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?
Mirco-blogging is a great way to let people know what you're up to that very instant. But what if you could let your followers know where your post originated from. That may have been the very thing running through the minds of the people behind byNotes.
On the surface byNotes operates like any other micro-blogging site but in addition to sending messages you can also specify where in the world you are via Google Maps.
Now we know what you're thinking, stalker tool right? Post a message of "I'm at this really nice cafe posted at 123 Anystreet, Anytown" could lead to a lot of unwanted attention. Thankfully byNotes has put into place restriction levels so that based on the access level you have established, people can either know the exact location, a general location like the country or some where in between.
The only downside to this service is that you must be in front of a computer to use it as byNotes doesn't appear to have a mobile version available.
Posterous is a new blogging service that's being touted as even simpler and easier to use than Tumblr. The process is extraordinarily simple: send something to post@posterous.com. Hey, look, you've started a blog. When you want to add something to it, send another e-mail to the same address. Simple as that. Supported attachments include everything from JPGs to PDFs to Mp3s.
It's not as if Tumblr is extraordinarily complicated, but Posterous presents some interesting possibilities. You can post your cameraphone pics and other moblogging material via e-mail, and have comments sent to you and reply to them on the go (again, via email). Also, we're not complaining about a blogging service that lets you skip past all those annoying signup processes. You already have an email account, so what do you need yet another login for?
Posterous obviously has to be careful about security, since forging email addresses isn't all that difficult. Michael Arrington offered a free TechCrunch t-shirt to the first person to forge a post on his Posterous blog, and the challenge was over pretty quickly. Posterous addresses these security concerns in their FAQ: "If we think it might not be you, we ask you to confirm the email before we post it. No matter what, you always get an email notification of every post we put online for your blog, with an easy link to remove the post if you didn't do it."
If your blog is looking a bit lonely why not get it a pet to keep it company? There are many sites that specialize in the creation of these Tamogotchi like characters but one site that caught our attention was doll-doll because instead of animals the creators decided to make them like little people.
Once you've selected a doll, customized and name it, you then copy a line of code containing your doll's information to your blog. From there, your little doll will live on your site. And like Tamogotchis of the past, you are responsible for it's well being by making sure you feed it regularly. If you slack off in caring for your doll, it may die.
Visitors to your site can also play with your doll and kill it as well (usually by giving it bad food). But unless you are the owner of the doll, death by visitors isn't permanent.
This is probably a good thing as you can imagine how many drive by killings might occur.
Fav.or.it is a new kind of RSS aggregator, somewhere in between a pre-set collection of feeds like Alltop and a full-on Google Reader-style service. It had been in closed beta, but now's it's opening to everyone. It includes a set of 2000 of the most popular and interesting feeds, and provides recommended stories based on what you're reading, how long you spend on it, and how you rate it. Basically, Fav.or.it tries to pay attention to what you're paying attention to. Also, as we reported earlier, your comments show up in Fav.or.it and on the original story.
It's no reason to abandon Google Reader, but if you're not already reading RSS feeds, this is a good introduction to managing them. With it's Top-Story-focused, categorized startpage, it reminds us more of Google News than Google Reader in some ways. Whether Fav.or.it gets a good user base is going to be depend on how happy people are with its recommendation algorithm. Even if you just think of it as site that exposes newbies to a couple thousand top blogs, it's doing a useful service for the Internet.
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.
Microsoft has released a new technical preview of Windows Live Writer, the company's desktop blogging client. Windows Live Writer lets you create, edit, and post blog entries using popular blog services including WordPress, Blogger, and Windows Live Spaces.
The latest version has a revised toolbar, tabs for switching views and word count features. But probably the most notable change is the addition of basic image editing support. You can now crop, tilt, or rotate images in Windows live Writer. There are also additional border styles including reflection and rounded corners.
You can also upload videos directly to Soapbox, MSN's answer to YouTube, for easy embedding in posts. We'd be happier if you could upload videos to YouTube and other sites as well, but this is still just a technical preview, so perhaps support for other sites will come in a future release.
ScribbleLive is a new liveblogging platform that's incredibly easy to use. You can create a blog and start updating it within seconds. That's because you don't even need to sign up for an account. you can login using OpenID or your Facebook or Windows Live login. On the other had, we didn't see a way to use the site if you're not already signed up with one of those three services, so you might need to register an OpenID URL, which could take a few minutes.
Once your up and running all you have to do to liveblog an event like a political speech, TV show, or concert. hit the save post button and your readers will be able to see your latest post. You can sort entries so they display from oldest to newest or vice versa. And you can invite others to contribute to the blog with you by sharing a URL.
The only problem with the service is there's no way to embed a liveblog on your own site or to set up a custom domain. But according to TechCrunch, an embeddable widget is coming soon. And when that happens, ScribbleLive could give CoverItLive, a service we've used in the past, a run for its money.
Lycos has launched a new web page builder called Webon. The service appears to be the latest salvo in Lycos's mission to remind people that the once powerful web portal still exists. A few weeks ago Lycos also updated its Lycos Cinema media player to allow users to chat in real time while watching movies together over the web.
Webon is sort of like a cross between Google Page Creator and Google's Blogger. There are a variety of templates for creating several different types of web page. You can make a standard home page, create and update a blog, a photo album, a travelogue, or a wedding web site. No HTML knowledge is necessary. You just pick a template and start adding content. You can customize the look and feel of your site by adding widgets or custom HTML code.
You can try out Webon without signing up for the service, which is a nice touch. But if you want to publish your page for the rest of the world to see, you're going to need to register for a free or paid account. Free sites are hosted at username.webon.com, while you can register a custom URL (username.com) for $8.95/month. While that might seem a bit steep, the Webon personal plan also lets users upload an unlimited number of images. Yeah, it still seems kind of steep.
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.
Six Apart has released a new Facebook Application called Blog It that lets users write blog posts directly from Facebook. That in and of itself wouldn't be particularly exciting or useful. But here's the cool part. You can also associate Blog It with your accounts on multiple blogging and micro-blogging platforms so that you can update a series of blogs from one location.
Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Moveable Type, WordPress, Tumblr, Pownce, Vox, and Twitter. Users can choose to simply use the application to simultaneously (or individually) update their status messages on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, or other micro-blogging services. Or you can write a full blog post, have it show up on your various blogs, and send out a quick note through Twitter, Pownce, and your Facebook news feed to let your friends know you've got a new post up.
If you're the more astute blogging type, it probably came to your attention a week or two ago that WordPress 2.5 was released. Depending on what kind of web space maintenance type person you are, you may or may not have upgraded immediately.
Today's big admission at Download Squad is that some of us, ahem, ignored the Upgrade Now! link for the last two weeks. It wasn't that we didn't care. It wasn't that we didn't think it was important. We usually love the opportunity to click on new buttons and thingamahoosies and break them see what they do. What was it, then? Was it laziness?
Pfft. Yeah. Probably.
But hot on the heels of the 2.5 release comes lots of talk and flurry about WP 2.6. It's something that would strike a lot of users as odd. Sure, developers have roadmaps, and plans, and direction for future releases well before current releases are completely polished. It usually takes a little more than two weeks for those sorts of things to be laid out on the table.
It would strike people as odd if they hadn't already laid their eyes upon the radically different 2.5 dashboard.
Triggit is a service for bloggers that lets you add YouTube videos, Flickr images, and text-link advertisements to your page without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor. The system takes just a few minutes to set up, and once you've done so, you can add content to your blog in seconds.
We've put together a little video showing how it works. But in a nutshell, you add a bit of JavaScript to your site, and drag a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet, a toolbar will pop up that lets you add content to your site including videos, images, and affiliate ads from sites like Amazon and Wine Zap. You can do everything right from your browser toolbar. No need to launch WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or any other blogging client.
Content you add using Triggit might load more slowly than other material on your site. That's because your site is basically sending a request to Triggit's servers asking which content to display.
Triggit supports Firefox and Flock. While there's no love for Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer users, at least Triggit picked a browser that works on all the major operating systems.
Forgive us, great Ceiling Cat. We discovered the only way you can even attempt to introduce a service called Poodz is to use LOLspeak. And even then... we're totally fearing for our mortal souls.
Poodz (oh come on, stop giggling) is a microblogging service. Clear on that? Yeah, we weren't entirely sure what microblogging was either, but since a few of us here are pretty short, we decided to check it out..
Turns out there are no height restrictions with a microblog. Truth be told, we still don't really know what a microblog is as opposed to a plain ol' videoblog. That's what Poodz is, when it's all boiled down.
It's kind of a Twitter-esque, YouTubey, Facebook-infused service. It's kind of like Seesmic in a way. Well, actually, in a lot of ways. From country of origin to general functionality and concept it is, there's no denying, a lot like Seesmic.
Mirco-blogging is a great way to let people know what you're up to that very instant. But what if you could let your followers know where your post originated from. That may have been the very thing running through the minds of the people behind 
If you're the more astute blogging type, it probably came to your attention a week or two ago that 
Forgive us, great Ceiling Cat. We discovered the only way you can even attempt to introduce a service called Poodz is to use LOLspeak. And even then... we're totally fearing for our mortal souls.
