The Morning News is throwing their annual Tournament of Books to figure out the best book of 2007. A new twist this year is the Making Book Tournament where you bet on what the winner will be, with the proceeds going to First Book, a literacy foundation. MeFi is dollar matching bets up to $1,000 for the contest.
posted by mathowie on Mar 4, 2008 - 18 comments

Pretty cool resource: MeFi User Sites.
posted by mathowie on Feb 22, 2007 - 45 comments

Winners of the December best-of post contest...and the envelope please...
posted by mathowie on Jan 2, 2007 - 104 comments

Yesterday I said jokingly "I'm not a big fan of gatherings -- it seems when you get enough people together in one place, the chances of one asshole ruining it for everyone goes up exponentially." and someone went and proved it. This is why letting new users can be problematic.
posted by mathowie on Apr 13, 2004 - 72 comments

¡Finalmente! I'm finally going to turn on new user signups, and I'm shooting for doing it on Monday. But I could use some help [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Nov 26, 2003 - 201 comments

I'm invoking the mefi lazyweb: help me gather notes for my sxsw panel [more]
posted by mathowie on Mar 7, 2003 - 39 comments

Although Anil's post is mostly rah-rah for metafilter, he makes some great points about weblogs and the web in general. Maybe this is the people's medium afterall.
posted by mathowie on May 3, 2002 - 27 comments

Time to vote on those crazy scholarship kids. It's been tested on IE 5 and NN 4, on a PC and a Mac and seems to work. I took great pains to make it hack proof, so it's as fair as possible. If anyone finds anything wrong, post it here, or email me about it.

There's over $1600 on the line, so read carefully and vote wisely.
posted by mathowie on Jun 12, 2001 - 18 comments

Just so you all know, I'm getting pretty sick of MetaFilter. Changes are coming very soon.

Big. assed. changes.

Call me mr. crankypants, but the level of discourse here is approaching an eighth grade level. Seriously. A lot of old timers say "it used to be so much better when..." and I hate to say it, but it's true. A long time ago*, people used to be a lot more respectful to others, people didn't attack each other, people of opposing viewpoints could bring their perspective to a topic and not just point out knee jerk political viewpoints and philosophies. Everyday I see the place getting more and more "mainstream" with all the closed minds and inflexible opinions that come with that.

Be prepared for the upcoming experiment at MetaFilter.

(I know I should just take a vacation from the site, but really, this place doesn't run on its own. I'm spending more time everyday here cleaning up self-posts, watching people attack each other, and banning IPs and accounts. So instead I'm making some huge changes.)

* - and don't go back into the archives and show me a year old thread that got ugly. I know the place used to be better overall, and you're not going to convince me of otherwise, okay?
posted by mathowie on Apr 5, 2001 - 85 comments

has a good discussion of weblog community formation and cross-weblog interaction. There's a good discussion going about the piece, and I asked the author how I should deal with the problems he mentions that MetaFilter my eventually face, and he offers several possible solutions.
posted by mathowie on Mar 3, 2000 - 13 comments