Maintaining your online presence can be such a giant pain in the ass nowadays since your followers are looking for constant updates on three hundred different web sites. It's especially annoying to try and publicize your new blog post manually after you've spent precious minutes of your morning typing and re-typing it.
Thankfully, the folks at switchAbit have been gracious enough to develop a web app for us that handles cross-site posting for us. What's not to love about an app that makes it appear as though you're doing much more work than you actually are?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Remember that craze back in the early days of the internet? The early 90's. You remember, the time when the animated gif was a cult phenomenon? Well, like pogs, they are back.
Move over YouTube, GIFTube is your one stop shop for everything animated gif. Users upload and share their creations or findings to make their MySpace pages, websites and blogs as flashy as they can through the provided web 2.0 embed code. Have a snazzy GIF or something saved from the internets early days? Submit it for entry into the directory. But please, do us all a favor and just browse the site, do not use these on your website. Thanks!
It seems that the new age of animated GIF's drops the flashy text and symbols in favor of some questionable adult GIF's on this site. So browse the GIF library at your own discretion.
Automattic, the owner of the popular blogging platform WordPress, has announced they have purchased Gravator, a popular avator system used mainly in blog commenting.
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's founder, announced the details of the deal on the Gravatar blog (now built on WordPress of course), saying that the decision to acquire the company stemmed from scalability issues they were dealing with. Gravatar allows users to keep the same 80x80 pixel image beside their name when they travel from blog to blog, so long as it supports the platform which the new version of WordPress does. Automattic saw this as the perfect fit since they have plenty of experience scaling, and saw a great opportunity with Gravatar believing it closely resembled what had been previously accomplished with Akismet, another one of their products, open API and its ability to be used with any platform.
Since buying the company, Automattic has also made all premium Gravatar plans free, and has noted that avatars are being served three times as fast. Refunds are available for those that had purchased the plans within the past 60 days. Look out for a new Gravatar API to be developed as well, plus get ready to see plenty of pretty pictures in blog comments soon!
There are two fantastic options for offline blogging (that is, managing a blog without using the web-based browser interface the blogging service provides). The first is Windows Live Writer Beta, which, as the name would suggest is a Windows app, but one that's so useful it might compel Mac users to invest in Parallels Desktop just to run it. The second is Ecto, a Mac-native blog composition tool that many bloggers swear by. (Ecto also runs on Windows.)
Gallery: Live Writer vs. Ecto
We've tried them both recently, so we were able to pit them head to head like the Indians and the Yankees to see which one is better. As was the case with many shocked Yankees fans, the conclusion of our little challenge was surprising. So which is superior--Live Writer for Windows (pictured above) or Ecto for the Mac? You be the judge after the jump.
Another online sketch service, Sketchcast, has entered the market and this one has a couple of neat YouTube-like integration features. Record yourself creating a sketch, add a voice over if you like, then save it for posterity. Once you're done, Sketchcast automatically spits out a URL that you can send to others and a code you can embed in your own Web site or blog post. Sketchcast also gives you your own channel where you can store your sketches so other people can view them or subscribe to your RSS feed.
Looking for an easy way to set up an email newsletter? Nourish will take any RSS feed and convert it into an email newsletter. The service is free to use, and relatively easy to set up and send out.
Want to keep customers up to date with your own newsletter?For companies that have a blog up and running, you can take that fresh content and easily package it into an email broadcast. Users register an account and presented with a campaign dashboard; four steps then stand in the way of your escape from the land of newsletter-less losers.
Choose a name, subject and to and from name and email address.
RSS Feed import - Paste the URL of your RSS feed, and grab posts from a certain date.
Scheduling - Daily, Weekly and Monthly newsletters can be created at certain times of the day.
Custom design (optional) - if you want your newsletter to better present your brand identity.
Subscribers to the newsletter are imported via a CSV file. When newsletters are sent out, Nourish will provide you with subscribers open rates, click through rates and the number of emails delivered. It's a great free service that has only one drawback, albeit a major one, there are currently only 10 subscribers allowed per account.
Today, the blog search engine 
