Many disgruntled readers have contacted me via email, IM, facsimile, phone and anonymous poison pen letters to ask ‘Hey Norman - whatever happened to the unified blogging day scheduled for Friday 18 April ?’ Apologies for the delay but before we get started, some random, meaningless statistics: Feedburner: 66 subscribers. Google Reader : ‘From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,807 items, starred 1 items, shared 325 items’. Twitter: Following 19. Followers 55. Updates 1,292 in 87 days. FriendFeed: Subscribed to 35. Subscribed to me: 30. Comments: 180 this week, 504 all time. Likes: 77 this week, 188 all time. Disqus: Comments left: 59 in 21 days. Comments on my blog: 31 in 14 days. Precious clout points - 12. Originally, on Unified Blogging Day, I was going to religiously transcribe every single ‘output’ over a 24 hour period into a separate blog entry (annotated with timestamp and channel). ...

Thoroughly enjoyed 2 hours of ‘The Story of The Who’ last night on BBC4. What a story it was. The ultimate rock’n’roll band. A Rolls Royce driven into a swimming pool, copious amounts of drugs, lots of girls and the premature death of two band members. During one gig, Moon was carried off stage - completely comatose. 30 years on, Pete Townshend looked visibly choked when talking about the (not wholly unexpected) death of Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey remarked ‘Keith seemed to think he was invincible. He thought I am “Keith Moon of The Who”.’ ...

A couple of Oracle bloggers (Laurent and Yas) are experimenting with Disqus on their blogs but Tim Hall has expressed some reservations about committing his blog comments to a hosted service outside of his control. Jake Mckee is also taken by Disqus but eloquently expresses similar concerns about ‘data ownership and presentation’. I understand (and used to vehemently share) both Tim and Jake’s reservations. It does seem perfectly natural to want all your blog content stored in your MySql database on your server. What if Disqus servers are slow and unresponsive or worse, even down ? Your blog would be accessible but your comments wouldn’t. What is Disqus isn’t around next year ? ...

This blog used to run on WordPress but now runs on Habari which is a blogging platform currently being developed by a set of very talented people. Undoubtedly, the number of developers and users running Habari is far fewer than the massive community using WordPress. Similarly, the number of available themes and plugins available for Habari is relatively small (albeit growing daily) and dwarfed by the vast, almost bewildering wealth of add-ons and the extensive range of themes available for Wordpress. ...

Disqus lets you easily track all comments you have left scattered over the blogosphere. Disqus allows you to administer comments on multiple blogs from a single dashboard. Disqus has built-in effective protection against comment spam. Disqus provides tight integration with Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, MT and Tumblr. Disqus provides Javascript code for every other CMS. Disqus supports threaded comments. Disqus allows you to fix that embarrassing typo by editing comments. Disqus ‘eat their own dog food’. Disqus is free to use. 10.Disqus is used on over 4,000 blogs. Disqus lets you subscribe to individual comment threads. Disqus supports gravatars. Disqus lets you rate comments you like (and dislike). Disqus provides an RSS feed for all your comments. Disqus styles comments in keeping with your blog. Disqus is configurable and extensible. Disqus is written in Django. Disqus treats an email reply to an comment thread as as additional comment. Disqus is under active development. Disqus listen to user feedback. Disqus offers an API so you can write your own applications. Disqus allows you to use your OpenId credentials. Disqus offer unbelievably helpful and prompt support. Disqus provide excellent widgets. Disqus supports multiple moderators and a range of moderation options.