Funny, just when I get One Thing New looking great, I decide to close up shop. Well, I’m not leaving blogging all together. But I’ve been thinking about my goals recently, and being a professional blogger isn’t very high on the list.

Turns out my highest goal is to take my part time freelance Web development and see if I can’t make a go of it full time. To that end, I’m going to consolidate the Rob Lindsey brand and focus on my Web presence over at RobLindsey.com.

Yeah, I just redesigned that site, too. But I’m going to change it up again. The main page will be a blog, which will deal with a lot of the topics that have popped up here. And you’ll be able to find out about my services and other pursuits on the sub pages.

For better or worse, I’ve got the blogging bug. So, instead of trying to become a blogger, I’m going to focus on becoming a developer who has a blog. There’s a difference. Anyway, thanks to all who have read and commented on this blog in the last three plus months. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope you’ll come over to RobLindsey.com and check it out when I get up and running.

After a couple pretty long posts, I’m taking it easy tonight with the first One Thing New Web 2.0 Linkfest. These are links to some interesting stories I’ve come across in the last few days.

• Bokardo posted a great response / analysis of the report in The Economist magazine claiming that traffic to social networking sites will outstrip traffic to porn sites. If that happens, it will be the first time that porn on the Web has fallen to #2 behind anything.
• Apparently at last weeks Web 2.0 Expo, Google might have tipped off some of their future plans in a survey they gave to their Google Apps Premier users. Web Worker Daily discusses this and predicts eight Google Apps in our future. I know folks already use Gmail for storage, but a Google online backup app would be awesome.
• A friend of mine who has very solid traffic on his Blogspot blog is going to be switching to stand alone hosting sometime in the next couple of weeks. Darren at Problogger.net posted an “open mic” about hosted versus stand alone blogging. Problogger is a great resource for bloggers of all kinds, but he has some particularly awesome posts about this topic.
• I was searching Technorati for some good posts about writing and found a great guide to writing for the Web. Writing for the Web is just as much about organization and marketing as it is about good grammar, and Kevin sums it up very well in his article.
• Finally, Wired magazine’s story about the lamest technology mascots will remind you why you hated Clippy so much.

Today I was checking out some themes on the Wordpress theme viewer, and I kept noticing some interesting design elements on different pages: super headers and fat footers.

Both can be viable tools to enhance your user interface, but both have pitfalls to consider. I started to think about the possible applications of these elements from a design and marketing standpoint, and I came up with a few pros and cons for each.

Super Headers

Traditional page layouts include a header, a main body, one or two sub columns, and a footer. A super header is an extra strip of information, advertisements, or navigation above the header. Examples include FeedBurner, Technorati, and Daily Kos.

Pros:
1. Prime Real Estate. This is the very top of your page. The first place a lot of people look when they’re discovering your site and trying to figure out what it’s all about. As such, it can be a great place to put ads, like Daily Kos has done. There’s a wide banner ad above the header on their front page. It’s also a good place to put your “About” and “Contact” links.

2. Super headers are unobtrusive. If you’ve got some links that you need to publish like terms of service or affiliate information, you’ll want them to be out of the way yet accessible. A super header is a great tool for accomplishing this. Mashable uses their super header for this purpose.

3. Meta navigation. A super header is a great place to put links for logging in to a service or managing user accounts. Google has been using their super header in this way for quite a while. Between the super header on all Blogspot blogs and their placement of their login links, I actually think Google is responsible for the growing use of this design element.

Cons:
1. Easy to ignore. The only real problem I have with super headers is that they have a tendency to blend in with my browser’s toolbars. For example, when I signed up to use Feedburner to publish my RSS feed, I had very little trouble navigating their site. But when I returned to check my stats a few days later, it took me a good minute or two to find the very tiny, very gray super header with the login link. I passed right over it because it blended in with my browser. A good rule of thumb for super header backgrounds is to go bright or go white. Avoid patterns and muted colors.

Fat Footers

While I don’t have any plans to add a super header to One Thing New any time soon, I am strongly considering developing a fat footer. I’ve seen these used on sites like lifehack.org, Bokardo, digg and others to add lists of links, tag clouds, and other data to the bottom of their pages.

Pros:
1. Where am I, again? If your blog front page is super long, having a fat footer with your logo repeated and some basic navigational links makes sense. By the time someone gets to the end of your 10th post, it’s nice to remind them where they are and reinforce your brand.

2. Come back again. Your fat footer is an excellent place to put subscription options for your readers. Besides having a big RSS link at the top of your sidebar or somewhere equally prominent, you can add a ton of subscription chicklets to other services in your footer. That way, your sidebar stays uncluttered, but you’re still offering the option to your readers.

3. Recommended surfing. Let’s say your blog isn’t the only Web site you are affiliated with. Your fat footer is the perfect place to promote your other ventures. If someone has read your blog to the end, they’ll see your links to other offerings and might continue their infatuation with your content.

Cons:
1. No really, where am I? If you don’t reiterate your brand in your footer, your readers won’t know or care what they’re looking at, and they’ll gloss right over it. Also, using your footer to display ads is a bad idea. That’s not the last image you want your readers to take away from your site.

2. Location, location, location. In case you’ve forgotten, the footer is at the dead bottom of your page. Eight times in 10 your readers won’t scroll that far down — especially if you have your blog set up to post multiple stories on the front page. So, make sure you don’t put any vital information in your fat footer. Things you put down there should be semi-redundant, meaning the things you link to in your footer can be found in more prominent places on your page. Or as I mentioned with the subscription links, offer one option up top and put add ons in the footer.

Again, both super headers and fat footers can be beneficial if used properly. Keep your eyes peeled for a fatter footer on this site in the next couple of weeks.

If you read One Thing New regularly, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’ve been short on the posts this week. Well, the new look of the blog is the reason for that. I liked my old theme a lot, but it was a little raggedy around the edges. And since eventually I want to be able to point to this blog as part of my resume, I decided to spruce things up a bit.

Not only does the site look different, but the content is also going to change a bit. I’m not going to do Top Five Fridays anymore, and you’ll probably see a lot less of the YouTube-centric posts. My efforts will be focused on Web technologies and how they affect, improve, and in some cases, hinder your every day life.

Not to worry, though. I plan to add a supplemental tumblelog where I can post stuff that doesn’t quite fit One Thing New’s tighter focus.

I want to thank everyone who has stopped by in the last three months. I hope you’ll stick around and see where the blog goes from here.

Excuse my absence yesterday. I was under the weather with some sort of pollen-related cold. But now I’m feeling better, and I want to talk about the notion of bias in the blogosphere. I read an interesting post by Matt Coddington, a fellow South Carolinian, over on his Net Business Blog talking about how subjectivity and bias are (or should be) natural aspects of the blogging medium. And I tend to agree. But if blogs are biased, can they be a form of journalism, too?

As long as there have been newspapers, there have been writers using the medium as their platform to advance personal agendas. One of the first concepts I learned when I took an Intro to Journalism class in college was “agenda setting,” the theory that popular media can influence the masses by what stories they cover and how much coverage they give them. So, even if the writers try to be as objective as possible in their stories, their editors’ bias shows in the length and placement of their stories. Subjectivity is part of being human, and I think traditional media does itself a disservice by trying to hide it.

There have been those throughout the history of journalism who have embraced their subjectivity: satirists, political cartoonists, columnists, and now bloggers. And that is the beauty of blogging. Not that bloggers are subjective — everyone is subjective — but that they embrace their bias to provide their readers with content no one else can give them. Through the filter of the blogger’s bias, readers get a wholly unique perspective on words that would otherwise just lay on the page. Instead of “just the facts,” bloggers make the news more accessible by giving a face and a personality to what they report.

But do they get the facts right? Skewing the facts to suit your agenda can be a dangerous thing (Iraq war, anyone), but that’s why, if it’s important to you, you should get more than one opinion about a story. And goodness knows there are enough bloggers out there happy to oblige. On this recent fracas between Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team, I must have read at least 15 stories from all sorts of points of view before I formed my opinion.

In this growing world of subjective media, the onus is on the reader to sort it all out. And, while some folks don’t like to do their due diligence on any one story (the big reason why traditional media isn’t going anywhere, by the way), I’m of the opinion that the more points of view I read, the easier it is to make up my mind.

So, are bloggers biased? Sure. Is that wrong? I don’t think so.