BlogMad in Beta!

BlogMad is here! Horray! If you haven’t heard of BlogMad yet, it’s an up-and-coming blog traffic exchange. The guys at BlogMad have some pretty creative, if not revolutionary ideas about boosting the traffic to your blog. And I, yours truly, will be a beta tester. I can’t wait! For the latest from BlogMad, check out the post continuation below.

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Tired of waiting for Google Calendar? Maybe you should try Yahoo! Calendar instead. Listed as one of the Top Underrated Apps of 2005, Yahoo! Calendar gets the job done. With features like email and IM reminders, a notepad, and the ability to share your calendar with others, Yahoo! Calendar has been offering everything (well, mostly everything) you need in an online calendar for ages. Of course, it works better if you actually use your Yahoo! email address as your main email (hence my problem with it since I’m a Google girl). However, with it’s glaring ads and Web 1.0 look and feel, Yahoo! Calendar is ready for a redesign. Then again, maybe Yahoo! will just add Backpack to their list of acquisitions instead.

Google plans to release a feed API very soon, as in the next month. Via Niall Kennedy’s blog: a feed reader API will let third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling.

Niall Kennedy reversed-engineered the Google Reader and then posted his findings. Then he received a phone call from Jason Shellen, PM of Google Reader, to let him know that Google built its feed API first and the Google Reader application second as a demonstration of what could be done with the underlying data.

Google lets you add customized content to your personalized Google homepage, if you sign in to your Google account. It’s a great feature that allows you to really customize the page with favorite RSS feeds, weather, stocks, etc. Now there is Google Modules, an unofficial website that offers up many modules you can add to your homepage. The modules are small widgets that go beyond what Google offers as far as just adding a feed or a link. There are games (Pac-Man, for ex.), Del.icio.us modules, to do lists, translators, images, and more. All you have to do is click "Get Module," then add the URL that’s generated to your Google Personalized home. Very cool!

What is with the Opera rumors lately? First, there were rumors that Google had bought them, and now, today the rumor is that they have been bought by Microsoft. Opera’s phones are ringing off the hook, despite the fact that they are countering that these rumors are completely unfounded. States their spokesperson: "We have not been bought, and we have not received any offers. It’s just a rumour…" How do these things get started, anyway? My guess is that Opera wants to be bought and they are doing a little PR work to drum up interest. Stranger things have happened.

Speaking of that Performancing Firefox plugin…it is pretty cool! Via their website: Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs. Performancing for Firefox is for Firefox 1.5 and above only.

Flock is getting some negative attention as of late. People are wondering why we need to use a browser like Flock now that there is this new Performancing Firefox plugin that allows you to blog from Firefox, using many different blogging platforms. And it works well. Maybe Flock got too much hype before it was even ready to be used. Maybe people are judging Flock on what it is now…and what it is now is a developer’s preview. Do you know what that means? It’s not even in beta yet! This early, early, cutting-edge, heck, bleeding edge stuff here! Give Flock some time to get built — I have a feeling the end-product is something you will be impressed with.

Recently, Flock’s Chris Messina, addresses some of the Flock backlash on his blog. It’s a good post. He says: Here’s the thing. We’ve actually been pretty certain for some time that most of the features that we build into Flock will be eventually be ported back over to Firefox as extensions. Or become commodity features in other browsers. That’s the way open source should work — and the way software develops plays off itself — and we’re totally in support of that! The point is not to make a bunch of proprietary tools that only work in Flock. That would be ridiculous and counterproductive. I mean, our goal is to make using all the great tools now available on the web easier to use by building a more consistent user experience. Yeah, that’s our big top secret plan.

Read the post, it’s an interesting statement he’s making there. Then come back and let me know: what do you think of Flock?

As part of the deal with AOL, Google is going to start testing new kinds of ads: ads with logos and graphics. Oh no! Are my beloved Google search results going to become a busy, flashing and blinking mess? The thing I hate about the AOL homepage when you log in is how busy it is — windows pop up at you and graphic content is everywhere (which is why I wouldn’t use AOL even if it was free). I’m worried that Google has lost some of their integrity in order to not lose this AOL deal to MSN. Let’s see…"don’t be evil;" "money is the root of all evil;" something doesn’t jive here.

Mercora offers something cool: it’s called IMRadio for Google Talk, and it allows you to search, find, and listen to thousands of artists in near-CD quality sound from webcasters from all over the world. By webcasters, they mean other Google Talk users who have downloaded the Mercora software. You can add files, folders, and songs to your library, make playlists, and invite friends to listen. You can also use the search functionality to find music that’s currently being shared on the Mercora network. Pretty frickin’ cool.

Is the band "My Morning Jacket" fed up with DRM? It’s being reported that when they found that fans couldn’t transfer their album "Z" to their iPods, that they responded by sending fans unrestricted copies of the CD. Sounds great, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I wondered how something like that would be carried out, so I visited their website for the details. Interestingly enough, there was only a link to a forum post on how to deal with the Sony DRM. Absolutely nothing on how to get an unrestricted copy of the CD was anywhere on the site. Even odder, a fan had posted a link in the forum to a news story about these unrestricted CDs, and no one in their forums knew anything about it. In fact, the forum moderator suggested that they email info@mymorningjacket.com to get more information. So how does a story like that make its rounds through the web, when the band’s website says nada and the rabid MMJ fans don’t know anything about it? Maybe they are trying to "look good" in the press…is it all just PR?