* If you click again on an "expanded" category/tag, it will take you to the delicious page - it has some nice features (related tags, clouds, other people's tags etc)

* My post-titles in delicious have the blog name in front of them - the tidy function removes this by dropping all text before the first semi-colon.

* If you click on a post title, the "expanded" tag is persistent (ie carried through in the URL) so that it will be "expanded" at the new page too.

I'll be implementing this for the drop-down list (like at Vent) in the next couple of days.

Lastly, some open questions for the forum:

* Should the drop-down list display posts in a drop down list as well (ie some categories have dozens of posts in them - too long, really)?

* Should the in-post tags take you to the homepage instead of staying on the current page (like at present)?

* Should you be able to select multiple tags? Ie "politics" and "sex"? If so, should this list posts that are tagged with politics AND sex, or posts that are tagged with politics OR sex?

To have multiple tabs loaded each time you start Firefox or when you press the home button, you can simply pipe delimit them in the options...if you wanted to open both Google and Digg when you open your browser, simply enter

http://www.google.com/ig | http://www.digg.com

• Blue Tenshi
  
• Pappmaskin Diare - Internal category results using .js
• Marc Morales - Internal category results using .js
• Digital Material
• Dimly Lit
• PFHyperBlog
• Greg's Cool [?] of the Day
• Totally Confused
• Thitiv
• BitterSweetBlue
• Atrocious Calamities
  

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high,"says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy."

The concept is simple and brilliant. You create an account (free, I think just a user name and password if I remember correctly) and then with relative ease you can create a Super Bookmarklet. You can drag and drop from a menu of the most interesting bookmarklets other people have contributed, into a box that you size yourself. Then, you drag your Blummy bookmarklet link to your toolbar.

So what's the solution? Well, instead of charging content creators to host their content (or running ads, or both), the idea is that we should go back to paying content creators. The Web 2.0 companies are making money, and they deserve their fair cut. 100%, however, is not a fair cut. How's this for the switch: I make it, We get paid for it. The first site to do it will beat out the competition, and fast.

Click the "?" (question mark) icon next to the word verification on your posting form. That will take you to a page where you can request a review for your blog. We'll have someone look at it, verify that it isn't spam, and then whitelist your blog so it no longer has the word verification requirement.

"If you don’t have blog categories, save all your posts in a del.icio.us account under various tags. del.icio.us is good to browse posts filed in tags, but what if you can’t find what you are looking for just from browsing the title of your posts, even though you know what tag the post is in. Sounds like you need to be able to search full-text of all the bookmarks saved under that tag, well in comes minisearch, the full-text engine for your del.icio.us account, or even for your blog if you use a del.icio.us account as a mirror for your blog."

• Is it Geocities for the Millennium?
• Is it G-Bay?
• Is it Craigslist?
• Is it an online diary / planner / schedule?
• Is it a virtual "jacket pocket" for stuff that you find on the web, write on bits of paper, & lose in the laundry?

It marks a significant departure for the company: It will become a publisher, a competitor in the content creation and management game, which places it in direct competition with the multitudes who feed and feed off the main Google search engine. Watch. This. Space.

A space station inside the online, multiplayer game Project Entropia has just been sold for $100,000. The buyer was Jon Jacobs, a very popular in-game figured known as "Neverdie". Why spend so much on a piece of virtual property? Because it's just like owning the Mall of America -- it's a place to conduct business and make real-world cash. Indeed, Project Entropia currently has 236,000 registered accounts, and the game allows you to use Earth money to buy in-game currency, which makes it spectacular place for any entrepreneur to set up business, really.

[What] if you could do a site search at Technorati Tags.

At the moment you can site search within one blog, what I’m proposing would be like site searching within one category or tag of a blog (Blogdigger can do this, but then Technorati is where everyone looks).

This way you could include Technorati Tags in your blog as usual (still pointing to Technorati Tags), but when looking for a post you could limit the tag to just your site, much easier and quicker to find one of your posts.

Earlier today we pushed out a change that will prompt some users to solve a CAPTCHA if our spam classifier identifies the blog as spammy.

We plan to quickly iterate on this approach a bit (as well as extend it to posts created via the API). So far, we have observed a slight decrease in the amount spam being created.

Tony Conrad, CEO of Sphere... and his team had carefully calibrated the release of the beta version, first testing it in a small group, and then gradually expanding. But when his friend, Om Malik, gave Sphere a thumbs-up in a blogpost, 20,000 people rushed to sign up for the beta version. It was far more than Sphere was ready to handle.

My advice would be to continually write relevant and useful content, while submitting to RSS directories, etc. If people read your material and find it useful, some of them will likely link to it, and that’s where the fun begins.

As you publish more content and get more links, you will eventually become a trusted source within your industry. At that point, you should start contacting the owners of related sites, and politely asking for blogroll exchanges. As you amass such exchanges, you will notice your search engine ranking (and traffic) slowly but steadily move upwards, to previously unattainable levels.

Just remember the basic theory behind it though. Quality content comes first, then links will begin to form naturally. For those who have knowledge, and are willing to work to articulate it, blogs are perhaps the easiest medium to express ideas, and attain backlinks.

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet. They can degrade the service quality as much as they want. They can increase the price as much as they want. They can add atop your content as many pop-ups, blinking banners, or other user-repelling advertising techniques as they want. They can promote your competitor's offers on your pages. Yes, you can walk, but at the cost of your loyal readers, links you've attracted from other sites, and your search engine ranking.....The longer you delay, the more pain you'll feel when you finally make the move.

But is any of it enough? I don't think so. The bigger question is, Can anything be enough to thwart a blight in a monocultural environment?

The real answer to the link devaluation problem has to come from outside Google. We need polyculture: for search, for advertising, for everything. In its absence, we get some fine but isolating services. And blights that take advantage of that isolation.

This circular Google-conomy is coming under scrutiny from left and right, because there's an apparently irreconcilable conflict here. The splogosphere that gums up our search works, colonises our referrer logs and steals our (well...your) content is a benefit to the adsense half of the circle. More places, more ads, more clicks, more $$. In the meantime, though, the legitimate content / hosting half of the equation is getting hammered, to such a degree that pretty soon no-one will visit or link in, & then no-one will see the ads, unless they're trolling for them. What had been the bright white shiny mega-mall in the 'burbs will have become the weedy lot with the empty stores, & we'll all be searching using some other service.

Blog search involves a difficult calibration between relevance, authority and timeliness. I have the sense that Sphere has the tools to handle the job, but first needs to retwist a few of the knobs.

The new search engine has plenty of features that I like. At each link, you can click on the blogger to get profile information: Average number of posts per week and blogs recently linked to. I would also like to see the number of incoming links, to get an idea of the blog's reach.

I expect Sphere to make its grand debut shortly. Despite apparent kinks, it holds great promise. More details from Techcrunch and Om Malik.

Rather than create topical group blogs, people will simply coalesce around the same (or very similar) tags, which will define a topicspace, a tagspace. Today, we don't actually do much with those spaces: for example, all the posts tagged "PR" at Technorati don't amount to a real destination, like a group blog does, but is just a luanching pad for people to go elsewhere. However, if someone -- like Corante, perhaps -- were to aggregate the writings of people -- like the individual contributors to Many-2-Many, and let's say another leading 100 writers on things related to the human use of the Web -- tagspaces would emerge. "Web 2.0" would explode, for example. A company like Corante could direct some editorial digest on what the most interesting pieces are for any day, and that tagspace could become a real meeting point for people interested in the topic.

Instead of pinging Technorati with a ThreadID system or a unique Tagback you could set up a “blog for threads” that you can ping, or why not just set up a service similar to Topic Exchange, but it would be Conversation Exchange.

You could have your own account space, like in del.icio.us, with an item list of all the conversations you have initiated, and also a list of conversations you have contributed in…maybe you could add tags to these linear conversations (or distributed gatherings) so you could organise, share and browse the portal by a conversation topic (a conversonomy even…he!..he!)

…this idea is simply leveraging on the Topic Exchange system by allowing a user space, and folksonomy features.

1. Is there anywhere else that a site can be hosted without a server?
2. What are the pros/cons of other blogging software?
3. How serious is the fallout for those of us w/ blogspot URL's? Will other sites block our comments / trackbacks? Will other bloggers refuse to read or visit us because we look dodgy?
4. What would the steps in a migration be? Say I wanted to move to typepad, for instance....
5. Any other thoughts... Comment away, please, and help me understand what's going on

Suggestion, Google? As bold as this might sound, you should institute an authentication system - a captcha of sorts - for every single post that gets sent through your Blogger service. This means that there's no more easy rides for the idiots out there who are killing your baby and the blogosphere. The user logs in, enters their post, then has to jump through a captcha hoop - much like commenters have to do on Blogger.com these days. It's a simple suggestion, and one that you really, really, really, REALLY oughta consider. You were willing to go the ref="nofollow" route, why stop there?

Copy the captcha to the publishing system, Google - let's just see what happens? Please, for the love of all that is holy, STOP MAKING IT SO INCREDIBLY EASY FOR THE SPAMMERS TO EXPLOIT. If you don't want to try anymore, then just get rid of Blogger altogether.

In other words: kill IT before they kill YOU!!

del.icio.us surf is a cool little tool that lets you 'channelsurf' del.icio.us tags/users. You simple enter a tag or username into the text box and push the appropriate button. A random page from the popular page for that tag is loaded into the frame and a link to post the page to del.icio.us is given. ....The idea is that if you like the page, then you post it to your del.icio.us, and the chances of someone else seeing it are higher.

There is actually two different use for the tag list area.
The common use : when you click on a tag, it displays the associated bookmarks.
The alternative use : when the form is up and you click on a tag, it adds the tag to the "tags" text input. So when you add a new link you can just associate it with existing tags by clicking on them

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent....I'm sure you can think of one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the 'Did you get my email?' phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our 'accent.

Okay, look. I don't want to write another too-long post, so I'll just say it: Please stop afflicting me with advertisements on your blog. I don't mind the reading lists and the CD's you're listening to. I don't even mind the paypal panhandling that some people do; it's cool. But adsense... that's ridiculous. Especially when the ads are in the middle of a post. That's a good way to lose me as a reader.

I read blogs because I like it, not because I'm into shopping. I can go to amazon for that. I'm glad there's no money in blogging, it's a relief. There's writing in blogging and good writing too, check out the blogs on my roll. They're there because they're good, not because they're financially viable. There is a difference.

The more I sense you're trying to make money from me via your blog, the more likely I am to click, not on your adsense ads, but on the little red and white 'x' at the right side of my Firefox tabs.

Netvibes.com is a customizable web 2.0 homepage solution

This service is free and gives you the user the ability:

• to create a personalized page with the content you like.
• to put together data feeds and services from web 2.0 applications with a very simple interface
• to access your page anytime and from any computer .

Key features of Netvibes:

• Browse, modify, and import your RSS feeds with our integrated RSS/ATOM feedreader. You can easily import an OPML file as well.
• Import, download and listen to podcasts without any additional software
• Check your e-mail on one or many Gmail accounts; stick web notes and weather updates; and many more features to come!

The blending of citizen and professional journalism is to give consumers "a more complete search experience," the company said in a statement.

"Our expanded news search dramatically increases the consumer’s ability to find events that matter to them, from major news stories, citizen reporting, commentary, and pictures that might not be covered by the mainstream media," Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo News, said in a statement.

The initial search returns links to professional news organizations, with blog links in a separate box to the right. Clicking on "all blog results" will get photo thumbnails from Flickr and My Web links, which are also displayed to the right of results from mainstream media.

Content publishers can add blogs to Yahoo News Search by visiting a publisher page on the portal.

Basically, enter your search terms as part of the url BEFORE the domain gada.be and run your search. For example, interested in searching for the term "airlines"? Simply enter http://airlines.gada.be (in other words, the query terms become the subdomain) and you'll be shown top results (no descriptions, however) from Yahoo, MSN, Flickr, Wikipedia, FindArticles, Google News, and others.

On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do - as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online - most young people are using it to communicate with one another.