Members of the MyBlogLog blogger network community are being invited to invite other members to join their personal community. The community that grows the most, in their gross total, from now to November 30, 2007, will win, win a shed load of Problogger prizes.

In honor of this meaningless inter-MyBlogLog community link love contest (my opinion only, you understand!), leave a comment below stating what you think the winning score will be. The closest to the actual winning score will win a big hug from Ed, a wannabe problogger who runs a MyBlogLog oriented link love feature with a bit of original content.

Anyway, to boost your bragging rights, and win yourself a set of problogger prizes, sign up and join the contest proper. Good luck!

When the contest closes, I will print off a similar list of guessers with a link AND a little commentary, you know, to add some content to the internet, like all good probloggers do.

Bobbarama, a top notch humor blogger has awarded The Pisstakers with a Break Out Award. My first reaction was That reminds me of when I was called Pizza Face as a kid. Thanks for nothing, Bob.

On closer inspection, however, it seems that The Pisstakers received this award because Bob finds lotsalaughs on this site, and he thinks we are going places. Some would say the further away he goes from me the better but I know what he means, really! Much appreciated and I am honored to go to the West Coast, all expenses paid, for the presentation ceremony.

5 more Break-out Awards

If the following 5 bloggers could find a few seconds from their hectic schedule to head over to Bob's to receive their awards, that would be spiffing.

Drum rolls...

The one and only Lord Likely, a true gentleman and scholar and complete and utter bastard, currently terrorizing 19th century USA with his tongue in cheek and Lord Palmerston in hand.

The one and only Linda of Are We There yet? a bloggerette major, safe driver and killer singer whose birthdays appear to have all come nearly at once.

The one and only TechIT Easy, whose leader, Jeremy Fain, has occupied France under the guise of Microsoft. He is stealthily enlisting a stunning international line-up of tech bloggers par excellence and to cap it all, he even has a sense of humor too.

The one and only I Eat Snowman Poop who never ceases to amaze me with her turns of phrase and whacky humor

The one and only Wolf Bernz who worked through being scammed and finally produced a video upload site with plenty of potential for great things.

Good luck to the 5 one and onlys in my world.

[Sound of trumpets] Thanks to Mike at Blog interviewer for a full-blown interview. Most interesting. [/trumpets]

It was completed a few weeks ago now, and I would have posted something earlier in appreciation of his coverage, but you can thank a few technical hitches and bouts of deep, dark technology-induced depression for my tardiness.

The nuts and bolts of an interview

A lot of thought has gone into the Blog Interviewer process. When you get a call to arms, you get a link to a clear and easy-to-complete form with a mix of easy and not-so-simple questions. You submit your drivel to Blog Interview HQ and lo and behold, the next thing you know you get a link to the interview.

(I think I need to adopt a similar form-based approach when the next spurt of Blog Interrogations comes to light. Copy and pasting into emails is hardly the stuff of 2007!)

End result of a blog interview

The final presentation is very neat too, with a screenshot and a voting button and a spot on the homepage - at least till the next batch of interviews comes along and shunts you into the archives. The thing I don't like is being so close to Google adsense. It makes me feel uncomfortable being squashed tight up against something so commercial.

Votes

Your best chance of homepage survival is to get rated, at least that way you stay in the sidebar and fight it out with a few other interviewees.

I don't know that mine is a particularly engaging interview, but even if it were like, totally amazing dude, I get the impression from looking around, and from Mike's own words, that to stay top of the pile, most votes would have to come from my own readership. It is still early days on Blog Interviewer, so no doubt this rating system will attract votes from folks right across the internet, and make for a better representation of what the general public rather than die-hard fans think. Could this be the next StumbleUpon?

Cash and prizes

To mix it up and grab some attention for his neat review site, Mike is offering prizes and cash galore in return for comments, so it is well worth a trip to see what all the fuss is about.

And here is a widgety thing, so you can vote for me, if you so desireth.

This is just a quick note to suggest that when you are staring at the screen unable to write two remotely funny words for a humorous post, read through Joey Guse's article about laughter clubs. I just did, and I feel a bit better for it.

A club where you laugh?

As with all great "inventions", these clubs were created by accident when a guy went to a park to laugh, and soon found he was quite the hit when others joined in uninvited. (He must have been in Asia and / or stoned? because I cannot imagine sober Brits or Swedes behaving with such abandon).

Coupled with some yoga exercises, and a bit of science thrown in - forced and natural laughter both have the same positive physical effect on us - the Laughter Clubs have since developed as a force for good, providing therapy to droves of screwed up people.

Joey says the Laughter Club experience has changed him. He is the one shuffling along the sidewalk giggling at nothing in particular

Ed laughed once.

I can remember as a kid going to drama classes on a Saturday morning and one time we had to lie down on the splintery wooden floor and laugh. I was so uptight, I was lying there thinking, "But I don't want to laugh, there is nothing funny going on and this is really uncomfortable." Being an obedient child, when the kooky teacher walked by peering at us all, I pretended to cackle, but I felt so self-conscious I soon shut up when she was out of earshot. Muggins here just lay there listening to everyone else slapping their thighs and guffawing as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They must have gone on to be actors, I guess. I wonder what they thought I would grow up into?

If you have time and money, Joey has a few books you might be interested in, all laughter and comedy related. As he freely admits, his jokes fall on stony ground, but his serious stuff makes people smile. He certainly writes lots of serious stuff, so you should find you have a good time reading it.