Sioux Falls, South Dakota isn’t usually the place I think about when I think of great looking, well-designed office spaces, but after seeing the Blend Interactive offices, that might change. This place is pretty dynamite looking with lots of character.

We redesigned, finally. If you only ever read Gadgetopia through RSS, stop by the actual URL and take a look.

I am looking for a 11” x 17” movie poster of “The Net” — the 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock. I have looked, and been unable to find it (please don’t ask why I need it — all will be revealed…)

I offer a $25 Amazon gift certificate if you find one that I buy.

This post, therefore, is nothing but a notice and a place to vent. I know some of you have strong opinions about ads in RSS, but this is particularly sensitive for Gadgetopia, since probably 80% of our eyeballs come through RSS. The HTML side is fine, but RSS is where the lion’s share of our traffic is.

Comments are open. Have at it.

A fire at The Planet’s H1 data center in Houston, Texas on Saturday has taken out thousands of websites.

[…] About 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers are affected by the outage.

We lost a server (this one, in fact) Saturday afternoon. We were just about to start bringing 45 sites up on a new machine early Monday when the server came back online.

That’s always tricky — at what point do you failover? If we had, the server would have comeback right while DNS was rolling or something.

There are 14 sites in this category, and Gadgetopia is ahead of sites like Scoble, Crunchgear, Techdirt, etc. I find this frankly amazing, and I suspect we may have been purchased once, which put us ahead.

Even more interesting is that we’re #8 of 44 in the entire “Internet and Technology” category.

I have no raw sales figures. I’d be curious to know who purchased this feed to read on a Kindle and why. If you’re out there, speak up.

Our first activity is a photoset of the Blend Offices. So, take a tour and learn about the safe, the robot, the gnome and everything else that makes Blend a fascinating place to work.

I have zero idea what I’m going to talk about. In fact, my first post might just be about how hard it is to do audio posts.

If you guys think I’m an idiot in print, trust me — audio isn’t going to change that perception.

What you have to understand, however, is that 80% of our content comes from search engines (most of that from Google), so this list doesn’t represent what Gadgetopia readers were interested in. It just shows an intersection of (1) what the public was searching for, and (2) what Gadgetopia posts got well-positioned in Google.

1. Tea Games
2. The Cell Phone Water Detection Sticker
3. T-Rex
4. Installshield Update Manager
5. Bitlord

Notice a pattern? Each post was named for the subject, and nothing else. So the TITLE tag of the post page was for the exact same search phrase someone would use to find it. Some things in SEO ain’t that hard.

Here are the top posts by comments gathered throughout the year.

1. The Cell Phone Water Detection Sticker
2. Intelius
3. Geek Squad
4. Why Macs Suck
5. Why Mac Ads Suck

As for numbers #4 and #5 there, I can only assume that “Macs” and “suck” just go together when searching the Net.

I’ll be back in action after the holidays.

One quick story —

We were at the Animal Kingdom today, and my son was sad to find out that the Expedition Everest roller coaster was closed due to “technical difficulties.” The truth, however, was a little more sinister.

(Interesting note: right about the time this would have happened, I remember several stern-sounding announcements over the PA that went “would [name] or [name] from Navarre, Florida (I specifically remember the city) please pick up a courtesy phone and dial [number].” It’s sad to know now why they needed to find these people.)

I find this extremely cool. I’m really proud of that post, though it was so long I don’t know how many people actually read it. It only got one comment.

What’s kind of neat is that Gadgetopia now has its own Amazon page. Which means you can rank, rate, review, and tag Gadgetopia on Amazon.

Gosh, this should be fun to watch.

So, I guess it was just a matter of time before I stumbled across something like this: gadgetopia.co.uk. It appears to be a very cool little gadget store and spy shop in the U.K. I like the little “good vs. evil” theme they have going there.

I had an email exchange with the owner of the domain this week. Seems like a nice guy, and we both celebrated our extraordinary taste in domain names.

In a larger sense, I looked into trademarking the name “Gadgetopia” once. I was told by an IP attorney that trademarks are industry-specific, so the best I could probably do is trademark Gadgetopia in the context of “a Web site about computer topics.” I didn’t think there was much danger of someone infringing on me in that regard, so I didn’t bother.

The fact remains that the odds of someone using the name “Gadgetopia” for something is very much lessened by the fact that there’s no good, universal domain for them to use since I (and this other guy) own them all.

I was offered $15,000 for this domain once by a guy who wanted to set up cell phone kiosks in malls. I declined, and he told me that he was going to change the planned name of his company because I wouldn’t give up the domain.