if you’re planning on wasting it, it had better return something to me – entertainment perhaps, valuable connections, interesting discussions … something. Well, I have my valuable connections on LinkedIn and Twitter (and email of course). The interesting discussions are happening on the blogs and boards and as far as entertainment goes, Cute Overload is WAY better.

Adios Facebook, until you show me some value, I’m not spending my time with you.

Several months ago, I wrote a comparison of Google Reader and Bloglines trying to figure out which one I would use. Well, almost 6 months have gone by and I am still using both.

And up until a couple of days ago I was still double-subscribed to most of my feeds. But then, a solution finally occured to me.

An epiphany of grand proportions!

Ok, no – not really. However, I did figure out what I liked the most of all about Google Reader beyond those features already mentioned – the Shared Feeds!

So as of Monday, I use Google Reader for shared feeds published by the likes of Robert Scoble and Eric Peterson and Bloglines for individual site feeds. There is still some overlap – how could there not be? But its far less, and so, far less annoying.

I’m going to get a recommended river of information on Google Reader and detail, detail, detail from bloglines – WIN WIN!

So a few days (weeks? the days blur together) FeedBurner announced that StatsPro and MyBrand were now free for the masses – let them eat cake!

Of course, I, like many of you I would guess, immediately sent the folks at FeedBurner an email requesting to be hooked up. It took a few days for them to respond but when they did, set up was a snap, a breeze, I don’t know what.

It’s really very simple, once you get in all you have to do is set up a subdomain of your domain with a CNAME record. – A word to the wise here, don’t set up your subdomain in anticipate of being let in. I made that mistake and then I had to go delete the record and wait a while to set it up again correctly.

But HEY, now my feed is available via my domain (http://feeds.instantcognition.com/InstantCognition). AND because it’s a CNAME, the original FeedBurner URL still works (http://feeds.feedburner.com/InstantCognition).

SO, if you have your own host go switch your FeedBurner feed to your own domain. Or, if you aren’t currently using FeedBurner because you wanted the brand equity – now you don’t have an excuse. Go get FeedBurner MyBrand and get some great feed statistics.