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SezWho Offers Portable Reputations : Web Worker has a thorough writeup on the SezWho service which allows commenter reputation and rating across the web. Installation is really simple with their Wordpress Plugin (also for MT). Web Worker seemed cautious about professing the success or viability of this service. However Read/WriteWeb, who is already using SezWho, was a lot more upbeat about the prospects. WeblogToolsCollection on the other hand, has been bitten hard by third party services and their scalability issues and I am going to shy away from this one for now. Sadly, it is quite hard to determine the dependability of a remotely hosted service from just their SLA and their promises, especially if their financial model is shaky.
More stats from whos.amung.us: I really liked the service when it was first started and the recent improvements just add a little more icing to the cake. Now you can view the number of simultaneous users on your site or blog in graph format for the day, month or year. There is also a neat little search feature to modify your past stats for a certain date range. You can now tweak the widget for your blog by choosing the color of the background and the text in the widget to suit the layout of your site and there are options for the size of the widget.
I chose the TechCrunch stats because they are much more interesting to monitor but as you can tell, I installed the widget on this blog on the first day I found it and unlike other tools, it is still displayed on this blog. I like it since it is unobtrusive and quite enlightening if not somewhat entertaining. The new features and the growing popularity seems to have affected performance of their statistics page a little but I am hoping that is temporary as their revenue grows and they are able to add more resources towards this project. The performance hit has had no effect on the display of the widget. [EDIT] Of course, I jinxed their server(s) and they are down at the moment with no display of the tracker.
In completely unrelated news, Wordpress 2.2.1 was released today and the upgrades include important security fixes and some bug fixes. The nicely polished upgrade is well worth it.
Web 2.0 free button maker: After the success of the Stripe Generator and the Ajax Loading Gif Generator, here is a Web 2.0 Button Maker that lets you upload your own icon and build gel buttons for your site or blog. I agree with Mashable that the script is not very Web 2.0 ish itself since you have to “Apply Changes” every time you make a change but it is fun nonetheless. I tried building a PNG with the flame logo of weblogtoolscollection.com but I was spending so much time on it, I just gave up and made something simple.
It turns out that we like “generators” on WeblogToolsCollection.com!
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