The folks behind TIME magazine at TIME Inc. have just launched their new technology website dubbed Techland. The new website has many old faces from TIME on its masthead including their Tech editor Lev Grossman who’ll be a regular contributor.
They’ll cover the more ‘user orientated’ area of the market with much of their categories revolving around products and less about news. These categories include Gadgets, Gaming, Culture and Videos.
Overall, it looks like a good website from a reliable bunch however the design is a little sloppy and I’d imagine they’ll be tidying things up a bit as the site grows. The ties with TIME are still evident with many of their information pages such as ‘Contact Us’ leading directly to TIME’s customer services page.
I was lucky enough to be asked by the Sixapart team to post a guest list on Blogs.com. My list was titled Top 10 Web 2.0 Blogs and here is the list below.
Grooveshark is an application that was reviewed here on Crenk sometime ago. At the time, I didn’t see the relevance of
Grooveshark awarded CNET's Top 100 Webware Award
the application, though it had some good aspects, I just did not feel comfortable with the entire package. It was not long after that post that officials from Grooveshark contacted me for a dialogue encouraging me to take a look at the offerings again, highlighting features I had not really seen the first time around. In the year that I’ve had with Grooveshark, I’m impressed with the continued efforts it’s making to establish itself as a viable music service for users.
CNET was obviously impressed enough to award it the 2009 Webware Winner for Audio and Music. Grooveshark has indeed come a long way and its user base has grown significantly. With this announcement comes features that again make Grooveshark heads above the rest. For starters their partnership with Ping.fm to build Tinysong API, which allows users to take the code and develop webapps that provide access to Groovesharks extensive library of music. It will be interesting to see what developers come up with as we’ve seen with various other online applications, the opening of the API makes it easy for supplementary apps to proliferate the net.
The second feature that was announced deals specifically with the blogging community. Grooveshark has announced that is now has a Wordpress plugin that allows integration into blog posts for users to set up their favorite songs for specific posts. You can set up just one song, or a playlist of songs for your readers on your site. An interesting option, at the very least you could create a small station of songs on your, possibly with a widget.
Grooveshark is definitely expanding its platform and appeal, and it should be interesting to see how much further they go in 2009!
IntenseDebate is a new wordpress plugin which offers an enhanced user commenting experience. Currently IntenseDebate has a easy to add wordpress plugin in which you can add straight into your platform and within a few clicks it can be live and working. Features include: commenting threading, reply by email, profiles, widgets, twitter integration and more.
IntenseDebate is one of many comment plugins that really help you try to increase traffic and build community around your site. I really think this idea has legs, but it needs to be part of a much bigger platform. It would be great if Wordpress took a few ideas from IntenseDebate and added them into their platform.
WordPress Testers and early adopters can now download Wordpress 2.8 and test the new features that promise to make WordPress better and more powerful than before.
There are lots of new features in WordPress 2.8 that are really interesting. Here are a few user features you can look out for
New Theme Installer routines
Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
Don’t notify post author of own comments
Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
Per Page option for plugins
Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
Support more than one gallery on the same page
Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
Fix most popular link category list
Add description field for tags
“Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers
Download Wordpress 2.8 Beta 1 now and try it out. Since its a beta release, don’t try it on your primary blog.
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk and discussion surrounding Ashton Kutcher and CNN. First he manages to get almost as many followers on Twitter as CNN (almost 900K). Then he challenges CNN to a race to get to 1 million followers first. If he wins, he’ll “”ding dong ditch” Ted Turner’s house.
This made me think a bit about Ashton and his original tech startup the Blah Girls. Blah Girls launched with a lot of press and publicity (mainly due to Techcrunch and Michael Arrington), but now it seems to be a very basic gossip blog with a cartoon attached.
Blah Girls produce a weekly vidoe who is pretty much a catoon spoof. The videos are very well develop and quite cool. However, these videos and Blah Girls in general doesnt seem to be getting much traction at all. The Blah Girls Youtube channel has over 3,500 subscribers but each video seems to be lucky to get more than 1000 plays. Plus for some reason YouTube has given Blah Girls a partner page, but they dont seem to meet the requirements of being a YouTube partner (apart from the fact that Ashton is quite well known).
Back to the site itself it seem that is had an initial push at launch but then has been slowly growing at the same pace as a normal gossip blog. The site has a great design, but there seems to be a huge gap of white space between the video section and where the actual blog starts. Ashton I really think you need to take a look at the design and try to piece it all together a bit better. Additionally, Ashton why arent you twittering about Blah Girls on your Twitter stream? Im sure 1m followers will really help you in pushing your site to the next level faster, plus you have a benefit that no other gossip blog has, your already bloody famous!
For the last two years we have been developing RouteNote at Insomnia Media, and in that time have been closely keeping an eye on digital music news and where the shift is going. I thought I would write a quick post and let everyone know my favourite digital music blogs to follow.
Hypebot – Hypebot is written by Bruce Houghton and is a daily report on the last news in the digital music space. Bruce is also the founder and president of Skyline Music (booking agency) and Skyline Consultancy in which he is a music and technology consultant to many music startups.
Digital Music News – Digital Music News is the news and information authority for music industry and technology executives. Digital Music News is founded and edited by Paul Resnikoff. Paul writes daily posts on Digital Music News and also send out a dialy newsletter to industry executives called the Daily Snapshot.
Billboard.biz – Billboard.biz is the digital music arm of the Billboard website. Billboard.biz discusses digital music news with normally at least 10 articles per day. Articles on Billboard.biz don’t just come straight from the USA they as encompass International digital music news, so that you get the full picture.
Digital Audio Insider – Digital Audio Insider is written by David Harrell, who writes digital music news from an artists perspective. David is in a band based in the UK and they use all kinds of different digital music stores and partners to sell/stream their music, and David’s writings are a great insight into what the average artist is thinking and what they are looking for.
Coolfer – Glenn Peoples has worked in the music industry for over eight years and founded Coolfer.com while working and living in New York City. Coolfer was a total ad free blog which is pretty unheard of these days. A week or so ago Glenn announced on his site that he would stop writing because he was offered a new job over at Billboard.biz asSenior Editorial Analyst, so you can now read his work over there.
Personal blogs are more than a bunch of words put together. A good personal blog reflects your identity, your personality and individualism and a factor of great importace here is the design. It is the first thing that the viewer notices, before making any presumptions about you or your personality. So a good design is necessary to leave a good and long lasting impression on the visitor.
To help you out with the design, we at Crenk have put together 17 new wordpress themes that we believe, will rock your personal blog. Read on.
So that ends the list. I hope you liked it, if that’s so, show me some love and Digg it
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
I came across a very interesting site the other day. I know its not really a startup so I shouldn’t be reviewing it, but I thought it was worth a mention anyways. The site is MakeStableMoney and it talks about how the average person can make money from home. I realise there are so many poor sites out there that seem to talk about this same issue, but for some reason I think this site actually has some quality.
Previously the site has talked about way to make money through sponsorships, best 3 google adwords books to read, 17 secrets on how to sell ebooks and more. This site can really help people make money online and I think it is a good investment of your time to check it out.
WooThemes has just released a new Free theme called Irresistible. It is a visually-rich personal blog, with a little bit of a multimedia focus. Incorporating some nifty video-options and widgets, Irresistible should meet all of your personal blogging needs. Just add your content to the mix.
WooThemes has launched today a new free WordPress Theme. Irresistible is a personal blog theme with a great unique design, available in 9 different color styles. Download and demo it here.
In less than a year, Zemanta has made a name for itself in the blogosphere. By becoming the premier add-on to the FireFox browser, bloggers now had access to an amazing set of tools to provide further depth to their posts. With hundreds of thousands of downloads, it seemed like a surefire winner, and there was little doubt that Zemanta has room to expand, but where and when?
Zemanta late last year supported another FireFox add-on called ScribeFire, a simple blogging tool that opened up in your browser without having to log into any other site or leave the page you are on. This allowed for amazingly quick posting to the blog of your choice, but also provided the same depth that you had available to you from within most popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad.
Recently it was announced that Zemanta has made another move towards mass market exposure, it has integrated with Gmail and Yahoo Mail, offering users of those mail clients the ability to attached related articles, pictures, and keywords to their emails that the recipients might need to fully understand the topic. I personally can’t imagine a better mass exposure opportunity than attaching yourself to two of the largest mail clients on the internet today.
Zemanta is a key tool that I recommend all bloggers install, but now with mail enhancements, I’m happy to see them growing. I’ve always been a big supporter of their efforts as it’s nice to see innovative ways to breathe life into a long standing medium like blogging.
It’s apparent that Zemanta will continue to offer what it always has; by offering photo suggestions, article suggestions, and keyword suggestions, as you type, updating every 300 words, there is bound to be another leap into further integration.
Perhaps a jump into an office platform for document and presentation creation, like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Only time will tell!
CenterNetworks
Go2Web2.0
Mashable
Profy
Read/Write Web
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c9d666c0-43f3-42db-a5c5-bf2276940ab7)
