The WordPress Plugin Competition 2.0 has been getting a lot of good press in the past few weeks and we already have four interesting and useful plugins announced for the competition. If you are planning to participate, why don’t you register on the PluginBlog and post your announcement? The last date to submit your plugin is the 31st of July. Lots of new prizes have been announced for the competition including over $700 in prize money from myself, Ajay, Jonathan and Darren, a Hostgator sponsored dedicated server for a year, an 8GB iPod Nano from Imthiaz, more hosting from PJMommy, a signed copy of Lorelle’s new book and a copy of Angsuman’s latest Translator Pro. Thanks to Matt, Lorelle and others for helping to promote the competition. Oz and Lorelle have also helped me make the PluginBlog more user friendly and clean it up. Ajay is helping me judge the […]

WP Plugin: Listen Button: Create instant podcasts from your blog text with this plugin from Odiogo.com. It creates a “Listen” button on your blog that people can click to listen to the text of a post. The content is read by a machine and the voice stream is linked in a flash player format on your blog. The mp3 resides on the Odiogo server and can also be downloaded. Weblog Tools Collection can now be downloaded in a podcast format with the help of this service. You can do the same for your blog by signing up for their podcast service. I am not sure this format makes sense for the staccato delivery of this blog but it might be a cool feature for blogs with longer articles and lesser linked content. At the very least, it is a novelty  for any blogger that always wanted to hear themselves type […]

Check out the refreshed Technorati: David Sifry unveiled a new version of Technorati today with improvements made in usability, design and scope of search. The greatest change is the look of the homepage and I cannot get over the difference. I completely failed to recognize the page and it looked like a MFA (EDIT: Made for Adsense) MySpace theme page at first glance and the ticker at the top is almost completely useless to me since it is almost unreadable. I am sure the technological innovations will be welcomed and the elimination of the “search silos” will make them more competitive against Google Blogsearch, but I think that brand recognition should not be wiped away completely but much rather phased in an out to benefit the novelty and retain customer comfort in the brand. Techcrunch has a writeup on the news. I am a frequent user of Technorati, especially since […]