In my earliest days of blogging and newslettering (and I’ve been at this awhile), a couple of mainstream publications featured stories about a tech newsletter I had just just launched. On the same day, a blogger named Jason Kottke wrote about my site. Jason’s link provided a lot more traffic than any of the other big media sites. It was on that day, staring at my web stats, that I began to truly understand just how powerful indie sites and personal brands would become as the Internet evolved. As most of you know, Jason is now a NextDraft syndication partner. We exchange a story each week. It it his 40th birthday, and like every other day, it’s a good day to visit his site.