UK Version Of StumbleUpon

Streakr.com

Newswire is reporting that Streakr.com has entered into a beta phase and they are calling on users to test out their site. Streakr is described as a social networking, bookmarking, web discovery service. Users download a “discovery” bar into their browsers which finds new websites based on that users particular interests. Does this sound familiar yet? If not, please continue.

Users can then rate sites that they like or dislike by clicking on a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” icon. Now the service should really sound familiar! Stumbleupon anyone? The sites can also be reviewed and then shared with other Streakr members via the social network.

The CEO is and co-founder had this to say about Streakr:

“Streakr is unique in that it brings together web discovery, social bookmarking and a social network in a user-friendly, customisable environment.

“Web 2.0 is all about discovering, creating and sharing, so we’ve built Streakr to reflect that. One click and you can find the hidden gems of the web; rate them and instantly share them with your friends.

To make a long story short, it appears as though Streakr.com is going to be the UK version of Stumbleupon in what seems like every aspect. I wonder if they can get away with this?

The Global Geek Podcast Returns

The Global Geek Podcast

My favorite podcast, better known as The Global Geek Podcast is back in action. TGGP consists of two guys in two completely different locations in the world getting together once a week to bring listeners jammed pack shows which are always filled with useful information.

These guys cover everything tech, from Web2.0 blogging, the internet, to product reviews and software, even what they did on the week-end. The Global Geek Podcast sits on it’s own with the quirky attitudes and pithy, humour between the hosts and their content!

Out of the 80 podcasts that I am subscribed to in Itunes, this one is near the top of my list, not only in terms of quality but in the amount of useful information that is presented. The usual show consists of tech news, new applications, new sites and services, and then reader feedback. Every now and then, Dr Evil makes an appearance. You’ll need to listen to a few back episodes to understand who Dr. Evil is.

The language used in the show may be a barrier for some folks but honestly, it’s what makes it funny. Listening to Dave go off on a tangent either on his own, or by keeping Tim or Knightwise in line is hilarious. At any rate, I wanted to commend these two guys for putting on a stellar show every week. It’s tough work, but I have to say the results of each show speak for themselves in terms of the quality and work put into each episode.

I highly suggest you subscribe to The Global Geek Podcast and at least listen to a few episodes. I think you’ll be glad you did. By the way Dave, congratulations on the move and to Tim on getting a new job.

Click here to subscribe to The Global Geek Podcast

My First Podcast Sort Of

Talkshoe.Com Podcasting Made Simple

Every Monday, Pete Balasch Jr. hosts a show on Talkshoe called Internet Marketing And SEO Tips. About 2 weeks ago, Pete decided to do an apprentice type show where he takes a generally inexperienced user and teaches them about SEO and the different ways a new user can gain ground on search engines. This past Monday, as I was waiting for the show to start, Pete informed me that his guest couldn’t make it. Since I was the only one in the room, he asked me if I’d like to do a show and be a special guest host. I said “sure”.

The show which you can listen to here, EPISODE18 – The SEO Apprentice Course Week 3 turned out to be rather informative. In the show, I gave an audio review of InviteShare, along with an explanation of how it works. Pete and I both discussed the effects of Web 2.0 on search engine optimizations along with a new term that has been created called Social Media Marketers. Think of SMM’s as the SEO guys who apparently get the gist of Web 2.0 and social media. During the middle of the show, Highway_Of_Life the new co-host for PHPBBWEEKLY joined in and gave us some valuable information concerning Google’s Supplemental index. This segment alone is enough to warrant a listen.

Last but not least, we covered PingBacks/Trackback URLs, the No-Follow link attribute, blogging in the blogosphere, using Twitter to update multiple other services and sites, and general SEO tips. If you happen to listen to this episode, I’d love to hear your feedback as I plan on having my own Talkcast/Podcast show in the not so distant future.

Pardon My Dust

Blog Construction
I have spent the past 24 hours redesigning this site. I wasn’t too happy with the top half of the site as well as the sidebar. I also wanted to change the sites appearance as I am going to start blogging about more subjects rather than strictly adhering to Web 2.0. As I become more involved in the blogosphere, I am generating new opinions and knowledge that I want to share. I also wanted to give the blog a personal look and apply a personal feel.

It was a painstakingly long process, filled with problems. At times, the site looked like a complete mess which was viewable to anyone who visited the site. Instead of doing all of the changes locally, I decided to make live edits, something I discourage anyone from doing if you want to keep traffic flowing to your site. I’m still messing around with a few different design elements but for the most part, the redesign is finished.

Let me know what you think!

InviteShare – Web 2.0 Invitation Exchange Station

InviteShare.com Your Invite Resource Have some invitations that you want to get off your hands? Why not share them with others. Now you can using InviteShare, a new site launched on July 8th that allows users to invite other users to new beta services

Why InviteShare?

If you have ever joined a new beta service through an invitation, then you’ll know that, as a new member of that service, you are given a limited number of invites to share with others. Services that start out by giving away invitations not only generate a ton of buzz, but it allows the service administrators to maintain the growth of the service. The last thing any company would want is to launch a beta service that would be open to the public, only to have it succumb to the amount of use and traffic which often times produces undesired results.

Most of the new services that spring onto the web, give users a ton of invitations to spread out amongst their friends or colleagues. The fact of the matter is, most users end up with invitations they can’t seem to give away. Using InviteShare, users can easily give their extra invitations away while also becoming a prominent figure on the InviteShare network.

Getting Started:

Creating an account on InviteShare was fairly simple. All they needed from me was a valid email address and a preferred username. Upon logging into my account, I am greeted with my profile page which lists any pending invites I may have, invitations that were sent from my account, the latest news in the upper right hand corner and links to edit my profile, check messages, my invites and a link to logout.

User Profile Page After Creating An Account

How It Works:

GrandCentral InvitationsThe meat of InviteShare is located on the browse page. This page lists a number of different sites and services that are currently in an invite-only stage. For this review, I chose GrandCentral. At the time of this writing, this is what the invitation list looked like for GrandCentral. To request an invitation to GrandCentral, you would click on the ADD YOURSELF TO THE LIST link. This will take the email address you used to sign up to InviteShare and place it onto the invitation request list.

If any other InviteShare members have an invitation to GrandCentral, they would check the list of email addresses on the request list. The email addresses on the request list are the ones that will be used to send the invitation. Since I have 10 GrandCentral invitations and there are five people on the list, I will be able to send five invitations to those requesting an invite. Once the invitation has been sent, InviteShare users are suppose to click on the email address on the request page and click on the INVITATION SENT button. This sends a confirmation to that email address. Once that user confirms that account, the invitation sender will also receive a confirmation. After you click the INVITATION SENT button, that email address is then cleared from the request listing.

Final Thoughts:

Those of you with a ton of extra invitations will really get a kick out of this service. Not only does it provide you with a way to actually give away those invitations, but it also bumps up your notoriety within the InviteShare network. The more invitations you send, the higher the priority you will receive when requesting an invitation to a brand new service. It seems to me, to be a win-win situation.

As You Can See, InviteShare Is Still In BetaDuring this review, I encountered about twenty different 500-INTERNAL SERVER ERRORS. The errors are most likely due to the popularity the service is receiving. After all, they did make the front page of TechCrunch, WebWare and Read/WriteWeb.

One of the most annoying aspects of this service is the inability to highlight and then copy an email address listed on the request list. Because you have to click on the email address to confirm the invitation, there doesn’t seem to be a way to highlight the text to perform a copy-paste operation, leading to more than necessary typing.

It has to be stated that, these sites and services are in an invite only period for a reason. One thing I have already noticed is that, it takes one invitation to get into a service, that service in turn grants you anywhere between 3-10 invites. If InviteShare takes off like I believe it will, new sites and services may have to change the way they do their invite program.

If you ever see someone requesting an invite or asking where they can get one, be sure to point them to http://www.inviteshare.com as this is the place that will most likely produce results.

Unrelated:

On an unrelated note, I want to get this off of my chest. Back in late June, I began a brainstorming session. In this brainstorming session, I ended up with the idea of creating a service exactly like InviteShare except that I was going to call it INVITR. INVITR is already taken and as I was in the process of slowly getting things together, I read an RSS feed that this service was launched, literally taking the breath out of me. To add insult to injury, the guys name making all of the news postings on InviteShare is Jeff, the same name as mine! Oh well I suppose. This is what happens when you have a good idea but no way to back it. I guess I can say that great minds think alike, wouldn’t you say Jeff?

Twitter Updates Profile Sidebar

Twitter is going through a round of small updates today. One of the most noticeable differences revolves around the sidebar located on the right hand side of the site when your browsing a users profile. The sidebar now looks like this:

Twitter Updates Sidebar

Twitter has taken this oppurtunity to provide users an easily accessible link which allows users to configure their phone or IM client to work with Twitter. The update comes as a surprise to many as the official Twitter blog doesn’t mention any updates that were in store for the Twitter site. I noticed that the ARCHIVE section of my Twitter profile has been inaccessible for about 40 minutes. It makes me wonder if they are changing some things around with that area of the site as well.

Look At All That Spam

The Akismet blog has posted some statistics involving the amount of spam being blocked. The figures are as follows:

Notice the last stat compared with the previous stat. Indeed, spam is growing. Akismet has put together a detailed chart which highlights the increase in spam from 2006-04 to 2007-07. As you would expect, the graph looks like the side of Mt. Everest. I don’t think we will ever see the graph enter a downward state. How has Akismet worked out for you?

Click on the image to see the full version

Digg Like Comment Editor For WordPress

http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit-comments/How many times have you published a comment, realizing just a few seconds later that you misspelled something, or your URL was incorrect. Usually, you would have to create another comment which would dismiss the previous comment.

Ronald Huereca of the Reader Appreciation Project has released a WordPress plugin which gives administrators and regular users the ability to edit their own comments within a given time frame. The plugin pretty much works in the same way that the Digg commenting system works.

The plugin uses Ajax so the entire page never needs to reload. Once a comment is published, a timer starts to count down the remaining time available to edit the comment. Once the timer reaches zero, only the administrator can edit the comment. Users can also edit their email address, or their URL by clicking on the text that needs to be edited. This will open the comment editor window allowing you to make the necessary changes.

Plugin Features

  • Utilizes the jQuery library.
  • Comment editing times out after 15 seconds.
  • Better error handling.
  • Graceful deletion for compatible themes.
  • A hook for other plugin authors to tap into.
  • Compatible with many plugins, including Akismet, WP Cache, Better Comments Manager, WP Grins, TinyMCEComments, and many more.

I have installed this plugin on this blog so now you’ll be able to edit your own comments. We need every WordPress blogger to install this plugin, or something similar so that users can edit their comments. Why this functionality is missing from WordPress by default is beyond me, but the solution provided above works out very nicely. Please visit The Reader Appreciation Project and grab your copy today and install it as soon as possible so people can edit their own comments.

Special thanks to the guys who host the WordPress Podcast for tipping me off on this plugin.

Yahoo And Google Social Networks Round 2

In a recent blog post, I described the way I am trying to converge my online presence, as I am beginning to go through social network fatigue. Thankfully Google and Yahoo get the gist and are working on two new social networks which hope to combine a user’s online presence onto one page. Their first attempts, Orkut and Yahoo360 have failed, with the exception of Orkut which actually has a strong following in Brazil.

Google sponsored a project last year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute that was designed to “rethink and reinvent online social networking,” the Google Operating System blog reported. The site also has screenshots. Dubbed “Socialstream,” the service would be more like a unified social network that would allow someone to have accounts on multiple services but centralized contacts in one location.

On Yahoo’s side, there is a project called Mosh. Check out this job description for a summer intern spot at Yahoo on a “cool new social network product.” According to the post, Yahoo’s looking for someone with lots of friends on MySpace and Facebook and who is “damn funny.”

I would love to see either one of these new social networking services actually see the light of day. It’s a breath of fresh aire to see that companies are beginning to realize the potential behind social convergence.