Forums for Bloggers

If you haven’t been there already, I have to tell you about one of the nicest forums for bloggers on the net: the forums at BlogAdvance. The people there are friendly, welcoming, and really helpful! I needed a banner and can you believe someone just made me one for free? How nice is that! When you get a chance, check out them out!

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The Google Finance Portal is a personal finance portal that offers corporate news, information and graphs, and allows users to search blogs for the opinions of other private investors. Users can monitor their portfolio and get access to chief executives’ pay details without wading through annual reports. Currently, there is no advertising on the site, an odd choice for Google, but they say they will work out how to make money from the site later on. (via The Independent)

On Monday, Microsoft quietly opened up Windows Live Messenger to all existing Microsoft Passport holders. If you haven’t gotten an invite yet, then you can try this link, which supposedly takes you to the Invitation Acceptance page that you would have reached if someone had invited you to try Live Messenger. If that doesn’t work, you can comment here because I have a few left.

If you had not been able to score an invite to the hottest new blog-traffic/community on the net, the wait is now over: BlogMad is LIVE! Sign up today! You can even get double credits while they are celebrating their grand opening!

ABC will start testing streaming their shows over the internet next month. The shows will be online eight hours after they originally aired, with commercials included. So, I guess if you want to save $1.99 and don’t need your TV to go, you can just watch the commercials. Nice!

When the Bush Administration demanded data from the search companies for use in a statistical study whose purpose is to defend constitutionality of its child anti-pornography law, only Google protested. The battle went to court and now there has been a ruling: on Friday March 17th, a federal judge ordered Google to give the Bush administration a list of 50,000 randomly selected URLs. However, the judge also ruled that Google did not have to disclose the list of people’s search requests (keywords used to search the Google index), as the government was demanding. Google lawyer Nicole Wong is quite pleased: "What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies."

I am pleased as well. Under this administration, we have had more of our constitutional rights and freedoms yanked from us under the guise of protection. Just because you have nothing to hide, doesn’t mean the government has the right to eavesdrop on your emails, phone conversations, or keep tabs on what you’ve been googling. For god’s sake, read Orwell’s 1984 — we are there. You have the right to privacy only as long as there are laws that protect it! You must vote, you must write your congressmen and women, and I highly recommend keeping tabs on the pending legislation page at EFF.org as well.

I’ve had many suggestions from people over the course of time to dump TypePad and go with another blogging service, but I couldn’t do it. I really like TypePad — it really makes blogging simple, while still offering nearly all the features I could desire. Now TechCrunch is reporting that SixApart, the parent company of TypePad, has acquired $12 million more in funding, bringing their grand total of monies raised to $23 million. They’ve also acquired a company that does mobile blogging, which I suspect will be coming to a phone near you in the future.

10 is a hot new technology website. Every weekday at 10:00 am (PST) the site is updated with a new video "that highlights people, their passions and often the technology they are using." At the end of each week these videos are compiled into a full length show. In addition to the show, there will be a number of blogs available as links from the homepage on a wide variety of technology subjects. Good stuff!

Bitty Browser is a little browser that can go on any web page - it’s like Picture-in-Picture for the Web. I must have missed this when it was on TechCrunch eons ago. With Bitty Browser, you can make a navigatable blogroll for your blog, an embedded search box, or embed content into your site from remote web sites/services, RSS feeds, podcasts, and OPML files; and I’m sure that’s just the beginning!Why has no one thought of this before? Is anyone using this? I’d like to see it in action on a blog!

Yes now you can Google Mars. Just so you know, I called it back in July 2005. (And yes, I know this has been up for days, thanks).