Google Charm makes its debut: A well written article about a recent expose’ by Google to publicize its’ New York offices and let reporters in on some lesser known tidbits of Goossip. This article reminded me of the various discussions and articles written on Attention and Google that Nick Bradbury and Steve Gillmore have been writing about.

Ultra-fast release cycles myspace keeps doing what everybody really wants, and it happens instantly A very interesting article on Myspace popularity and some insights into one of the reasons it might be working so well. Lighting fast release cycles with constantly changing “coolness factors” makes users keep coming back for more. One of the lines of that article that sticks to my mind is “Skyler said she’s seen things break on myspace, but nobody seems to care much since they know it’ll probably be fixed tomorrow.” I know that in my professional life, I would write more software and introduce many more features if I held that philosophy (and had many more man hours at my disposal).

Megite: What’s Happening Right Now intelligently uncovering the most relevant items from auto discovered news sites and weblogs This time they let users create their own Megite page with subscription lists tuned with feeds. This seems to be an amalgamation of a feed reader with a Memeorandom and has the look and feel of Digg. My initial reaction after looking at the front page is that Memeorandom has a much better “at a glance” readability than Megite which reads more like a blog than anything else. {EDIT] I just got my OPML imported and I have to admit, this is much easier to read than my news reader.

I have been receiving an increasing amount of spam, of both the comment and the email kind, from TOR which led me to the EFF homepage of TOR. With power comes enormous responsability. Anonymous proxying of data and connections can be a good thing on the one hand, but can be a big problem on the other when you consider that criminals and miscreants can easily manipulate the anonymity to suit their nefarious needs. I see this network (and all like projects) becoming a huge problem in the future. Does this anonymity come with any responsability? Should there be accountability added to anonymity on the internet? What gives an user of TOR the authority to use/abuse their services? Does TOR hold their users responsible for their actions? More generally, does the Internet, as a medium, offer unabashed and unfettered anonymity without consequence? Is that how we, the end users of […]

sxore sxore is an identity and reputation system for blog authors, readers and commenters. By acting as an intermediary between blog posts and comments, sxore provides a framework of identity for participants in the blog dialog. At its simplest, this framework stops comment spam by requiring commenters to prove that they’re not automated spam bots, and by providing moderation tools to blog authors. Sounds interesting? Read more at the link above. I got bored after the first few paragraphs because I thought they were overthinking the whole commenting thing. Also, their website has a distinct “Flickr” feel to it. Anyone use their beta software yet?

WP plugin: Performancing Metrics Plugin For those who can use plugins on their WordPress blog, I’ve made a plugin for integrating the script so you don’t have to touch your template files. on implementing the Performancing Metrics tracking script.

WP Theme: DarkNight Dark, 2 column, blogger like theme for WordPress based on Minima Black

Favorite WordPress Plugins: Some very good/useful links to plugins accumulated on one page. Another good list of WordPress plugins (linked from original page)