Dear Jimmy Fallon,

Congratulations on landing the big Late Night gig, it’s a good show, and you are doing good things with it already.  The “I’m a big geek” meme is original, and you are already doing a good job milking it to make things a bit different on your new show.  Kudos for that idea.

Please take this letter in the spirit in which it was intended.  You will not be taken seriously as a geek until you have Kevin and I as guests on Late Night.  I understand you are new to your job and all; that’s why you have so far taken the “easy geek” route.  Having Kevin Rose of Digg/ Diggnation and Joshua Topolsky of Engadget on Late Night was frankly an easy way for you to go.  Sure, Digg is the biggest geek social media site on the planet, and engadget is the biggest gadget site.  I realize that makes these guys an easy call to have as guests on your little show — but come on, that’s the easy way out.

The fact is, you are not going to be taken seriously as a geek until you have Kevin Tofel and I, James Kendrick, as guests on Late Night.  Now before you rip into this idea, know that I understand that jkOnTheRun is not the biggest and flashiest gadget site out there.  That’s why a move to have us as guests on Late Night could only be taken as solid proof that you are a real, certifiable geek.  Taking the hard way, now that shows guts, and I’m sure you have them.

I’m pretty sure that Kevin and I have handled more gadgets than those other guys combined.  I mean, come on, our tag line at jkOnTheRun is “…using mobile devices since they weighed 30 lbs.”  Thirty freakin’ pounds!  That shows how long we have been doing this geek stuff, and you can tap into that gadgety geek goodness on your show.  That would sure get you tons of geek cred on the street.  No question about that.

Make no mistake, Kevin and I are geeks all right, the exact sort you are already using to build up your geek meme on Late Night.  But we’re not ordinary geeks, no sir, we are PROFESSIONAL geeks who do this for a living.  We don’t sit around drinking beer and pretending to play on laptops.  Nope we do this geek thing FULL TIME.  We are a part of the most respected tech network on the Internet, GigaOM.  You’ve heard of them, I’m sure.  You need that if you are ever going to be taken seriously as the true geek of late night.  Trust me on that.

I hope you realize that this entreaty is based on respect for you as a late night host.  We want to see you succeed at this Late Night thing and we’ll do anything we can to help you in this endeavor.  We’re there for you, man.

Take care,

James Kendrick, jkOnTheRun

UPDATE: I have tweeted this challenge to Jimmy Fallon.  If you’d like to see us on his show then get your own tweet in too!  @jimmyfallon

Our recent poll to capture a feel for how you access jkOnTheRun is now closed with almost 1,000 responses.  While it may not be surprising for a mobile tech blog, fully 60% of respondents use a mobile method for accessing the site most often. While we realize that the choices in this poll did not cover every conceivable method for accessing jkOnTheRun, the poll did give us a feel for how many are using netbooks (14%), handhelds (4%) and phones (10%).  Here’s a complete breakdown of the results:

Here are the actual numbers for each:

Thanks to all who took the time to vote in the poll.  Your information will go a long way to helping us make the site better for all.

We are always trying to keep up with ways we can improve the site here on jkOnTheRun and make your visit the most enjoyable as we can.  One of the ways to do that is by tracking how you access our site most often when you come to visit us for a bit.

It’s time for a poll to let us see how you visit us the most.  It’s a simple poll, just indicate the manner in which you visit us most often.  The selections are self-explanatory and the last one indicates if you usually access us via the mobile version (m.jkontherun.com).  You did know about that, right?

One of the aspects that most appealing to our community here is the great commentary that we all share. For the longest time, James and I have wanted threaded comments to make that experience even better. We looked at various third-party systems and plug-ins, but in the end, we left things alone.

Our hopes for a native solution were just realized today, since WordPress announced support for threaded comments. We’ve got ‘em implemented, so have it and enjoy! I think they’ll make a great community even better. Then again, maybe I’m the only one who sometimes gets lost in the linear comment threads. Is it just me?

I’m sitting at the local car dealership using my MSI Wind over EV-DO and I just realized something amazing. Here at jkOnTheRun, we’ve just pushed past our 10,000th post! While some might view that as a writing accomplishment, I’m a little different.

I view it as 10,000 opportunities to reach out and have a conversation with you. 10,000 chances to enjoy discussion and opposing viewpoints on mobile technology. 10,000 relationship builders. We don’t just try to post news or hands-on info and have the conversation end. When we can, we chime in along with your comments and together we turn this blog into passionate community.

And that’s the other half of the eqution: you. I’ve often said that “without readers, we’re doing nothing more than writing a bunch of useless words.” The 46,500 comments left on the site, both positive and negative, add just as much value as those 10,000 posts. If not more.  At the end of the day, we write the blog but you make it sucessful. Not us. For that, thanks! 10,000 times over.

Our daily “Mobile Tech Minutes” video feature has truly been a treat for us. We started these very short segments last week and we’re thrilled with the community response. You can’t keep everyone happy all of the time, but we strive for keeping most people happy as much as we can. The vast majority of responses and e-mails have been positive and for that we thank you.

So we’re going to continue with the daily feature and try to bring you a unique and brief mobile tech tidbit to see every weekday. Tomorrow however, we’re going to try a change in the way we deliver the content.

Continue reading »

This looks ironic since I was just complaining about too many social networks, but the timing is out of my hands. Our crack technical staff (that means you, Chancey!) just got our jkOnTheRun Twitter account set up with TwitterFeed. That means you can subscribe to the blog through Twitter… or not, the choice is yours. Of course, you never know what opportunities or secret stuff we might tweet using that account. You don’t want to miss anything, do you?

Don’t take it personally if the jkOnTheRun Twitter account doesn’t follow you back. James and I have our own accounts and use those for personal use. Interesting back-story on this: Dave Winer actually set up this acccount for us way back in 2007 to test his “River of Feeds” project. We’re thankful and appreciative that Dave turned the account over to us so we could offer our posts via Twitter. I consider Dave an all-around nice guy and this just another example of why.

We try to not toot our own horn too much but this is so big we have to let it out.  Trends Updates is a web site that rates other web sites in a myriad of different categories.  They recently named their Best of 2008: Top 25 Technology Blogs and we are honored to make their cut.  You can see from the sites on the graphic below that we are in very good company and we are absolutely thrilled to make the list.  We do what we do because we love it and it’s always great when others appreciate it.  Check out their full list for the list of 25.

We report on what browsers our visitors are using from time to time which gives a picture of the browser wars.  The current figures show that Firefox is still the browser of choice among savvy readers.  Internet Explorer is the next most-used browser among visitors.  Interestingly, Google Chrome is still holding steady at 5% which is slightly higher than Opera.  It has remained there since Chrome was first released.

We warned you we had some back-end stuff going on last night and that the ability to leave comments would be compromised. We are happy to report the work is over and with the exception of some minor cosmetic things you should be seeing us again and you certainly can leave comments again.

The site looks pretty much the same as it did before this work began and if you didn’t know it you wouldn’t believe that this minor downtime saw a complete switch over to the WordPress platform.  It’s a tribute to the crack technical staff at GigaOM that we completely changes platforms and yet our site looks the same as before.  That was the #1 goal with the switch and they did an awesome job!  If you encounter any minor issues with the new site please send Kevin or I an email and let us know.  Stand down and surf away!