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."
Anyone that blogs about websites and has tried before knows that getting a decent screencap of a web page can be tricky. Enter FireShot, a Firefox extension that makes quality captures child's play.
Install the add-on and you're given FireShot creates a tiny menu on your navigation toolbar that gives quick access to full-page and visible area capture functions. It does a great job at rendering pages, even those with Flash animations. Support for saving as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and BMP is built-in, as well as exporting to just about any editor.
What really sets FireShot apart, though, is the integrated upload feature. Select it, and you can resize your image on-the-fly and post it to FireShot's free image hosting repository with minimal effort. If there's one feature that helps sell a piece of software to us, it's how much time and effort we can save by using. FireShot makes putting browser screencap online so easy we almost feel lazy doing it. Almost.
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.
Google has rolled out a whole slew of new features for Blogger, the company's user-friendly blogging software. In order to enable the new goodies, you'll need to login to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. This is where Google rolls out tools that might not be quite ready for prime time. But once you try out the new version, you'll probably never want to go back.
First up, Google has redesigned the post editor. It's still a what you see is what you get editor, but the toolbar looks much cleaner and placing images got about a thousand times easier thanks to a new drag and drop image handling. You can also easily resize images by clicking (or double-clicking in Firefox 3) to bring up a box that asks if you'd like an image to be small, medium or large.
Blogger in Draft also has better support for HTML and enables tables and other advanced HTML code to be placed in a post. And the preview feature brings up a new window so you can preview your post without leaving the editor window.
One thing to note is that Google has turned off the autosave feature, so you'll need to click the save button periodically if you don't want to lose your work. Autosave should be restored in a future update.
Making a point-by-point comparison chart is a pain in the butt. It requires fiddling with spreadsheets, formatting lots of individuals cells and hoping the results are easy to read. Tablefy takes all the mess out of comparing things. Just put in your data and it'll do the rest. You can even embed pictures and YouTube videos with little fuss.
The example charts look sharp and professional, and there are some neat little auto-formatting quirks that save you time. If you're doing a comparison that uses a lot of "yes" and "no" -- a feature comparison between two apps, for example -- Tablefy will automatically color the yes and no cells for you, making them easier to distinguish. Although the charts are made to be embedded on your own site, there are lots of examples to browse and vote on at the Tablefy site.
Back before the days of FriendFeed, it was pretty common to see people post things like, "Just wrote a new blog post. What do you think?" to Twitter. That's a good way of getting your link out there, but if anybody actually wanted to answer your question, they'd probably do it in the comments, not in Twitter. Chirrup is a way of tweeting back at someone and commenting at the same time. A neat trick!
Installing Chirrup is as simple as uploading a bit of PHP or installing it as a Wordpress plugin. Most webhosts support this, and the HowTo on the Chirrup site has straightforward instructions for getting it working. Once it's set up, Chirrup will grab any replies to you that contain a URL from your site, and associate the right comments with the right pages. It also knows how to unpack TinyURLs, which eases character-count concerns considerably.
Poll Authority is an easy poll-creation service that generates nice tidy multiple-choice polls you can paste into your website or blog. A lot of blogging services and social networks have their own polling systems, but as far as the platform-neutral free poll generators go, Poll Authority looks pretty decent.
With the free version, you get unlimited polls and a bit of customization in terms of appearance. Upgrading to the $5 or $8 monthly plans doesn't actually seem to do much, other than adding a bit of professionalism by replacing the Poll Authority link on each poll with a customized one. The Gold plan gets you a breakdown of your results by geographic area. Bottom line: if you're looking for a fast, easy way to make a poll, and you don't want it to cost you anything, Poll Authority is a good bet.
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.
What do you get when you add Technorati + Mahalo + Google? One part human led guide team, one part ranking of individual posts, and one part powerful algorithm that decides what's hot and what's not, based on what is fed into it.
Today, Loud3r is launching 25 separate sites on 25 different niche topics that range from Motorcycles to Web 2.0. Big deal, right? There are content gathering tools everywhere these days, why bother with this one?
Each of the 25 niche sites is set up to kickstart its own community, with features reminiscent of Digg. You can give feedback on the stories, and it will help their algorithm get smarter. The more sources that the guide feeds the engine, plus the more you interact, the better user experience you'll get.
Today, OneSpot has formally announced the commerical availability of its OneSpot publishing-as-a-service™ platform. This subscription service allows publishers and businesses to deliver relevant content from across the web to a targeted audience. Think of OneSpot as a white-label Techmeme, Sphere Netvibes and Digg solution.
For instance, if you publish a site about social media, OneSpot will provide related content from relevant sources that you can feature alongside your original content, in sidebars, headline widgets, RSS feeds and more, giving full credit to the original author and source. Thus, instead of having to populate an entire site with news stories and haphazzard links, you can focus on creating quality original content, while still linking to the biggest stories in your particular area.
OneSpot tracks over 200,000 web feeds to find content in a specific area; these feeds are from trusted sources and the user has full control over which stories are featured, approved or blocked. How content is displayed and how frequently it is published is all determined by the user. The net result is something similar to the New York Times BlogRunner service, with the additional ability to have a branded "Meme" tracker and the ability to enable user-voting a la Digg or Reddit.
We think that OneSpot is an interesting approach to content aggregation and syndication. Looking at their site, the way related articles are collected and aggregated appears both efficient and timely -- a problem with many related-content engines is that the sources are sometimes old or out of date.
For businesses or publishers looking to add extra value to their sites, OneSpot might be a viable solution.
The widget looks a lot like the recent readers widgets you find from services like MyBlogLog. But Friend Connect offers users the opportunity to interact with their contacts and communities more deeply without leaving the current web page. For example, Yakuel has added a comment widget that lets FriendConnect users who sign up to be members of her blog to leave comments that are visible to other members.
When you visit a site with a FriendConnect widget you can invite your Google contacts or friends from other sites including MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo to join the community.
Yakuel says there are only a handful of Google gadgets available at the moment, but says there is a section where you can grab gadgets from third party developers, much like the gadget gallery for iGoogle and Google Desktop.
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.
Does your Blackberry do enough for you? RIM thinks it could do just a little more, so it released an official mobile Flickr uploader for Blackberry handsets. The program allows Flickr-Blackberry hybrid addicts to snap pics, tag/geo-tag pics, place pics in albums, and adjust pic sizes. When you're all set and ready, posting the photo is a matter of a few button presses.
We recommend Flickr users with Blackberry handsets at least try it since it's free, and we can imagine the service being useful in a wide variety of situations including blogging, of course. It's probably more useful as a toy than a tool -- an easy way to share vacation photos on-the-go, great concert moments, fun party events, etc.
This is quite different from RIM's usual behavior, which is centered around productivity and business rather than recreation. The program's existence is likely a response to the recent surge of unique services accompanying successful, fun-based handsets (Sidekick, Helio Ocean, LG Voyager, iPhone, etc). Though it's not the most amazing thing to come from RIM, at least it's better than a useless MySpace app or another YouTube uploader... been there, done that, not impressed.
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 
Today, the blog search engine 
