After expiring last September, Baio.net was finally released back into the wild yesterday and I snapped it up! I’d been patiently waiting for months, so it’s a relief that nobody else registered it (like the Scott Baio fan club.)

Now, I can give out vanity e-mail addresses to my dad’s side of the family, if they ever got around to getting computers. Also, I was thinking of setting up a family weblog a la Utsler.net. Any Baios (Baioes? Baioii?) around the world who want a free e-mail address, give me a buzz.

I’m probably going to regret this, but I found the full video clip of Katie Couric battling conservative psycho-pundit Ann Coulter on the Today Show. It’s been in the entertainment press recently, dubbed the Couric/Coulter Catfight. Needless to say, it’s uncomfortable and strangely compelling. Download the 8 MB Windows Media video, or the rushed transcript from Drudge. (If anyone can mirror this video, post the link in the comments. Thanks to Moatmai for the clip.)

It took a while, but my Metafilter Statistics page has finally been updated again, after resting peacefully since last November. Regardless of how you feel about Metafilter, these charts give you a three-year glimpse into the changing trends of a popular online community. It looks like traffic has finally seemed to level off a bit, after a period of long growth. (It’s also a convenient way to spot cult threads.) I posted a thread about it on Metatalk, the forum for discussing all things Metafilter.

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Question: Why does Amazon.com have a dog named Rufus on their 404 error page? Travis Smith, editor of Variety.com and generally nice guy, found out the short history of Rufus, the Amazon dog.

A couple new improvements to the Waxy Backlinks script. It can now be called from PHP scripts, referrers from some search engines are now excluded by default, and you can set the maximum number of backlinks to display and the minimum threshold of hits before a link gets displayed. Any of these options can easily be changed in the script itself. Many thanks to Joe Utsler and Ben Trott for bug reports. Download Waxy Backlinks v0.05 now! (Installation and configuration details inside.)

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