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One of the key points that Marshall Goldsmith makes in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is the importance of apologizing to people when you’ve made a mistake and thanking them when they’ve made a contribution (or even an observation).

So, in that spirit, I have to apologize to people who’ve made (or tried to make) comments on this site for the past few months; I discovered last night that I’d done something to my WordPress configuration which was sending comment notifications into the ether (actually they were probably spamming some unknown user sharing the same hosting provider), and therefore, any comments from “new” people were stuck waiting for approval, and I wasn’t seeing comments from “old” people, either.

I think I fixed everything up, but for those of you who may wonder what’s been of interest to my readership recently, I’ll call out the “lost” commentors and comments here:

• Way back in November, Ed Costello weighed in on my Ubuntu problems (fortunately, that machine’s no longer an issue for me).
• Mike Lipsie commented about לקונדל and its underlying conjugation.
• November 30th’s posting on Free Rice brought out comments from Sacha Chua and Barbara Finkelstein, and I’ve responded in the comments to that post.
• In mid-December, David Preston taunted me because he got his XO long before I did. But now I’ve got mine, so I don’t care.
• Henry Bankhead at the Los Gatos Library explained how to get to their catalog via Worldcat.
• Turbo Todd Watson recommended I read the book version of Charlie Wilson’s War (which I’m in the process of doing — and I agree, it’s even wilder than the movie!).
• Marshall Goldsmith noticed my comments on his book.
• Cathleen Rittereiser offered me help in Getting Nothing Done. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to go back to Getting Things Done until vacation rolls around again, though.
• My posts [1] and [2] on Twitter brought out comments from Connie Reece, Ed Costello, Sacha Chua, and Len Edgerly.
• I was not alone in being underwhelmed by Gentlemen of the Road - Downstreamer agreed.
• Richard Schwartz is trying to incite me to play a game.
• And finally, Xavier Verges and Ed Costello wish they had their XOs now thatI got mine.

Summarizing all those comments was a lot of work, but fun — maybe I’ll do it again some day.

I started to play with Twitter in late July. My first few posts were answers to the Twitter question (”what are you doing?”) and they were incredibly dull. It didn’t take me long to give up on Twitter — I hadn’t found the secret sauce.

But I didn’t quite give up (probably because I had a bookmark on my iPhone, and I kept seeing the site when I hit that browser window). I started playing with Facebook, too, and saw some of my friends there add a Twitter app to their pages. I even sent a couple of @replies to friends, but it was all one-way broadcasting on my part.

And there was one other use I had for Twitter: Remember the Milk, an online to-do list which I’ve also been toying with as part of my Getting Things Done efforts. RTM featured a Twitter interface, so I could easily add a task to my list by sending it a direct message from my phone — and since I had 200 messages a month, whether I needed them or not, it seemed like a win to me.

Early in December, I started noticing (and following) more and more IBM friends on Twitter, and then I had a conversation with Sacha Chua, one of the people I mentor at work. She convinced me to give Twitter a more serious try, so one evening, I started looking at replies to people I was following and inserted myself into a conversation or two.

It didn’t hurt a bit. And I found myself conversing with Industry Names like Ed Yourdon and pundits like Michael Krigsman. Not necessarily about industry topics, either. It’s amazing how much can fit into 140 characters — the sidebands are amazing!

And then on Boxing Day night, I was stuck in a crafts store while Diane was shopping, so I sat down with my iPhone and turned to Twitter. There was a discussion of painkillers happening, and somehow it swam into my ken (probably indirected through Robert Scoble). I didn’t actually have anything to add, but it did remind me that I had a big bottle of expired aspirin to dispose of, so I tweeted a question. And I got an answer (which I still haven’t acted on).

But I also got drawn into the general conversation (hey, I was bored!), and by the time Diane was finished (and it wasn’t that long), I was following a bunch of people I hadn’t known existed 30 minutes before. And they were discussing serious topics like Susan Reynolds’s cancer (hence the painkillers) and silly topics (too numerous to mention).

And I’ve been wandering around those discussions and increasing my circle of contacts for the last week.

Is Twitter a substitute for face-to-face contact? No, definitely not (especially when the avatars change for special events like Frozen Pea Friday, or @newmediajim’s birthday), but it’s a good way to meet people you wouldn’t encounter in a more focused environment. And if you happen to find you have something in common, you can chat with them and even choose to follow one another’s tweets. (And there’s the secret sauce!)

I wouldn’t use Twitter for mission-critical communications — there are clearly scaling limits, both technological and human — but it’s a useful tool to have in the toolkit, and it’s fun! And if it weren’t fun, it’d be a lot less useful. What could be more boring than reading streams of 140-character messages from total strangers?

There’s nothing like finishing the year by doing a software update to fix security holes.

I’ve had Jott on my speed-dial list for a while, but I haven’t made extensive use of it. And I’ve been using Remember the Milk to manage a few of my tasks…but again, not seriously.

But that may change, now that the two services are integrated. I like the idea of being able to dictate a quick voice note to myself and have it show up in my task management system. And having more of my tasks in RTM will encourage me to use it for even more of my tasks — or at least that’s my theory.

And, as the previous entry in this blog shows, I can now even use Jott to blog — short blog entries, to be sure, but sometimes I only have a little bit to say.

Hmmm, if brevity is the soul of wit, does enforced brevity guarantee I’ll be wittier?

This is a test entry done through Jott, let’s see how it works.

Powered by Jott

(It works pretty well — I was surprised to see a link to my voice message, which I’ve deleted, since it’s of no real use.)

I haven’t been keeping my blogroll up to date for a long time - basically, I do almost all my blog reading in NetNewsWire, and I haven’t found a good (read: automatic) way of reflecting what I follow there to the blogroll here.

But spammers have figured out how to update the blogroll here automatically, so I just got rid of it entirely.

Damn spammers.

Well, not really — but I’m now using ContentRobot’s iPhone plugin to make it easier to read this blog on an iPhone. Thanks to TUAW for the pointer!

If this works, you’ll see it.

The only tricky part of the upgrade was getting rid of the extraneous leading “/wordpress” in the tar file.

This was one of the first things I saw when I got back to my office after lunch:

NewsGator Daily: “This morning we announced the release of NewsGator Mobile for iPhone, a free newsreader that takes advantage of the unique design and user interface of Apple’s wildly popular new device. The free service, which works with iPhones and other mobile devices is accessible at http://m.newsgator.com.” [via Brent]

So naturally, I had to try it. I like it…a lot! It won’t replace reading blogs on a real computer (especially those only available inside the firewall), but it’s sure convenient and makes it easy to zip through an accumulation of items in a few spare minutes. Very cool indeed!

No, I’m not talking about bathtubs. I’m talking about the scum who have apparently decided that death threats are an acceptable way of expression, at least when it comes to Kathy Sierra.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be on the receiving end of such threats and abuse; hell, I found it hard to get back to work after just reading what she was subjected to.

Kathy, I hope you’re able to return to blogging; your perspectives and good sense have helped me (as have your books). But first, take care of yourself.