PictoBrowser

PictoBrowser is a web app that lets you quickly and easily create photo galleries that can be added to your website or blog. To use PictoBrowser, just click the PictoBrowser logo on any PictoBrowser you see or go online to their website, enter your flickr username, choose your set, tag, or group, and the HTML code will be generated which you then post to your site.

How easy is it? I made my first PictoBrowser in literally, 5 seconds. In 10 seconds, I had customized it so it would fit here.

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HelloTxt is a website that lets you post to multiple microblogging services at once. The supported services include Twitter, jaiku, Pownce, meemi, tumblr, yappd, and more. If you’re a member of more than one of these services, you know that updating multiple services at once can be time-consuming and usually not even worth your time. Although jaiku will display your Twitter posts for you, many services don’t have any aggregation features. Now with HelloTxt, you can quickly microblog to all the services at once.

Here’s a Blackberry rumor to drool over: supposedly, an touchscreen, iPhone-like Blackberry line is coming in 2008. According to the rumor, the Blackberry 9000 series will be a touch-screen device with a small form factor. Unlike traditional Blackberrys, the 9000 series won’t have the half-screen/half-keyboard look. What it will have, however, is an upgraded multimedia system, which means it should have good mp3 and video capabilities, especially if it’s going to compete with the iPhone. The 9000 series will also be 3G; that would be a killer feature since the iPhone only gets good speed when it’s on wi-fi. And of course, the 9000 series is still a Blackberry, so push email will remain standard. (picture is wishful thinking only)

If you have one or two blogs that you are addicted to, you may find this service useful: SendMeRSS. Unlike an RSS email subscription like service like mine, which emails you a digest of recent blog posts, SendMeRSS will deliver individual posts as they go live in a single email to an email address you provide. The service is not only useful for keeping tabs on your favorite sites, but could also come in handy to receive blog posts on a mobile phone, a computer where the website is blocked, or a computer where you have email but no internet access. However, if you sign up for more than a couple of blogs using this service, your inbox will soon be overrun with blog post emails, so use this service sparingly!

If you haven’t figured out RSS yet, check out this video for a great explanation:

(via Digital Inspiration)

ShareThis is a web service that lets you instantly access all of your profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing of web content. Now, the company has just announced a new version of the popular ShareThis button, ShareThis 2.0. The button, designed for content publishers, lets your site’s visitors easily share your content via social bookmarking websites or by emailing the post to a friend. With ShareThis 2.0, the button has gotten a major overhaul. You can now configure the button type, which social web services you want to include (including Facebook & MySpace), and you can even pick colors that match your website. You can also now share via IM and mobile chat protocols, like SMS. There are new tracking reports so you can see how people are sharing your content. (These will be available after the button has collected a month’s worth of data). However, the biggest news is that the new button supports non-WordPress platforms, so you’ll probably start seeing a lot more of this button soon.

New Technorati CEO, Richard Jalichandra, is already making things right after only one week on the job. To that end, Technorati is making some great changes:

1. Filtering tools are back. Filtering search results by the source blog’s authority is a tool that bloggers wanted & were very upset over when it was removed.
2. Tag search results and keyword search results have been separated once again. As Richard says, “We also know now that we alienated bloggers who tagged their blog posts, say, as being about Facebook (a really nice little company, I might add) by burying them with all blog posts that mention Facebook.”
3. Charts are back - you can see the popularity of a word over time.
4. They had been moving to a new co-location facility. They know they had issues during the move. The move is over and everything is going to be okay now. Promise.
5. They are implementing plans to enhance crawler accuracy & reduce indexing latency.
6. They know they need to get back to what is at their core: blog search.

Looks like we can’t count Technorati out yet.

I’ve been a bit busy and have been behind on my tech news. First stop for updates, TechCrunch. I see that Microsoft has released a new blogging tool called Windows Live Writer, which is a desktop application allows you to compose and post to your blog whether it’s Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Radio Userland, or one of many others. Live Writer offers a WYSIWYG editor, easy photo insertion, & the ability to add Windows Live Local maps into a blog post. What’s different about Live Writer is the Windows Live Writer SDK which allows developers to extend the capabilities of the program to publish additional content types. According to the site, some examples of what could be developed to integrate with Live Writer include: images from online photo publishing sites, embedded video or audio players, product thumbnails and/or links from e-commerce sites, or tags from tagging services.

Upon installation, be careful to notice that the option to install the Windows Live Toolbar is checked by default - if you don’t want the toolbar, uncheck this. As I began to write this post, I was at first almost confused as to where to type the text of the post. Although there was a circled text block that said “Enter Post Title Here”, there was no area that said “Begin Typing Your Post Here,” as you would expect. Apparently, you just type anywhere in the white space. I liked typing in the “Normal” view mode the best, as it felt more like writing a text document. I especially liked the “Web Preview” mode that showed what your website would look like when the item was posted. This preview is even better than the preview that TypePad offers - it looks just like you’re viewing your actual website with the new post already live. Adding the photo to this post took an extra step or two when compared to TypePad; by default, the “insert picture” link only looks for .jpgs and .gifs - I had to change to “all files” to see the .png I needed. Then, the picture was huge and needed resizing (manually). There was an option under the “border” settings to inherit the settings from my weblog and that made it look more like what I’m used to. TypePad still wins here, since the default settings in TypePad are just right, no editing needed. Adding photos was thing thing that finally turned me off to the blog editor in the Flock browser - it just wasn’t as good as TypePad…and if I can’t blog with Flock, then what’s the point? I decided. When it was time to publish, I could easily publish either as a draft or as a live post. Altogether, pretty easy to use. More useful than just using TypePad? Not yet, but maybe that will change as more things are developed for Live Writer. I look forward to seeing what those might be.

Joe has a really cool post about a new blog network called 9rules. In order to join, you have to submit your blog during a specified 24 hour period that they inform you about approximately a week in advance. You don’t need to join 9rules to enjoy 9rules though, they already have a bunch of communities you can browse now.

BlogBurst is a brand-new syndication service that gets blogs placed on “top-tier” websites. If your blog is deemed a “high quality, topic-focused blog,” you will be invited to join their service. I suppose that means they’re not taking just anyone (no mommy bloggers perhaps?) According to BlogBurst, once accepted, a blogger will gain visibility, audience reach and traffic, while publishers weave the rich and diverse fabric of the blogosphere into their sites. In other words, major websites are going to syndicate your content…sites like washingtonpost.com, for example. Sounds intriguing. You know I signed up!