Over the past week, I’ve been suffering fairly badly from my sinus infection and bronchitis and haven’t been writing nearly as much as I would like. There are several important blog posts I want to get to, and perhaps even some that have become moot, or at least changed direction considerably over the past week.

I have been trying to keep up with emails, social networks, visiting various blogs, and so on, and have lots of notes to highlight.

In the social network space, the big development is Plurk. You can sign up and follow me there, or if you want to boost my plurk karma, you can signup here.

Plurk is yet another microblog. You write 140 character messages to say what you are up to and your message gets displayed with messages of your friends. Sound a lot like Twitter? Well, it seems a lot of the users are people who were frustrated by Twitter’s downtime. Yet there are some interesting differences. Plurk is a bit like what you might expect to get when Microsoft attempts to take Twitter, shoehorn it into a Gantt chart and display it on an ajax version of MySpace. When I described it that way to my eldest daughter, her eyes just sort of glazed over, but I’m used to that from my daughters. So, if what I said doesn’t make sense, just go over and take a look at Plurk.

So far, most of the discussions on Plurk seem to be about Plurk, with a bit of emphasis on how you build karma there. So, I’ll keep playing with Plurk and building my karma there, but I’ll probably stick with Twitter, even with its downtime, to get my real news.

People have commented that they don’t want yet another site to update their statuses. Why can’t someone build one place where you can update your status and have that sent out to all the other sites? Well, I’m told that ping.fm does that, but you need an invitation, and I haven’t scored one yet. If anyone can get me an invitation, drop me a note.

Ping.fm’s current competition is hellotxt. I’ve signed up for hellotxt and sent a few messages from it. The MySpace and Bebo connectivity didn’t work for me during my test, it doesn’t cover as many sites as ping.fm does, and there isn’t a nice SMS interface right now for people in the States, but it looks promising.

The other site that just came on my radar is mento. Mento is a tool to save a link to a bunch of different places at the same time. They have a Firefox addon which I’m about to start testing. No opinion on this one yet.

My first attempt at using Mento, after bookmarking Orient Lodge, to bookmark an article about an effort to build a Croquet VM. Croquet is a virtual world system, based originally on SmallTalk. It is an important part of Qwaq, and I want to keep an eye on the what goes on in that space.

If I had Mento installed earlier, and felt that it was working properly, I might have used it to flag three recent posts I’ve stumbled across via EntreCard. New York Renovator has this post about Victory Gardens. She talks about people growing victory gardens as part of the effort to live greener lifestyles, less dependent on foreign oil. It fits nicely with my interest in Project Laundry List, an effort to get more people to dry clothes outside, even fighting restrictive covenants that prevent it, and noting that “Electric dryers use five to ten percent of residential electricity in the United States!

Another cool blog entry I found through EntreCard was Your Fun Family’s pointer to a 50 State map game. I’ve played it twice, and do pretty well. Some of the first states that I put on the map are a little bit off, but once a few states are on the map, it becomes easier. My average error has been 11 to 13 miles, missing 3 to 5 states. My last round I got a score of 90.19.

One last blog post, found through EntreCard, is of a waterslide, which I believe is in Germany. Check it out.

One final note: I did get a chance to check a few of my Facebook requests. Facebook has a new application for blog networks. Stop by and join the Orient Lodge blog network on Facebook. If your blog is in a Facebook blog network, let me know.

Enough for now. Now, I need to try and sleep off some of the heat and the sinus infection.