2008 August | money news blog

12 08 2008

Disqus launches improved Wordpress plugin, now SEO-friendly

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Blogging, Social Software

Disqus offers web publishers the capability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.

There’s just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn’t notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. This day, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.

The new plugin is much more tightly integrated with Wordpress than the old version. First up, the comments are now indexable by search engines since they’re stored both on your site and on Disqus servers. Second, it’s now easier to import and export comments. And third, you can now moderate comments using the Wordpress Admin interface. No need to login to a separate web page. Improved plugins for other blog platforms should be coming soon.

The Disqus web site has also been redesigned to make it easier to navigate through comments. It’s also easier to follow comments left by a particular user.

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12 08 2008

Digsby multi-protocol chat client seriously cuts RAM usage

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Social Software, Beta

Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There’s just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.

Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you’ve got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older Computer with 1GB or less, there’s no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.

A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn’t go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.

The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There’s also a new crash reporter.

Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn’t advocate replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you’ve been frustrated with Digsby’s high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.

Continue reading Coccinella - the whiteboard thrill just doesn’t last

11 08 2008

Coccinella - the whiteboard thrill just doesn’t last

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Open Source, Social Software

Despite its seriously flawed name, Coccinella, the open source IM client, has some interesting features that might make you do a double take. The idea of chatting and having the ability to draw on a whiteboard, as well as play chess during a chat session sounds like fun, so I decided to give it a spin.

I learned from the process that Coccinella is the Latin name for ladybug. It isn’t, as I had thought originally, a bacteria found in pond scum. I continued my pursuit, preferring to focus on the adorable little ladybug in the logo and ignore the unfortunate “ella” associations with the name.

Coccinella is a free download for Windows, Linux and Mac. After downloading the application, the set up assistant leads you to select from a list of servers to open a new account on. Although Coccinella can connect to any Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server including Google Speak, AOL, MSN and ICQ, you have to dig for information to find out how. The set up assistant leads you to select from various servers and so I created an account with Jabber.org. I was happy I did.

09 08 2008

Tweet Olympic style with #080808

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Social Software

Some folks in China want to make sure that while you are Twittering in the next two weeks you can have an simple chance to talk about the Olympics with all your Chinese friends.

Steven Lin, one of the co-founders of the #080808 movement said it’s “just for fun, a way to write down the day,” according to the New York Times. The Times and others report a new #080808 user is added every half-second.

They even have a nifty buddy icon template you can download and personalize. So, go tweet about the Olympics. You know you want to!

[Via ReadWriteWeb]

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Continue reading Twitter - Fail = Rejaw

08 08 2008

Twitter - Fail = Rejaw

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software, web 2.0

Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.

The basic idea’s pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.

Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it’ll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.

07 08 2008

TripSay like Twitter… with a map… for travelers… sort of

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Social Software

TripSay is hard to explain. It combines travel information, social networking, maps and reviews of places. As someone who enjoys traveling, I think it has potential.

Basically, you log in to TripSay and build your world by entering places you have traveled. Each place you enter can get a rating from a smiley face to a butt (really!) and a short tip or comment for which you can, thankfully use more than 140 characters. You can join groups with similar travel interests like a particular place or type of travel.

Based on your rating of places you’ll get recommendations on the map that match what you have indicated you enjoy. Most of my current vacation have been to beaches, so the majority of my recommendations were for beachy places. Tripsay uses a suggestion engine to generate your results.

If you want to look for something different, you can click on different icons on the main map to see mountains, shopping, cities, etc. that have been rated by other users.

TripSay calls itself an intelligent social network (that) delivers highly targeted travel information, recommendations and tips based on one’s one-of-a-kind preferences and social network.

I think if TripSay gains a big user base and lots of information it could be really useful to find interesting restaurants and out of the way places that guidebooks don’t cover. But, it will really depend on the amount of users the site attracts.

It is now in free public beta.

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07 08 2008

Mozilla brings Twitter, RSS, other messages to Firefox with Snowl

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Mozilla, Social Software, Beta

Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here’s what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.

The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.

But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you’ve got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you’ve got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There’s an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a “river of news” style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.

Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?

06 08 2008

Atomkeep synchronizes your profile across social networks

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’re a good, upstanding netizen, odds are you’ve accounts with half a dozen social networking service or more. You may only use one or two services, but if your friends or colleagues pressured you into signing up for LinkedIn, Plurk, or Pownce, you probably filled out an online profile before promptly forgetting about it. And now that you’ve moved, changed jobs, or gotten married, the profile is woefully out of date. Atomkeep can help.

Atomkeep lets you synchronize your profile information across more than 20 different services including Digg, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress, Jobster, Facebook, and Twitter. You can choose from a big list of category elements to fill out and when you hit the sync button Atomkeep will send that information to your social networks. You can sync with all of your networks at once or just choose the ones you want to update from a list.

The coolest part of the service is the fact that you don’t need to fill out your Atomkeep profile at all if you don’t want to. It can import your profile from another service and merge it with your profile from other locations. So if your Facebook profile is already pretty complete but your Last.fm profile could use some work, Atomkeep can import the former and use the information to fill in the blanks on the latter.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Continue reading Are you normal about money?

06 08 2008

Are you normal about money?

Posted by: in Money General Talk

Filed under: Debt, Saving, Wealth, Relationships

In the book, Are You Normal About Money?, author Bernice Kanner outlines responses from a public survey posted on the Bloomberg Web site. According to respondents, sixty-five percent would live on a deserted island for a year for $1 million dollars. Sixty percent would even admit to a crime that didn’t do and serve six months in jail for that amount–and 10 percent would lend their spouse for a night. For $10 million, most of us would do just about anything: one-fourth would abandon our friends, our family, and our church. And for that amount of money, 7 percent–one in each fourteen of us–would even murder.

Part of the problem with money is that people want more. Thanks to fifty plus years of mass media pushing merchandise at us, we’re convinced that more will make us happier. For decades, Lewis Lapham has been asking people how much money they would need to be happy. “No matter what their income,” he reports, “a depressing number of Americans believe that if only they had twice as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. The man who receives $15,000 a year is sure that he could relieve his sadness if he had only $30,000 a year; the man with $1 million a year knows that all would be well if he’d $2 million a year”…”Nobody,” he concludes, “ever has enough.”

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