Silicon Valley Watcher: Can blogging boost IBM’s revenues and reduce layoffs? She said that Robert Scoble, a leading blogger at competitor Microsoft, recently posted a link on his blog Scobleizer to her site, which boosted her readership was quoted as said by Catherine Helzerman. Do these people really understand the power of blogging and how blogging evangelism works or are they just amateurish corporate bigots who are appeasing the tech-savvy shareholder? Thanks Hack The Planet

WordPress Themes for Troops: Well, not really. This author is “auctioning” off themes to raise money for our troops. Without delving into politics, the themes are nice and this is a nice way to raise some money.

Appcasting: software updates via RSS enclosures Interesting. Open Source could definitely use this to release betas and such to a select group of testers.

Root’s famous Gemini Template has been recolored. Gemini Colored comes in Black, Blue, Green, Pink, Red, Tan and Yellow. You can view and download here: Gemini Colored

Firefox Security Flaw: If this news has not reached you yet, might want to take a quick gander. Fix (and the fix for the fix) is already in the trunk and should be released soon.

21Publish: Turnkey solution to start your own branded blogging community. Useful and usable when used in the context of a school/college set of blogs or for custom webhosting/community solutions such as that of a forum or an ISP. Another niche market served. [EDIT] I must add that after looking at things closely, it looks like a multi-user blogging tool, much like WordPress with a different face. It will take a closer look at the multi-user features to understand if it is different at all.

WordPress Plugin Competition Forums: As an addendum to the ongoing WordPress Plugin and Mod Competition Blog and Wiki, I have put together a set of forums as well. bbPress is the forum manager of choice and the style comes from the talented Fernando Graphicos. Please let me know if some other forum areas are needed or if something is amiss. As a side note, the code is lightweight and very, very streamlined. Loving bbPress so far. An admin console would be an excellent addition! [EDIT] Gone.

The Simple Ajax Code Kit (SACK) is a javascript library that takes the hassle out of AJAX programming. This could be especially useful to any WordPress Plugin authors out there that don’t want to spend time messing around with code that isn’t directly to do with their plugin. Implementation is as simple as three lines of code so it makes your code look a lot neater as well. Key features are: Simple and light to implement. Addresses security issues that toolkits such as SAJAX have. Handles international strings (UTF-8). Full documentation is available at the link above, and it will soon be part of other plugins such as WordPress: Touched. Enjoy, I hope you find it very useful.