What could be more compelling than documenting the lives of characters from the video game The Sims? Okay, it doesn't sound all that compelling, and there are many examples on the web of it being done poorly. But once in awhile someone comes along and does something that seems like a bad idea in such spectacular fashion that it truly becomes noteworthy.

Alice and Kev is a blog by Robin Burkinshaw that documents the lives of two characters he created in The Sims 3, the latest iteration of Electronic Arts' blockbuster game franchise. The two characters are a father and daughter, and Burkinshaw decided that to make things interesting he would give his characters some real challenges, such as homelessness and in the case of the father, Kev, insanity.

The resulting story is somehow both heart-rending and hilarious. Burkinshaw's blogging style is almost entirely graphical, with occasional pithy comments thrown in. The few comments he includes give the story life, and the characters really do feel all too real.

Reading the comments for each update is almost as entertaining as the posts themselves; Alice and Kev have a huge following, and an average post results in 100 or more comments by people who seem to genuinely care about this duo, and the other characters they are involved with.

It's an inspired bit of storytelling, a bit of a surprise given the usual fare when it comes to Sims blogging.

[via Boing Boing]

On my list of 14 extremely useful Firefox addons I included ScreenGrab for capturing web pages to PNG or JPG images.

Today, I replaced it with Screen Grab to Wordpress. As you probably guessed, it's got the same core functionality with one major addition: the ability to send images directly to your Wordpress-powered blog.

Configure the URL, username, and password to all your Wordpress blogs an you're ready to go (just make sure you have XML-RPC remote publishing enabled).

Click the icon in your Firefox status bar to display SGW's menu and choose what to capture and where to send it. You can save locally, copy to the clipboard, or post directly to Wordpress.

If you're blogging a capture, you can enter a title, tags, body text, and even set your new post to publish - if you don't check the box, the post defaults to draft status. After successfully uploading, you're taken directly to the Wordpress edit page to put the finishing touches on your new post.

With less than 600 downloads to date, this one is a bit of a diamond in the rough. It's a tremendous timesaver for anyone blogging about items discovered while browsing with Firefox.

I can't always get to my main laptop when I feel like putting together a blog post. If you've read some of my other lists, you probably noticed that I'm a big fan of portable applications for just this reason. As long as I've got my trusty USB flash drive, I'm always equipped with the programs I need to get things done.

Here are ten of my favorites (plus two alternatives). With these programs in my pocket, I'm always able to write when inspiration strikes - regardless of what computer I'm using.

1. Windows Live Writer is the best offline tool for composing blog posts, hands down. While Microsoft doesn't offer a portable version, it's a simple DIY project (Brad first covered it in September 2007). You can download the portable launcher from Scott Kingery's blog: it's over a year old, but it works just fine with the latest beta of Live Writer. With a rich feature set and support for Wordpress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, and more, it's a necessity.

2. Portable Firefox and SRWare Iron are both great browsers. I keep Firefox handy in case I need access to my favorite extensions, and use Iron when I just need to do some quick surfing. Why Iron instead of Chrome? For the added privacy.

3. GreatNews is a decent, portable RSS reader that's actually portable (no Java runtime needed, like RSSOwl). The download is under 1mb, and it formats feeds into a tidy newspaper-like layout. If I'm using a machine where I'd rather not log in to my Google account, I'll fire up GreatNews to read my feeds instead.

Don't you just hate it when you sign up on a forum or blog comment system and everyone has cool avatars, but you don't? If you aren't too picky about it, why not just punch your name into Turn Your Name Into a Face, and let it come up with something for you out of 100,000 possible faces.

Now, granted, the options may leave a bit to be desired; they're all black pixel art on a random pale background color. But there are enough options to be somewhat entertaining. It's particularly fun to punch friends' and family members' names into it to see what they might look like, or at least what you can tease them with.

What I'd like to see is a WordPress plugin that uses this functionality to assign avatars to blog commenters that have not explicitly given themselves an avatar.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Due to many complaints from users of LiveJournal the company announced it will again offer basic accounts. Unlike most other free blogging platforms, LJ's basic account has limited capabilities but the bonus of no advertising.

The option of signing up for a basic account was removed in March. Makes sense considering a free account with no advertising generates no money for LJ and in fact, probably costs the company money in storage space at the very least.

Apparently, LJ bloggers have grown accustomed to blogging without the distraction of ads. When the basic accounts were removed as a new user choice, many current users decided to hold a one day protest, refusing to blog or comment. In a news post LJ announced that basic accounts will return by the end of the summer for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The LJ team has also started a new blog specifically to discuss options and ideas for the future of basic accounts.

The LJ team admits it was probably a bad decision in the first place to remove the basic accounts but it looks like the developers plan to work with users on ideas to make things work to everyone's satisfaction.

[Via Profy.com]

Today, the blog search engine Twingly has officially come out of beta.

Twingly allows you to search for the "Best of Blogs", with spam free results, the company says.

The folks at Twingly are also announcing their new widget platform that lets you turn any search result into a widget quickly. See an example here.

We're not sure how "spam free" this is, or what type of technology they use to make this claim, but the results didn't look that great when we did a search.

The saving grace here is that you can vote a result as a "like", which will bring it up in the ranks. A little Digg style there thrown in. It's going to take a lot of early adoption on Twingly's part to make that system work.

Along with the search, you can translate results into other languages, as well as subscribe to an RSS feed of any search as well. That's pretty standard stuff.

The Hot Right Now feature that shows up under the search bar could pick up some steam though. With all of the content out there, the trend seems to be towards companies trying to find a way to bubble up the most "important" or "interesting" content. We'll watch to see how this evolves and to see how accurate and/or helpful it is.

Twingly admits themselves that they're focusing on European blogs even though they're indexing worldwide, so that's something to keep in mind too.

If you love writing, but hate the grunt work of blogging - like inserting relevant links, tags, and images, Zemanta might be for you. It's available as an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a plug-in for Wordpress or Movable Type, and it automatically adds some useful stuff to your blog posts in progress on most of the major blogging platforms. It suggests links and applies them to the relevant words in your post with one click, and it also provides tags and a gallery of Creative-Commons-licensed Flickr photos you can drop in.

Zemanta currently supports Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, TypePad and Blogger, so the majority of blogs should be able to make use of it. It might be too blunt an instrument if you've got a really specific linking scheme going on at your blog, but for a post like this one, it came in handy: it automatically linked the word Zemanta to zemanta.com. Hey, we were going to do that by hand anyway. More importantly, it also grabs links to stories from places like CNN, the New York Times, and Technorati.

[via WebWare]

It's part of our culture to want to get more done in less time, so it's unsurprising RSS readers are so popular nowadays. But what happens when efficiency and productivity start to replace general happiness? Well, that's what happened to a long time web publisher/surfer known as Halsted (AKA Cygnoir), who recently became fed up with her RSS addiction.

"I dread opening my RSS reader these days," she posted the day before giving up on RSS. "Right now there are 876 unread items glaring at me, from a total of 269 feeds." As of this writing, the brave soul has managed to get through about a week without relying on a reader -- you laugh, but some of us are truly addicted!

RSS and other technologies are often praised for their ability to save time, effort, etc, but it seems many forget their limits when they get into the habit of turning free time into work time -- all the time. This gets us wondering: How many feeds is one too many, and -- for all the RSS addicts out there -- how often do you check your feeds?

It looks like torrents isn't the only business the Pirate Bay is concerning itself with. First there was image hosting and now there's blogging. BayWords is the site's foray into the world of blogging services, aiming to provide a service that does not want to restrict "uncomfortable thoughts and ideas" and let people say and link to what they want (as long as it complies with Swedish law).

Apparently one of the Pirate Bay captains, Brokep, had a friend who's blog was shut down by linking to copyrighted material. This inspired him to offer this alternative, which runs on a customized version of a multi user install of Wordpress. The site plans to continue adding features, updates, and themes, and encourages users to "blog your heart out."

If you've been looking for a place to take your blog, BayWords might offer a nice home, as long as you don't mind having "myname.baywords.com" as your address. Or maybe you just want to be able to tell people that your blog is hosted by Swedish pirates. Or something like that. Unfortunately, it does look like ads will be implemented eventually to cover expenses, but information on bandwidth or other stats are not available at this point.

[via TorrentFreak]

Yesterday, we posted that Craigslist joined the 20th century with a 1990's-esque blog to let the world in on what's going on within the inner self of Craigslist. Today, Craigslist is already making fantastic progress through time. No, the blog still looks like it belongs in 1996, but it is demanding that the fan operated craigslistblog.org surrender it's domain.

Although Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster hasn't asked Tim White, the fan blogger, to stop blogging - he does claim that the domain name infringes on intellectual property and is confusing to the media and the public. That, and some of the content Tim White was using was exclusive to Craigslist and shouldn't be posted. In an effort to meet halfway, the blog now prominently displays that it is indeed an "unofficial" blog and has removed the content in question, but apparently that is not enough. Probably now that Buckmaster has his own blog he feels the need to defend it with a lawsuit.

If you are interested in what the exact correspondence was, Valleywag has it available for your viewing pleasure. It is however, sad to see a company like Craigslist resort to 21st century intellectual property chest-beating strongarm tactics instead of engaging the blogger in a civilized manner and at least attempting to come to a mutually agreeable resolution before issuing threats. This is neither going to make Craigslist look good nor will it make them any friends.

Online classifieds site Craigslist has always thrived on its simplicity. While other web services have added bells and whistles, AJAX, and Flash, Craigslist has a look and feel reminiscent of the dawn of the internet age. Of course, the site has ben thriving, so there hasn't been much need to change.

But Craigslist has been in the news a bit over the last few weeks for some less than pleasant reasons, so it's kind of nice that Craigslist now has an official blog where CEO Jim Buckmaster can post his thoughts. Up until now, the closest thing there was to a Craigslist blog was the personal blog of founder Craig Newmark.

Now, here's the interesting thing. Buckmaster is discussing the big issues of the day on the blog, and engaging with his audience directly. Users can even leave comments on blog posts (although you're redirected to the user forums when you click a comments link). But the blog still feels very 1999. It has a stark layout, and there's not an RSS feed in sight. So no, our headline isn't a typo. We'd love to say we're welcoming Craigslist to the 21st century, but even the Craigslist blog feels like it was designed over a decade ago.

[via TechCrunch]

Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, is becoming known for buying up some of the most creative WordPress hacks out there. They've already snapped up the global avatar service, Gravatar, and added a handful of quality themes by Chris Pearson to their selection of default templates. Now Automattic is taking WordPress into the arena of social networking by hiring designer Andy Peatling and acquiring his BuddyPress plugins.

There's a placeholder page at BuddyPress.com right now, with the Automattic logo and a simple description of what BuddyPress does: transforming "a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform." For an example of what that might look like, you can check out Peatling's work on chickspeak.com, built on BuddyPress. If you're a designer who likes the power and flexibility of WordPress, but you need to get outside the basic blog and put together a full-on social network, user profiles and all, this could be a great solution.

Yahoo! is getting ready to take the wrapper off TechTicker, an online program aimed at technology investors.

TechTicker specifically targets technology stocks in a portal type environment. The new program will offer streaming video, blog posts and breaking news targeting the technology investment sector. The portal and show which are said to be launching in January 2008, pick up where Yahoo! Finance Vision left off in 2002. Thankfully high speed connections are far more common in 2007 and better video compression tools are available to make internet based shows a feasible reality, rather than a pipe dream (no, we're not poking fun at Yahoo! Pipes, ok, maybe just a little). As for the other financial information that will be displayed, we assume it will resemble what Yahoo! Finance already does, but targeting technology specific companies.

With Yahoo! Finance high on the list of financial sites, TechTicker could be headed for great things. Of course, track records aside, we will have to wait for the roll out in order to really decide.

Check out what Yahoo! Finance Vision looked like back in the day.

Jott is a voice based online tool that we covered earlier this year. The basic premise is that you call a specified phone number, speak a message, and have it's transcribed and sent as text to your account on a service like Twitter, a Wordpress blog, a Tumblr blog, or even to Yahoo Groups.

Now Jott officially supports Google Calendar. Users will now have the ability to speak into the system, specify a Google Calendar, and have Jott drop in an appointment. Great for on the go and have to set something up ASAP so you don't forget!

Jott is currently in public beta.