If your a true geek, that'll spark the rest.

I'm back in DC, finally. At least for a couple days. I really just need to clear my head out a bit. I think I might go wonder around the monuments some and reset.

I did find this comic this morning, and it reminded me of bored.cc, which also reminded me to let certain folks know that I now have access to the domain again. I went ahead and renewed it for 2 more years. I'm not sure what we'll do with it. I know a lot of people want me to put it all back online, but frankly, theres just cooler shit out there now. Maybe some sort of hybrid new age approach, who knows.

Anyway.. It was great to get some sleep last night.

How fitting. The first comment posted to this brand spanking new blog of mine is "Hey Alex! Bring back bored.cc!" Every couple months I get an email or an IM, or now a blog comment, with that same request. It's actually pretty cool, and I totally enjoy hearing from the bored.cc crowd.

I'd love to bring back bored.cc. Starting from scratch, I could make it such a better site. Seeing things like digg.com come along and basically do the same thing in a cleaner way made me understand some of the usability issues we never got past (while making me a tad jealous in the process.. though, I mean, Kevin Rose is the man, so... it's cool.)

For those who never had the chance to play around with bored.cc, it was basically a generic digg (not just tech) but was based around this whack ass RPG metaphor instead of votes (almost in a joking fashion, but it worked).

Users would submit stories, post comments, post jokes, create polls, participate in web cam rankings, etc. etc. All the while, they'd earn experience points for their participation. Naturally, they'd move up levels every so many points. The higher the level, the more moderation power the user had over the site -- approving/rejecting stories (more like slashdot in this fashion, which is what it was modeled after), etc. The entire concept was built around the idea that I, as the admin, would never ever have to do anything. It should run itself in this weird sort of communal way.

It ran for the majority of my college career untouched (literally, coded and rarely touched again, for years... not good practice, but an interesting experiment), slowly growing in users. Never advertised and only based on word of mouth and search engine traffic, we went down with about 1000 users (at one point we had more, but lots of them were spam/crap..so.. doesn't count ;). Traffic wasn't great, but it would have been nice to throw adsense on it ;)

At the end of it all, I guess I was looking for post-college jobs and knew if someone googled me, they might not get the most flattering returns. That was probably what drove me to shut it down. I should have just removed my name from it and let it run.

Anyway, stay tuned, who knows ;)