MyBlogLog snapped up by Yahoo!
Our favourite social networking site has just been snapped up by Yahoo! for what seems to be a figure of somewhere between $10 – $12 million dollars.
The popular MyBlogLog widget is to be seen on most of the top blogs around the world - including web @ amanzi. The widget displays the most recent MyBlogLog community members that have visited the site in question. I always found it quite surreal seeing my photo up on various sites that I visited…
Here are the most interesting links with the breaking news:
- Welcome MyBlogLog to Yahoo! (by Jeremy Zawodny)
- The Jig is Up — MyBlogLog joins Yahoo!
- Yahoo buys MyBlogLog… for real!
- Yahoo Buys MyBlogLog. No, They Didn’t. Wait, Yes.
- The breakthrough that is MyBlogLog
- Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog.com – For Real This Time
Google’s Blog Search overtakes Technorati
Blogger, Niall Kenedy, has posted that Google’s Blog Search service is now getting more market share than long-time market leader, Technorati. This is mainly due to Google promoting links to the blog search on some of its prominent sites. If Google moved the blog search links to its home page, I would expect to see an even greater jump.
Link: Google Blog Search overtakes Technorati’s market share according to Hitwise
PayPerPost Acquires Performancing.com
TechCrunch are reporting that controversial advertising network, PayPerPost, are in the process of acquiring Performancing.com – a blogging community that has almost 28,000 bloggers signed up to their various services. PayPerPost are controversial as they pay bloggers to blog about various advertisers’ services or products and, up until recently, did not require that bloggers disclose the fact that they are being paid for the post. Performancing.com develop their popular blogging tool which integrates into Firefox as an extension. They also set up a Metrics service for blogs which they recently said was being disbanded, as well as newly created advertising network which is still being fully launched.
Due to the controversial nature of PayPerPost, I predict that Perfomancing.com will lose most of their top bloggers – most of which probably don’t agree with the ethics of PayPerPost. Performancing.com will not include the blogging tool as part of the acquisition – instead this will be spun-off into a new brand.
UPDATE: Nick Wilson from Performancing.com and PayPerPost have now both confirmed this. Nick’s post on Performancing.com has already received a couple of negative comments.
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: You
Time Magazine has voted for their annual person of the year award and the prized honour has gone to You. What they are actually referring to is the user-generated content that is taking over the web at the moment. This includes all of the blogs that are created and constantly updated, all of the so-called “web 2.0″ sites that aggregate information and provide platforms for anyone and everyone to voice their opinions. Sites like YouTube, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the others that allow anyone to be a part of the revolution.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn’t make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
Read the full article here: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
TechMeme introduces new river-of-news feature
TechMeme have quietly rolled out a new feature to their technology site which displays the last five days of headlines in a river-of-news style. If you’ve been offline for a couple of days and you want to quickly catch up with the most recent headlines, you’ll definitely get use out of this new feature. The archives have also been added to the other sites in the TechMeme family: Memeorandum, Ballbug, and WeSmirch.
web @ amanzi tags: TechMeme
Technorati tags: TechMeme
Pimp yourself with PikiPimp
A fun little timewaster, PikiPimp allows you to upload photos and place funny objects on top of the picture for a laugh. The interface is actually very powerful and shows off the cool capabilities that can be achieved with some clever AJAX. If you’ve got 5 minutes to kill, head on over to the site and check it out for your self. Here’s my first effort…
Others have already been playing with it and the site has already got coverage from TechCrunch, Micro Persuasion, and Go2web2.
Check Technorati for more.
Get mail from other accounts in your GMail
Google have just announced that they have added a much-requested feature to GMail – the ability to retrieve mail from other POP3 enabled email accounts into your GMail inbox. This feature is only available to a limited number of users at the moment. You can check to see if you have this feature enabled by going into your account settings and look for the section labelled: “Get mail from other accounts”
Just launched!
Get mail from other accounts
Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized ‘From:’ address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled. Learn moreThis feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We’re working on making it more available soon. Look for it in the ‘Accounts’ tab in Settings.
How do I set up Mail Fetcher?
Gmail allows you to fetch mail from any of your other, non-Gmail accounts. You’ll be able to read email from up to 5 additional accounts, all in one place, and take advantage of all of Gmail’s great features.
- Click Settings from the top of any Gmail page.
- Click Accounts.
- In the Get mail from other accounts section, click Add another mail account.
- Enter the full email address of the account you’d like to access, then click Next Step.
- Email will populate the Username and POP Server fields when possible, based on your email address. Enter your Password.
- Decide whether to:
- Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server. If you’ll only be accessing your email through your Gmail account, leave this unchecked. If you’d like to be able to access your mail directly from that account, or if you’re accessing it through any other accounts or devices, click to select this option.
- Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.
- Label incoming messages. If you’d like to automatically label all messages that are retrieved from your non-Gmail account, select this option. You can choose to use the predefined label (your email address), or you can select an existing label or create a new one from the drop-down list.
- Archive incoming messages. Mail from this account can be archived directly, without showing up in your Inbox. Learn more about archiving.
- Click Add Account.
- Once your account has been added successfully, you’ll have the option of setting it as a custom From address. This allows you to compose messages in Gmail, but have them appear to be sent from your other email account (learn more). Click Yes to set up a custom From address.
You’re done! Gmail will now check your other account on a regular basis, and new mail will appear automatically in your Gmail account. You can disable importing at any time from the Accounts tab of your Settings page. Just click delete next to the appropriate email account.
Sphere just out of beta
A new blog search engine called Sphere that has been in private testing for some time, is finally being launched. This looks like a really useful tool – I ran a search on Altiris and it brought up heaps of articles on their software virtualisation tool which I only recently discovered (and blogged about here.)
If you check it out soon, you’ll see some really odd things being searched for in the “Top Searches This Hour� section. I guess this is because there’s only a few people testing it out and searching for all the important things like “sex� or “marijuana growing“!!
One of the coolest features of the site is the ability to only display blog posts for specific dates. The site uses a nifty Flash app to allow you to drag along a timeline to select the date range. You have to test this yourself to appreciate how cool it is. All searches can be subscribed to through RSS which is useful if you want to monitor a particular topic.
The media searches are interesting too – these searches display news items, photos, books, and podcasts for whatever your searching for. You can also setup a bookmarklet that will let you search for related items for any web page you’re currently viewing.
Links:
(originally posted on the beta @ amanzi site…)
Netvibes new release – Anise version
Netvibes have just rolled out a whole bunch of new features, including the ability to set up multiple pages which show up as tabs along the top of your homepage. You can rename the pages and give each one its own favicon. You can also drag and drop widgets from one page to another! For example, you caj set up different tabs for your homepage, emails, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and one for all the other stuff…
The tabs take up a bit of screen real estate at the top of the page so you can also hide the title of your page if you want. Another new feature is the ability to decide whether you want 2, 3, or 4 colums on each page. Unfortunately you can’t customise this on a per page basis but hopefully this gets fixed in a future release.
They’ve also included the API in their public release now, so you can create a web page and use that as a widget in Netvibes. They are still working on the documentation but as long as your page validates then it should be included as a widget.
Netvibes continues to lead the field in the crowded market of homepages!
(originally posted on the beta @ amanzi site…)
co.mments for tracking comments
We’ve mentioned before that we liked the service from coComment which provides a way to keep track of all of the comments that you make on other people’s blog posts. We liked the service so much it made us want to go out and comment on people’s blogs, which is great for the blogosphere.
Recently, an article on the TechCrunch site previewed another service that aims to aggregate your comments into one central location, but we didn’t bother with it at first – thinking it was just a rip-off of cocomment.com. Well, we were wrong to ignore it, because co.mments is a really cool service that provides similar features as cocomment.com as well as all the features that coComment forgot to implement.
The biggest problem with coComment is that the site would only track your comments – you wouldn’t know if any other comments had been made on the post, so you wouldn’t know when to check back for responses. Also, it would only track your comments if you remembered to click the bookmarklet. co.mments does things a bit differently – for starters, you don’t have to make a comment on a post to track it. This is a great idea if you want to keep tabs on a conversation without actually joining in. Then you can follow the entire post with comments from the co.mments site. Also, you can add a link to each post on your blog to allow users to add the post to their own co.mments profile. You can see these links in action on this blog now!
co.mments also have another cool feature which is similar to a ‘river of news’ on the front page. As people add posts to co.mments they are displayed on the front page and you’re given the opportunity to add them to your own tracking pages. There are also, obviously, lots of options for RSS feeds – you can track your own posts as well as everyone else’s.
Overall, this is a great service and we highly recommend that you try it out yourself.
Links:
- coComment – cocomment.com
- co.mments – co.mments.com
- TechCrunch’s review on co.mments here
- TechCrunch’s review on coComment here, andhere
(originally posted on the beta @ amanzi site…)
