In case you haven’t noticed, there is a lot of discussion going on over at FriendFeed. This has created a mini-crisis for those of us that blog professionally – a lot of the best conversation is taking place off-site. But developers are quickly coming to the rescue, and the latest is Mark Carey, who has developed a plugin for Movable Type bloggers that allows you to import comments from FriendFeed to your blog. Even better, ...

My latest article at Inc Technology is up. The topic is about the glut of content on the Web today. The bar for quality content keeps getting higher. What that means for you, if you publish content on a blog or website, is that you have to be choosier about topics — and more creative in how you present them. I give 3 tips for content: - Focus on topic niches, rather than general topics. ...

Wired magazine interviews Oren Etzioni, creator of Farecast, a service which uses aggregated airfare data to predict when the best time to buy your plane ticket. He offers a few expert tips the data's shown, like: Common wisdom is wrong...The lowest price tends to hit between eight and two weeks before departure. Buying tickets farther in advance usually doesn't save money. This rule holds except for during peak demand, like Thanksgiving and spring break. You ...

Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit. Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps on message lengths. But instead of directing users to a regular webpage, a TinyPaste’s URL sends its clickers to ...

Recently someone asked me, “what’s the best tool to find keywords for search engine optimization purposes?” We discussed her needs, and it turned out she wanted something to tell her more than just suggested keywords. She also wanted to better monitor her website’s rankings for each keyword. And she wanted to find other high quality sites to link to. In the end, I recommended 3 tools, all of them from SEOBook.com. I thought you might ...

Userplane has been adding to its roster of available community-building tools for some time, with free API options for things like chat and Webmessenger. The plugins for these Userplane additions are now available as plug-ins for VBulletin, WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and phpFoX. The point is to make it even more simple to create communities around these newly supported platforms with Userplane’s plugins. It’s all rather out-of-the-box on the development side, and aims to take ...

Believing that health sites need their own ad network, Healthline is bringing its semantic search technology to advertising. The health search engine is launching the Health Media Network, an ad network that will place contextual ads on health Websites. It is like an AdSense for health sites. But instead of relying simply on matching keywords on the page where the ad is being served, Healthline says it can serve ads that match the health concepts ...

I’ve been desperately combing the feeds for something that sparks the creative juices this evening. Given the good run of news days over the last several weeks, the streak of news that caters to my various interests was bound to subside eventually. Just as I was about to give up hope, I found a post from Nick O’Neill’s Social Times on the topic of monetizing Twitter. I can already hear the groans as a significant ...

Update: I was mistaken in stating that Panoramio only uses photos you’ve taken for the new Look Around feature. I’m glad to see that this feature does include images from multiple users. Panoramio, the geo-tagging photo site that was acquired by Google and integrated into Google Earth last year, now has options to create 3D panoramic views of your photos. You’ll need to first take several successive and overlapping shots of the area in which ...

In my profession, screenshots are like ketchup on fries. Sure, you don’t need ‘em, but they both add so much flavor! The latest service to tingle my taste buds is SnapCasa, a free website thumbnail provider that retrieves screenshots without delay or hassle. All you need is the website’s URL and SnapCasa immediately uploads a screenshot of the site in four sizes which are then free for you to use whichever way you’d like. There ...

Revisiting my initial review of Jimmy Wales’ latest endeavor, Wikia Search, I’m instantly reminded that back then it was just a promise, with actual features and options sorely lacking. Now, the concept behind Wikia Search can finally be seen in the actual product. Starting today, you can now edit search results, add annotations, spotlight the result you deem most relevant, add your comments and delete entries - just like you can in Wikipedia. For example, ...

In the world of Web celebrity, few have become as well-known in the past year as Veronica Belmont, who first gained acclaim as host of CNet’s Buzz Out Loud, then moved onto Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo Daily, and most recently took the reigns at Revision3’s Tekzilla Show. Along the way, she even interviewed our own resident Web celeb, Pete Cashmore, at MashMeet LA (embedded below). Now comes our chance to interview Veronica, as we debut our ...

OpenSocial gained a new convert today. AOL is officially joining the initiative to standardize social-networking apps, Google VP of Engineering David Glazer announced today at the Google I/O event. TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson liveblogged the entire session, which just ended. From his notes: AOL joins OpenSocial today. Their suite of products will support the standard. Not much more was mentioned. AOL, of course, bought Bebo for $850 million, which is already part of OpenSocial. But Bebo ...

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to us that the social networking company will announce an open-source initiative around its Facebook Platform sometime today or tomorrow. We originally broke this story we broke yesterday. We’ve also learned from another source that the name of the initiative will be fbOpen. As Michael previously reported: Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to ...

With oil prices so high, how much would it cost to convert every registered car in America to an electric vehicle? Nothing, according to computer scientist Philip Greenspun. Well, nothing more than we are spending already in oil. He figures that if we took the $400 billion that Americans spend every year on oil that goes into cars, we could use that money instead to pay the interest on an $8 trillion loan. That would ...

Orgoo is an all-in-one communications hub for email, instant messaging, video chat, and SMS that we’ve been waiting quite a long time for. Mike first covered the USC-bred startup in May 2007 before you could get your AIM contacts into Gmail. And then the company “launched” at TechCrunch40 in the fall with a presentation that emphasized the importance of aggregating all your means of communication. However, the only part of Orgoo actually available to the ...

http://www.DanceF... Robert Muraine, also known as "Mr. Fantastic" on the street, puts on an audition unlike any other. By far the best audition I've ever seen, and interesting to watch over and over. This is off the first show of Season 4 on "So You Think You Can Dance." May 22nd, 2008. Pretty funny stuff :) Author: DanceFan2008 Keywords: Robert Muraine mr fantastic contortion locking pop popping so you think can dance week season first ...