When looking for a subject for this week’s “The Sunday Morning Post” the choice was an easy one; however, once again it would seem that I have stumbled upon a subject that is hard to define, yet has made a huge contribution to this and many fellow Bloggers. No birth-dates, no children, no wife, no working on a family farm….. just cold, hard facts. Dave Sifry is all about the cold, hard facts. I’m not sure this post will make for a warm and fuzzy read, but it’s sure to be educational.

Dave Sifry is an entrepreneur with over 20 years experience in the I.T industry. Most recently, he founded Technorati, the largest blog search engine in the world. He is Chairman of Technorati’s Board of Directors and served as CEO from 2002 to 2007. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave lived and worked in Kobe, Japan for Mitsubishi Electric, and speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. While he now lives in foggy San Francisco, he has an interest in the outdoors and is drawn to Yosemite, in his hometown state of California.

Dave was a co-founder and the CTO of Sputnik. Prior to Sputnik, he was co-founder, CTO, and Vice President of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc, having built Linuxcare’s services infrastructure.

Dave is a recognized expert on leadership development, blogs and the massive changes in the digital media environment, Open Source development, and the Linux operating system.

He is also the creator of Projectdocs, an online document management and collaboration service, and Hoosgot, a lazyweb service. He served on the founding Board of Directors of Linux International, the Advisory Board of the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Technical Advisory Board of the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement.

Like so many of my subjects, Dave no longer keeps a regular Blog, which is truly our loss; his last entry at Sifry.com was on April 19, 2009 and titled: Great Kids Afternoon Project: Claymation! He does, however, leave in his absence a hard-earned understanding of the Blogging Process with his train of thought. React quickly, make your post easy to read, link, optimize for the search engines and don’t forget to post! Now, those are cold hard facts!

Jason Kottke is an American Blogger with a degree in physics from Coe College and was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” as a Blogger in 2003.

Kottke, a pioneering Blogger, began his Blog in March, 1998. On February 22, 2005, Kottke announced that he had left his job in web design to work on kottke.org full-time within a “micropatronage” model (subscription blogging). Exactly one year later, Kottke announced that only 1450 micro-patrons had contributed $39,900 and that he would not attempt a second year. As of May 2006, the Blog was and is supported by paid advertisements. He is married to Meg Hourihan who cofounded Pyra Labs with Evan Williams, the company that launched “Blogger” later sold to Google.
His latest post, “Secret Restaurant Menus” was posted on March 10, 2010. He holds an Alexa rating of 19,137 as of March 10, 2010 which is an 11% improvement over the previous month.

While digging into the archives for this story I couldn’t help but notice the footer of kottke.org which shows a measure of personality and reads: “You’re visiting kottke.org. All content by Jason Kottke (contact me) unless otherwise noted, with some restrictions on its use. Good luck will come to those who dig around in the archives. If you’ve reached this point by accident, I suggest panic. In memory of DFW, rest in peace. Thanks for everything.”

I couldn’t ignore his footer to his resume’ either (here’s the link): “My mom thinks I’m really great, but more appropriate references are available upon request”.

While finishing up on this post, I thought I would take a look at what Jason was Tweeting about today. Guess that was unusual timing!

“kottke.org is 12 years old today. Land sakes, where’s the time gone?”

If you’d like to know what is hidden below, highlight the redacted text below:

And catch this trick, pretty cool huh? This is from one of Jason’s Post. It’s called redacted text. Thanks Jason!!! Ya gotta love those Pro-Blogger tricks!

Meg Hourihan is the co-founder, along with Evan Williams, of Pyra Labs, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was acquired by Google. She published weblogs at Megnut.com and meg.hourihan.com. She co-founded Kinja along with Nick Denton of Gawker Media.

She is the co-author of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, and a frequent speaker at technical conferences concerning online journalism and the role of women in technology. Hourihan was named a Young Innovator Who Will Create the Future in 2003 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. PC Magazine named Evan Williams, Paul Bausch, and Hourihan (the Blogger team) as People of the Year in 2004. She was a member of the RSS Advisory Board from 2006 to 2007.

Hourihan married fellow blogger Jason Kottke on March 25, 2006. Their son, Ollie, was born on July 3, 2007. Their daughter, Minna, was born September 21, 2009.

At this point, I’m going to take a spot of “Literary License”, which I am normally reluctant to do with the posts found in “The Sunday Morning Post”. I’ve always thought that I would let the facts just stand for themselves. However with Meg Hourihan, I have to stray from that intent just a bit, as there is so little hard information on her technical career. In fact, Meg Hourihan has had a fragmented, if not colorful career. With so little known, and the absence of an interview to fall back on, one has to be careful in filling in the blanks. So I offer these observations with trepidation.

Meg is “the” pioneering Pro-Blogger, maybe the best. While doing my research for this very small piece about an otherwise complex personality, it is easy to see how she naturally rose to high levels in technology. As her prominence increased, from the obscure and quaint, to the spotlight of popularity, Meg Hourihan has slowly faded into the background of New York and the privacy of Family Life. By all appearances, it looks like something between “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally”.

Her two Blogs that are named above have fallen into a quiet neglect. Meg.Hourihan.com celebrates the birthday of a popular Blog on May 2, 2006 only to post three more times before falling silent on June 2, 2006. Her most active Blog, Megnut.com, began to fade somewhere between the births of Ollie and Minna, dropping off in October 2007, dormant in 2008 and only active in June, July, and August of 2009. Her last post was this past February 17 with the post “No Favorite Food For A Toddler.”

I like to drop-in on my subject’s Twitter accounts to see what they are doing the very day that I post their articles. A quick view of Meg Hourihan’s day shows her response to her husband’s Tweet that “Kottke.org” (Jason Kotte’s Blog) is 12 years old today, Her response: @jkottke Golly!

What a perfect ending to this post!

Evan Williams was born on March 31, 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska. Raised on the family farm, Williams, when not in school helped out with the irrigation chores. He attended the University of Nebraska for a year and a half, and following tradition left to purse a career in technology.

Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, co-founded Pyra Labs to provide Project Management Software. A note-taking feature of the software was spun off into the now popular Google app., Blogger.

Google acquired Pyra Labs on February 13, 2003. Williams left Google in October 2004 to co-found Odeo, a podcasting company. In late 2006, Williams co-founded Obvious with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees. In April 2007, Odeo was acquired by Sonic Mountain.

In 2007, Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey hooked-up to start “Twitter”. In October 2008, Williams became CEO of Twitter, displacing Jack Dorsey who became chairman of the board.

Evan Williams lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with wife, Sara Morishige, and son, Miles born on August 11, 2009.

If your feeling like the following information on Williams represents “Cliffs Notes” instead of a journalistic post, there’s good reason. While in the course of doing research for this post, there just was not much information on Williams himself. He has done plenty of interviews, but rarely talks about himself. It’s pretty much Twitter this and that.

Williams like Biz Stone still manages his own Blog, though he also, like Stone has not been active for some time, since December 28, 2009 where his last post was titled “They’re not talking to you”.

And what is Evan Tweeting about today? OH: “My face awaits you.” ……….. Very Strange!