It’s great to make new connections, contacts, and friends, but it’s really important never to forget about the person you’re stuck with for the rest of your life… YOU!

Thinks I’ve been doing to connect with myself, in no particular order of importance or level of help connecting to me.

1) Waking up for 4am yoga… yeah crazy I know… my roommate heard about it and we wen. We were two of four people crazy enough to be there. I slept through most of it, but hey I tried something new.

2) Walking around my neighborhood to Momo Sushi. It’s a 3 mile loop and I got to watch Culver City High School beat Beverly in baseball while eating.

3) Making dinner for a friend. Sometimes a nice dinner at home with whatever I an find in the pantry/fridge and great conversation is the best way to remind yourself where you come from and who you are.

4) Watching old movies. I have a thing that I like to see the classics. In college I took an American Cinema course to be forced to watch films like Singing in the Rain, Girl with a Yellow Ribbon, and the Godfather. It was great! In the past few weeks I’ve watched All the Presidents Men, Boondock Saints, The Emperor’s Club, and Full Metal Jacket… this week hopefully I’m going to watch Taxi Driver.

5) I returned to Rockclimbing. This was an activity I took up the last time I was unemployed and was looking for something that would provide positive reinforcement in the absence of a man or a boss. This weekend some friends and I went climbing in Point Dume on the beach in Malibu. There was a pod of dolphins and humpback whales that cam by just a few hundred feet off shore. It was amazing!

6) Free Yoga class at Lulu Lemon. The instructor was amazing, and during the class I came up with the name for one of the sections of the Iphone Apps (”Xtras”) and a quality tagline “Stalk and Talk with StarTrax”. Mental clarity often comes when you aren’t trying to connect with anyone but yourself.

7) Reading my favorite magazine… The Week. Much like other things I like, it pulls together pieces of columns from top news sources to provide less biased reporting on the top stories from the previous week. If you’ve never read a copy, I’ll give you one. It might be the best news in print. I haven’t gotten the chance to pick up a book to read, but maybe sometime soon.

Catching up on my DVR/Tivo. I have a guilty pleasure… it’s called Brothers and Sisters on ABC. Until I got a DVR I used to watch it on Abc.com, but I’ve always watched 2-3 episodes at a time. I’m not very good with waiting for cliffhangers to be completed, so catching up with a few episodes at once works out nicely.

9) Going to NYC. I maybe the only person who goes to New York and relaxes, but the GEL 2009 conference was a great excuse to visit my two best friends and sisters who live there, and not do very much else. I think I had 80 emails on my blackberry that collected while I was there, but I got to them eventually and no one seemed to be too mad to wait a day or two. In NYC just sitting on buses and subways for long periods of time can be a very meditative experience.

10) Walking my old dog. When I lived in Santa Monica, land of the lucky people, my roommate had a wonderful golden retreiver named Bella. She’s the best dog ever… chill and friendly… and super soft to pet. When I was forced to move out (my roommate’s fiance was moving in), it was agreed that I would get “visitation rights” with Bella. Now that I’m in Santa Monica practically every day to work at Tsavo, I get to go over and have Bella accompany me on a long walk along the ocean at least once a week. Few things are as relaxing an calming as walking along the ocean, listening to the Beatles, and having a friendly companion like Bella.

11) Sleep. I’ve been sleeping a lot more. It turns out that every day is better if you’ve gotten some sleep the night before. Who would have thunk it? There was a point in January/February where I was sleeping 4-5 hours a night and working my tail off. This did not make me happy and didn’t make me that fun to be around, so I’ve been sleeping more. It means I can’t be at as many events, or be there for after parties, but I feel better, and as mentioned in the beginning, it’s all about ME for this post.

Please tell me what you do to connect with yourself….

It helps if you are associated with connectors. Most people on this list I have been introduced to by Andrew Warner or Daniel Paul, I definitely owe them this shout out.

Per some recommendations from some of the individuals below, I’ve taught myself a little bit of HTML. This list was created using what I learned, and was typed completely in the HTML not visual editor on Wordpress. It took longer but I think it was worth it for the adventure.

List of high level people who were nice enough to give me some time:

1. Josh Spector – Director of Content at Comedy.com
2. Mike Jones – CEO of Tsavo Media (among many other accomplishments)
3. Sean Percival – Director of Content at Tsavo Media (and other sites including LALAWAG)
4. Drew Baldwin – Co-Founder of Tubefilter
5. Marc Hustvedt – Co-Founder of Tubefilter
6. Mark Jeffrey – CTO of Mahalo
7. Tyler Crowley – Director of Business Development, Marketing, and Strategy of Mahalo
8. Eric Stephens – Director of Product and User Experience at Mahalo
9. Mark Geller – Product Manager of Photos at Google
10. Jun Loayza – Co-Founder of Viraology
11. Yu-kai Chou – Co-Founder of Viraology
12. Neil Patel – SEO Expert and Founder of QuickSprout
13. Don Mosites – Founder of Streamy
14. KW Low – Director of Business Development and Strategy at AT&T Interactive (Yellowpages)
15. William Barnes – Founder of WPB Group (and Geeky T-shirt extraordinaire)
16. Shira Lazar – Tech Reporter and Ultimate Connector who blogs at The Pop Report
17. Stefan Goldby – Producer at Chemistry Productions (and former VP at ManiaTV)
18. Hayden Black – Executive Producer of Goodnight Burbank (and on-line video power player)
19. Mike Prasad – Developer of Koji BBQ’s Twitter and GirlGamer
20. Yaron Tilajef – Director of Sales at (mt) MediaTemple
21. The crew at Eblizz
22. Every C level person at AFI
23. And a few other people I’m sure I’m forgetting

Well that’s the end of this post and my HTML experiment. Let’s hope all the href=”" links work

After weeks of talking to people at networking events, tech events, friends, twittering, facebook status updating and google searching, I still couldn’t find the ability to search multiple blog feeds for a specific topic and then have that search become its own RSS feed.

Responses on Twitter included Google Reader, NewsGator, RSSReader, just to name a few. They are all great services that allow individuals to view the newest posts on the blogs that they care about, with bolded numbers to tell the user when they’ve missed something. There is generally the ability to search an individual blog or even multiple blogs for a topic of choice.

There are also a number of readers that you can purchase to have as an application on your computer. I’m not sure why you would want this with the free options out there, but who knows. Additionally, now your company can actually control which feeds they are sending to you. There are new sites out there like Streamy, Feeds2.0 and Trackle which are in Beta testing and might be able to do some cool stuff, but right now they aren’t exactly ready for use. My favorite suggestion was PopBandit, which is now out of business.

So I kept asking and asking different people. When all of a sudden last night, I gchatted a blogger friend of mine to see what she used for aggregating the blogs that she reads. She mentioned that she used to use one site but now like the vast majority of the population, she uses Google Reader. Amazingly enough, the site she no longer uses actually does EXACTLY what I needed. Enter Bloglines.

Reasons I love Blogines:

1. It allows you to subscribe to as many blogs as you’d like. Including the feeds from twitter.
2. You can search the whole library of blogs or just your feeds for any topic you choose.
3. You can even use AND or OR functionality to refine or expand your search.
4. Similar to Twitter Search , it then can create a new feed from just your search.
5. Even as you add new feeds to your list, the permalink for your defined search within your feeds remains the same.

Only problem with Bloglines, their TOS isn’t clear about whether or not I can use their technology for my application and either way the new search feeds seem to be protected for non-users. At least I can show my developers exactly what I want to happen, and maybe we can recreate some of the technology.

Hooray for listening to Jason Nazar and continuously talking about the technology I want to create, one never knows where the answer to your questions will come from.