Steve Rubel has a post about the “Underground” blogosphere. What is this? Here’s the info straight from Steve:

The Underground Blogosphere is an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of emails that bloggers send to each other every day. In essence, they are “pitching” their latest posts in hopes of getting a link.

I hardly ever do this. Why? I just didn’t think it ever actually worked. Shit, as a Y-list blogger I would love to have more links, and more people talking about RIAs, but I’ve never actually thought that emailing a bunch of A-listers would result in links. Now allow me to make a broad generalization: I don’t think very many other Flash/ColdFusion/RIA/Adobe bloggers do either. Why? Because we have MXNA. All of the fun conversation is on MXNA and it’s really easy to see what posts the community thought were the most interesting. It’s a great tool, and I use it all the time. I assume that others do the same, am I off base on this? Do you guys send other bloggers posts you’ve written in hopes of getting a link? If you want a link from a Y-list blogger, send them to me!
Now that I know this actually works I’m going to be an emailing fool and spread the word about Flash, RIAs, and Apollo. Wish me luck.

I’m taking the plunge and switching over to WordPress. I’m hoping to make the full switch tonight, but I may have to wait a bit to get all of the entries converted over. Big thanks to Ray Camden and his BlogCFC which is what I had been using. I still need to tweak the site quite a bit, but you can check it out at http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com.

The address won’t change at all, and some of you won’t have to change your feeds, but if you’re using the old rss.cfm feed, you’ll need to update it to my http://feeds.feedburner.com/ryanstewart/. If you have any tips on migrating to WordPress, let me know.

It’s been a crazy and bizarre week. I always try not to take myself too seriously. I started this blog a year and a half ago just because I wanted to talk about Flex. I can still remember getting the email from MXNA that my blog was going to be aggregated and thinking how cool that was. Then a funny thing happened – people started reading my blog. People started commenting. When I moved to Seattle, I got dinner with Hans just because he read my blog. Then when I heard ZDNet was looking for bloggers, I emailed them on a whim and offered up my services. When they gave me a shot I had to step back and make sure there wasn’t some other Ryan Stewart they were talking to.

Since then it’s been awesome. I’ve had amazing conversations with people at Adobe, at Microsoft and a ton of cool companies making use of RIAs. Every day there’s something interesting in my inbox, and I love it. But every once in a while I feel like I’m in over my head. I’m just a guy who really likes RIAs. I see so much potential out there and my naïveté allows me an almost unnatural amount of enthusiasm about what’s possible. But now I’m in the maze of PR firms and journalistic integrity. It’s a crazy world, and I hope I don’t lose the enthusiasm. This week I got caught up a bit and started taking myself too seriously. Jeff Houser (whom I owe a beer next week at CFUnited) once left a comment that said “I read yours [blog] because you’re the most optimistic person I know”.

With everything happening right now, it’s hard not to be optimistic. Look at Apollo, Flex, WPF, the Mobile World, broadband penetration, Web 2.0, hell even Ajax – the web is cool! But I’ve spent too much time trying to be a “real” blogger and not enough just writing about the cool stuff. I need to do more of that.

Wow, are people pissed. Techmeme is on fire with people angry about O’Reilly and CMP and how they handled the Web 2.0 half-day conference (sending them a cease and desist letter). I think the guys over at CMP made a mistake, and I think that it leaves O’Reilly looking bad, but people are acting like Tim himself went to Ireland and shot Tom Raftery. It was badly played, and there’s a lesson to be learned here, but there are more productive ways to start a dialogue about what those lessons should be.