I have 3 different blogs (1, 2, 3) that are powered by WordPress, which is without a doubt the best blogging platform out there. The good thing with WordPress is that it is open source, which means anyone can create plugins to improve WordPress’ backend to fit one’s needs.
There are 12 plugins that I find extremely useful and I would like to share them with you.
It was first reported by Twitter that around 10 a.m., Amazon.com shut down, giving an error code to anyone visiting it. It is now back on track but Amazon lost big money.
Amazon PR:
The Amazon retail site was down for approximately 2 hours earlier today (beginning around 10:25) – and we’re bringing the site back up.
Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible.
Amazon’s web services were not affected nor were our international sites.
According to TechCrunch, Amazon loses $31,000 per minute they are not working. That’s about $3,286,000! No doubt that someone got canned today at Amazon…
There is some amazing stuff out there on the Web–resources, tools, tricks, and tips. Problem is you spend so much of your time just keeping up with new technologies – learning, playing – and this doesn’t leave much time to go hunting for the latest and greatest tool, or for a better way of doing things. I’ve made this list to make your life easier.
By connecting his cellphone with his Twitter account, this guy is able to turn his lights on/off. Pretty cool isn’t it. One question remains though: why use your cellphone to turn off your lights when you can just get up and switch off the light? Ok, ok, I get it. The result doesn’t matter; what matters is that you can do it.
Hitwise released its latest April report and (surprise) Google has again hit a new high with 67.9% of all searches. Yahoo is second with 20.3% and Microsoft is far behind with only 6.3%.
Patricia Hursh wrote a good blog entry at SearchEngineLand.com about online registrations and downloadable asssets. Online efforts are designed to generate leads and a good way to generate those leads is to give an incentive to people to enter their contact information. Most of the time, the incentive will be a downloadable eBook, or white paper, or report; call it whatever you want.
Patricia presents 3 proven method to increase registrations:
MySpace has won a $234 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam award ever, The Associated Press has learned.
A federal judge ruled against two of the Internet’s most prominent spam defendants, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, after the two failed to show up at a court hearing.
Rines and Wallace worked in concert to create their own MySpace accounts or take over existing ones by stealing passwords.
They then e-mailed other MySpace members asking them to check out a cool video or another cool site. When you go there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ring tones.
It would be a surprise, though, if MySpace ever collected. The giant judgments are all defaults, which means they don’t necessarily even know how to find the spammer.
There was no telephone listing for Wallace in the Las Vegas area, where he is last known to live. Service was disconnected for two listed numbers for Rines in Stratham, N.H., his last known address; a third number was unlisted.
A funny video I wouldn’t have come across if it wasn’t for this site. First uploaded Monday, the video has clocked a staggering 1.4 million views this week, garnering it YouTube’s coveted “most viewed” spot. Levi’s says no special trickery was used during shooting. I believe them but I wouldn’t risk my balls at it….
The 3 bigs are starting to embrace data portability by making available sets of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.
MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday. The following day, FaceBook rushed to announce FaceBook Connect, and Google is expected to present Google’s Friend Connect on Monday.
This whole Data Portability thing will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says:
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data.
Google will have to catch up with MySpace and FaceBook as it doesn’t have a gigantic pool of active users like the 2 social networks sites already have. What? Google is not leading the way for once?
Xobni (“inbox†spelled backwards and pronounced zob-nee) has produced a free downloadable software that, once installed, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages quickly and easily searchable.
The most useful part of Xobni is how it indexes and threads content. The program lists emails in “conversations†a la Gmail, so you’ll see all the back-and-forth replies to any message together in one window within Outlook (Xobni runs as a sidebar inside the program). Having all that info so readily available, without even having to navigate away from your current message is quite convenient.
Xobni also saves you time on searching for those old email attachments. When you have an email open, Xobni’s displays a box that shows you every single file you’ve ever exchanged with a person and lets you easily access them.
Another neat feature is you get all their contact info, including phone numbers extracted from their past emails. Xobni will pull their digits from their signature and save them for you, without you ever having to do a thing.
Xobni comes with many more features such as analytics, people relationships, etc…
The company was founded by two former graduate students who met on internships in Washington in 2006. Last year the co-founders went through a Silicon Valley start-up boot camp, called Y Combinator, where they received an initial investment and temporary offices.
In February, Bill Gates demonstrated the program at Microsoft’s San Jose developers’ conference and called it “the next generation in social networking.â€