Geez, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I tend to work hard and also play hard, and was out of town for a couple of days to catch Pearl Jam once in Camden and TWICE in New York City at Madison Square Garden.

Seeing them live again just reinforced how badass they are and how much I adore them. They are masters at getting the crowd involved and excited, and every band looking to establish a connection with their fans needs to see them to experience this first hand.

Ace Frehely from Kiss came out in the encore on night two as the band covered “Black Diamond” for an interesting treat. Not a kiss fan, but Ace tore it up anyway, with Mike and Matt on vocals.

Anyway, I’m way behind on things as usual and am going to spend this week inside catching up on my blogroll.

For my subscribers and regular readers, you probably already read some of these blogs or have heard of them mentioned here before. For those of us who are new to evolvor, you might not even know what the hell a “blogroll” is, so let’s explain that before we go any further.

To start, I have subscribed to over 300+ blogs over the past 3-4 years in my study of internet marketing, web2.0, design, business, and music related news and discussion. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, this is the syndication technology that many use to subscribe to their favorite blogs and news sites. I use Bloglines and Google Reader to store all of my feeds.

So, my “blogroll” is that list of 300+ blogs that I read on a regular basis. It is here that I constantly sharpen my marketing and business skills. I try to skim through my reader daily, but some times I’m just too damn busy (or too damn lazy) to go through it, and the blog and news entries pile up. I haven’t really had a chance to check it out in about 2 weeks, and as of right now there are 2600+ entires to pour over! I’m sure to stumble over some good tips, tools, articles, and rants that will help you in your marketing, advertising, and business endeavors.

I found this neat web application that allows you to create quizzes and embed them into your blog or other web pages as a way to engage your readers and community called quibblo. I’ll be creating one for you soon!

We’ve been moving toward offering more design and graphic services over here at evolvor, and learning how to design with vectors is the real way to go about creating graphics - the reason being that once you create a logo or artwork in a vector file, you can then re-size the thing for whatever project you need with distorting the thing or losing quality. A new tutorial site Vectortuts has gone live to help us lean more about the subject.

It seems Google and Adobe have teamed up to figure out how search engines can crawl Adobe Flash files better. While I’m still an advocate for not using flash (and most bands always design their sites with it), it does make me a little less standoffish about the technology knowing that ole’ Google may be able to read some of the text in these files. I’m not saying to build your whole site in Flash, but maybe if you already dropped 10-20 G’s on a Flash site you can sleep a little better at night.

Brian from Copyblogger is constantly using musicians as metaphors for your blogging success, and this time he hits close to home as he discussed finding your own voice & niche, something I think I have perfected after a year and a half of blogging. Are you standing out from the crowd or following the herd?

A sad note: popular comic book artist Michael Turner has passed away at age 37. He has been battling cancer for quite some time, and the comic world will mourn him for years to come. His work has graced the covers af almost every major Marvel and DC title over the past ten years, and was responsible for helping create popular female characters Witchblade and his own Fathom and Soulfire comic properties. We’ll miss you Mike.

1800 more to go, tune in tomorrow as I continue to catch up!