Zomgee

Much has been said about this service called Twitter. It’s essentially a microblogging, opt-in platform where you subscribe to people and get their updates delivered in feed form. When you post, those people following you receive your updates. Now that those details are out of the way…

November 26th through 29th were horrifying days in Mumbai, India. The city was in disarray as terrorists had taken over and bombed trainstations and hotels. The center of conflict was in the Taj Mahal Hotel. Within, guests had barricaded themselves in rooms, the kitchen, and other hiding spots. Some communicated via cell phone calls, texts, and emails, but a major outlet was Twitter. Hostages sent tweets out to inform loved ones and co-workers that they were ok, if they were injured, places to stay away from, and supplies that their hospital needed. By now, most of the original tweets are so buried that they are hard to find.

Now take what I’ve just relayed about Mumbai, and imagine how twitter would have affected incidents and our responses to them..

Invasion of Poland/France – “Uh.. guys, German tanks just rolled past the border, run!”

Pearl Harbor – “Japanese planes just flew overhead.. strange.. Seem to be heading for Pearl Harbor”

D-Day – “wow”

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – “So.. the city next to me just blew up. I’m thinking we should take cover”

And thats just WW2. Its weird to think how history could have been drastically altered by one simple web application… Keep that in mind next time your thumbs tap away on your phone updating your status..

(Edit: I actually did have this finished last night, but forgot to push the Publish button.. doh!)

One year ago, Zomgee featured this post, one of the most popular posts to date..

How not to end up in a ditch

Over the past few days I’ve been arguing with myself as to whether or not I should write a  welcome message or just jump right into the thick of things with a real post. It seemed somehow that introducing myself to people, who for the most part, already knew me was superfluous yet here I am doing exactly that. Perhaps one day when this blog has spanned out to readers we do not know that this will serve to them as their introduction to me. Hopefully that will not cause them to immediately turn away from the site.

I have been blogging since late 2003 and for better or worse everything that I have written is out there for all to read. I can most certainly look back and realize what a horrible writer I have been on some occasions and yet notice eloquence on others and let us all hope that throughout my endeavors on  Zomgee.com I will lean more toward the later.

What can you expect from me here that you didn’t get on lotrfanatic.com? Well for starters I’m going to update more often. This coupled with the fact that there are two other authors means regular updates for this site which can only be a good thing. What I will be updating about is another thing altogether. My old site was a hodge podge of anything and everything that I felt like writing. Here I will be sticking to some staple topics and hopefully not straying too far from any of them.

The main topic that I will discuss that the other two authors will not is politics and current events. Now don’t worry this doesn’t mean I’ll be shoving Hillary vs. Obama or Romney vs. Giuliani down your throats or anything but I will be giving commentary on events currently taking place and how they fit into the world we live in and more specifically how I think we should look at these events. Yes, they will be opinion pieces so please feel free to disagree with me. I love a good discussion and I love seeing the thoughts of different people with competing viewpoints. It makes for good reading.

Secondly I will probably spend a lot of time writing in such a way that could be considered ranting. I use to call my old site the “Rantings of a Lord of the Rings Fanatic” and that is because I will often notice a given topic that needs discussing and spend some time discussing it. I plan on continuing this trend although probably with less fervor than I have in the past.

Finally I will definitely spend some time writing movie reviews. Dan has mentioned that he would like to do this as well and I welcome that, however, we will both likely not agree on every film or watch every film so we can probably tag team this effort without any trouble. I personally want to make this an entire section of the site that users can go to, to see what we recommend, but we’ll see if and when that happens.

The long story short is that I write far more than I need to and Zomgee.com is here to stay. We look forward to you reading what we have to say and letting us know what you think.

When starting a new project, it isn’t always easy to see how well things will turn out right off the bat. Zomgee seems “so far so good,” but I’m starting to see it’s potential. Readers will find Zomgee as a one-stop-shop for several topics and interests and I feel excited to be a part of it all as a writer.

OhYoBlog will soon be, for the better time of it’s final days, an internet road sign leading right to Zomgee. Can’t say I’ll miss it as much as I’ll enjoy posting on Zomgee instead, but this is a foreseeable opportunity cost we can all manage with. Besides, everyone’s gotta love these little avatars.

A new road might lead to more fun than we bargained for, so we all can’t pass this up. It was fun enough designing the first Zomgee logo. One of the other authors proposed we use a computer circuit board idea: it fit. Who knows how long we’ll keep this logo, but it seems to work for now.

All in all, I’d say we’ve got a great chance of rolling Zomgee in the right direction! Props to the Zomgee krewe and thanks for visiting.

So by now you should have seen the sweet looking countdown letting you know when zomgee.com is going live. I’m actually writing this quite a few hours beforehand so that this is waiting for you when the doors to this place open. Let me explain what is going on here.

Tom, Pete, and I decided that instead of three separate blogs, we’d pull together and have a joint blog- tying together each of our unique reader base and shifting our focus from large, infrequent, and often personal posts to shorter (sometimes), more frequent (hopefully), and widely appealing articles. I, personally, have several awesome ideas for posts I want to get started on, but those shall come soon.

Believe me- the stuff we’re going to be spitting out for you guys is just about as diverse as you can imagine.. everything from cars, tech stuff, computers, and games to stuff that I can’t even speculate about right now. All this to say- you’re going to want to register- or at least subscribe.

Have your own blog? Great! We have some plugins installed solely for your benefit. CommentLuv is a great plugin that gets your latest post from your website and shows it right below your comment. We also have a Gravatar plugin, which lets an avatar you have uploaded to Gravatar.com be displayed next to your comment (its free too!).

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed and email updates! For even more control over what you subscribe to, please feel free to register. Don’t worry, all email addresses and personal information submitted are strictly confidential and will not be sold, distributed, or given to any 3rd parties.

Check back often and let us know what you think!