5 things we love about WordPress 2.5
March 31, 2008
I spent some time this weekend updating my personal blog to WordPress 2.5 which was released Saturday. I've been a WordPress user for a while now, and it's worth noting that version 2.5 is one of the biggest updates since the release of version 2.0 back in late 2005. There's a huge list of upgrades on the official WordPress blog, but I thought I'd go over a few of my personal favorites so far:
Read moreIs OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?
March 24, 2008
OpenID, a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials, gained significant momentum over the last year as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all pledged their support for the initiative.
LinkedIn, Now For Companies
March 21, 2008
LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.
On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.
These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.
Read moreUnder the Radar: Managing your business online
March 20, 2008
Security, reliability, and stickiness were key talking points at an Under the Radar session showcasing online business collaboration tools. Presenters included Act-On Software, Magento, Mumboe, and NetBooks. While all presenters emphasized their company's ability to offer software as a service, Magento and NetBooks especially focused on tools for small business.
The Cisco-funded Act-On Software combines Salesforce.com's leads database with WebEx's large-scale conferencing to add invitation and follow-up services and pull data between the two. For example, Act-On runs as a tab within Salesfoce, WebEx, and Microsoft applications, and can show Salesforce data after a WebEx conference. Act-on will manage the invitation to promote a webinar, track attendance, and offer follow-up analysis on a given WebEx webinar.
Magento, an open source eCommerce application, lets clients build online stores to their specifications and even manage multiple stores and retail types from a single administrative interface. Magento also offers promotional tools in addition to SEO support and catalog management. What's different in the market is the open-source aspect, so far unique to Magento.
Read moreVale Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008
March 18, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke has died at his Sri Lankan home, aged 90.
Clarke is best known as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but his reach stretched beyond Science Fiction. In 1945 he accurately predicted the use of Satellites as a communications tool, and later joined Walter Cronkite in covering the Apollo space launches.
Read moreYahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry
March 13, 2008
Yahoo’s embrace of all things open continues today - expect an announcement in an hour or so that they are expanding their Open Search Platform that we wrote about last month.
Love Client Number 9: Eliot Spitzer Gets Mashed-Up!
March 12, 2008
You knew it was only a matter of seconds before there would be video mash-ups on the Web related to the prostitution troubles of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.
Some are pretty racy, of course, because the story is, well, pretty racy, generating the most excellent headline from the New York Post: “Ho No!”
But here are two ones I liked a lot. The first is from Barry Mitchell on the accordion in a song parody using the Searchers ‘ ditty, “Love Potion Number 9.” And the second does a very funny take-off of “The Odd Couple,” pairing Spitzer with another Luv Guv–New Jersey’s Jim McGreevey.
GigaOm Launches Ostatic Resource For Open Source Community
March 4, 2008
GigaOm (Om Malik’s blog network) just launched a new open source software focused blog called Ostatic. The goal, Malik said today in an interview, is to track news around the world’s 150,000+ open source projects.
Malik quotes IDC, saying that 71% of the worlds developers have used open source software, and that 50% of organizations have some open source software in production. This is, of course, big business - MySQL was recently acquired by Sun for $1 billion, for example.
Read moreGoogle Bypasses Tech Departments — Again
February 28, 2008
I've been toying around with Office Live recently -- Microsoft's web-based collaboration tool and today Google announces an addition to it's Google Apps package that will let people build Web sites where they can post anything from contact information to presentations to videos. Google says this will make it easier for workers to collaborate on projects. Read more
MyPunchbowl Has Its Own Buzz: News Feed for Parties
February 26, 2008
Yahoo may have beat them to it with the launch of its Digg clone, but MyPunchbowl too wants to announce a product called “Buzz”, this one a Facebook News Feed clone of sorts for party planning.
MyPunchbowl Buzz will give hosts and guests alike a way to keep track of what’s going on with the party scene as organized through the site. Initially it will consist of the onsite info stream shown below, but there are plans to expand its scope to include RSS, instant messaging, and SMS-based notifications as well. An API will eventually be provided for developers to leverage the Buzz data for whatever purposes they desire off-site.
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