As an experiment I won't have any images in this post. Are they essential to get noticed? I know some people just want to get their thoughts out there without having to worry about finding suitable pictures. I am thinking about working on some tools to make it easier to do that, e.g. an applet that takes a Wikimedia image you are viewing and generates the link to paste into your post. I just need to learn enough Javascript or something to do that.
It's been another good week for me on Steemit. I've reached a reputation of 66 and have over 350 followers. According to Dead Followers 237 of those have posted in the last month and from Steem.cool I see I need 10,000 billion 'REP' to get to the next level and I have 7.4 million Vest. 10 million Vest is considered what you need to be a 'dolphin'. For now I'm a large minnow.
And so, to business:
is a fellow guitar enthusiast who is sending me some picks for my collection from Canada. He has a post about where they came from.
is a new Steemian and possibly the oldest at 90. He's got some cool stories of his life in the organic food business
is someone I met on the (now dead) identi.ca microblogging site. He's an open source enthusiast who has done podcasts and has a blog. He's still figuring out what this site is about, so let's help him out.
I think Steemit should appeal to those in the open source world who would rather not use proprietary sites. We have control of our data here and Steemit cannot easily be shut down as some other social sites have been (Tsu, Friendfeed, Orkut, Google Buzz). It's also a great platform for developers. I've said a few times that I plan to play around with some Steemit data. It's partly as an exercise in Python programming, but I also want to help the community. We already have lots of add-ons, but I'm sure there's lots more potential.
I won't include my usual signature block. There's been some discussion of having the option to store on against a profile so you can automatically add it to every post. I think most people just copy it from a local file each time. We did just get notifications, so that's a sign of the constant evolution on this site. It's still in beta, but steadily gaining the features it needs for mainstream acceptance.
Steem on!