This is rather neat – Frappr, an online tool that lets you map out the location where you live, work, take your holiday or anything else. You can then share your unique URL with friends and find out where the rest of them live and work in relation to everyone else. I was pleasantly pleased […]
Category: Weblog Tools
TypePad’s growing pains
TypePad seems to creaking under the strain of its own success. For some weeks now, I’ve been observing (and experiencing) constant server timeout problems when posting to this blog. And I’m not the only TypePad user who’s in this position. In July, I posted with some frustration on the constant difficulties I encountered at that […]
PubSub ranks PR bloggers
If you want to find information on the popularity (sometimes equal to influence but not always) of PR bloggers, you already have quite a few choices such as Technorati Blog Finder: PR and Blogpulse Profiles. There’s now another choice – The PR List, part of PubSub’s new Community Lists. Managed by Constantin Basturea, the list […]
Move from TypePad to WordPress getting close
My plan to move this blog to WordPress is now close to completion. The big test today worked without problem – importing all the content from this blog into NevOn 2.0, my new WordPress blog. Some 1,300 posts, 1,650 comments and 775 trackbacks since I started this blog in July 2004, all contained in a […]
TypePad customers get an offer that’s hard to refuse
As many TypePad users know, the hosted blog service has been a literal nightmare to use in recent months. I’ve posted my frustrations about it as have many other TypePad users. There’s even one blogger who started a blog (on Blogger) last week on filing a class action lawsuit against Six Apart. No takers yet […]
The Frappr nine
Last month, I signed up for Frappr. This is the neat free web service that lets you create a map that connects you with your friends and colleagues wherever they are. Those friends and colleagues can add their photo. If they have a Frappr map, you can link to theirs. The service is rapidly gaining […]
Blogging with Flock
For the past couple of days, I’ve been playing with Flock, the new web browser. Not so much for its capabilities as a browser – and it is pretty good at that – but more its capability as a blog editing tool. Even though it is still in development (nice warning when you download the […]
Join the FIR community
If you’re a listener to one of the For Immediate Release podcasts and you’d like to let the readers of your blog or website know about FIR, we have some graphics you can display on your own site. Here’s how: Choose which graphic (below) you’d like and save it to your own computer. Then, upload […]
New Feedster 500
Feedster has published an updated list of its Top 500, “a list of 500 of the most interesting and important blogs.” This is the first update since the list debuted in August. This blog was on that list, at number 221, but has disappeared way over the horizon from the new list and doesn’t appear […]
Les Blogs 2.0 kicks off today
The Les Blogs 2.0 conference in Paris formally starts today and runs until Tuesday evening. The event is completely sold out. Lots already been going on over the weekend, judging from the rapidly-growing Technorati tag list. What’s the event about? Absorb this, from Loic’s opening remarks: […] We believe there is a revolution going-on. We […]
Cool Nokia N70 is the business
Yesterday was a rare day, a day during which I enjoyed playing around with a gadget purely for the sake of it. Getting to know it a bit, trying things out on it to see how it works. Generally, just having a great deal of fun with it. The gadget is the Nokia N70 smartphone […]
A standard symbol for RSS?
One of the topics Shel and I discussed with Rick Klau of FeedBurner during our FIR podcast interview with him on Tuesday was about the challenges of helping ‘normal’ people understand what RSS is. The acronym itself and the little orange icons with ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’ you see everywhere really are not helpful to the […]
Getting back up to speed with TypePad
A welcome sight for every TypePad customer – you can access the TypePad service again and you can update your blog to reflect accurate content. (Quick jump: I’ve included some tips below on how to republish your blog and how to make a backup of its post content.) If you didn’t visit this blog at […]
Six Apart: Perceptions and the role of communication
This is clearly not a good time for some companies offering blogosphere services. Last week it was Six Apart’s nightmare with the TypePad service outage for almost a full day. Now it’s the turn of del.icio.us which is still suffering in the aftermath of a power failure at their datacenter last week. If you try […]
TypePad’s indelible record
Noodling around the web and the blogosphere in preparation for tonight’s podcast discussion about Six Apart’s TypePad outage last Friday, I noticed that in the majority of blog posts I scanned, the bloggers concerned were apologizing for their blogs being offline. “Indelible record” is the phrase that immediately springs to my mind. All those hundreds […]
Write and post to your blog from Performancing for Firefox
This is very nice indeed – Performancing, an extension for Firefox 1.5 that enables you to use write a post and publish it to your blog just by using Firefox. It may be just an extension but it’s a pretty powerful one. It’s a full-featured editor that presents you with the kind of editing interface […]
Video publishing and other cool things
Interesting developments with video, blogs and mobile phones. Videos of the panel sessions at Les Blogs 2.0 in Paris earlier this month are now available from Vpod.tv, a new video publishing venture from entrepreneur Rodrigo Sepúlveda. You can stream the video (amazing quality) or download the files (big, +/- 200 megs each). (Now’s your chance […]
Organizing for the New Year
Housekeeping’s on my mind today. After enjoying Christmas in the UK with family, and being almost wholly switched off from the blogosphere for the best part of a week, I’m finding it quite refreshing to sit in front of my desktop PC today and think not about blogging but about hardware, software and sorting out […]
Taking Swicki for a spin
One of the topics Shel and I discussed in show #98 yesterday of The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast was Swicki. Shel’s been experimenting with this new search engine on his blog and thinks it’s pretty good. So I decided to give it a try and see for myself how good it is. My first […]
Previewseek: New web search engine impresses
In reviewing some recent visitor stats to my blog, I was curious about quite a few inbound links from a search engine I didn’t recognize – Previewseek. A quick look at it shows that this search engine (it’s in beta – what isn’t these days?) works in a different way to what you might be […]