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Current.com = Digg + TV [WP Plugin Hack Included]

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Current.com LogoSocial News Aggregation is big business – take a look at Digg, arguably one of the most popular sites on the internet & all powered by user-submitted content.

Well I’m a big fan of social websites, and news aggregators… and I have recently found a new(ish) site that I have a feeling may definitely be the way forward.

Current.com is a social news sharing site with a difference – it has it’s own TV channel (in the UK, Sky channel 183 and Virgin channel 155). It’s the perfect menagerie of services… think Digg, but televised. This helps fuel submissions to the site, as if you comment or submit material, there’s a chance your content may end up featuring on TV making you a pseudo celebrity in the process.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

22.05.2009 Tech View Comments

Streamy Revamps & Leaves Beta

Friday, May 8th, 2009

For a long time I’ve been looking for a website that houses absolutely everything I look for in a personalised start page… and for as long as I can remember, I’ve had to settle for iGoogle. Don’t get me wrong – Google’s start page is absolutely stellar, and I can almost absolutely everything from feed reading, to checking Facebook, updating Twitter and so on.

However for a fair while I had also been eyeing up a contender for it’s replacement in the form of Streamy. You may remember the site from my previous review of the site that had a fair bit of attention.

Anyway it’s been a fair while since I’d used the service, and I decided to check it out again, and discovered that the devs had revamped the site’s look and functionality. After having a chat with site co-founder Jonathan Gray, I found out that they had “quietly launched” out of beta, and hadn’t yet advertised the fact. This is great news, as I highly recommend the site to anyone – and here’s why.
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Popularity: 2% [?]

08.05.2009 Tech View Comments

New Addiction

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

I have a new social site addiction – Blip.fm. The site is prettymuch Twitter for music enthusiasts, and the best thing for me is that it interfaces with my other favorite social music site Last.fm . :)

Once you register, you build your profile like any other social site… but when it comes to adding your content, you search for your desired track by name, or artist name. You can then preview the track to make sure it’s the right one. When you’ve selected your track, you can then enter a 150 character message to go with it a-la Twitter.

I have set up the site to post directly to Twitter, and scrobble to Last.fm too… and using this, I’ve also enabled Twitter to update my Facebook status. However I don’t want to spam Twitter or Facebook too much, so thankfully there’s a method of selectively not sending an update to Twitter: All you do is add an exclamation mark followed by a space at the beginning of your post. So for example, my post could be “! This track really rocks”.

There’s a nice community feel to the site as well, with each blip having a vote up button where you can “give props” to the DJ for posting it, as well as adding the song to your own playlist, or reblip aka reposting that blip yourself. You can even send a DJ a message/reply using the Twitter-esque @username method.

Anyway check it out, and add me if you’re into similar music – hope you enjoy! I think I got Smoo addicted to it as well. ;)

Popularity: 1% [?]

17.01.2009 Tech Comments Off

Google Friend Connect – Now Active!

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Ever since I heard of Google Friend Connect (around about the same time I heard about Facebook Connect) I was extremely interested in the idea. I’ve always somewhat of a social media whore, so this little idea from Google sounded promising. On top of that, I’ve been a strong advocator of Google for a long time, despite their megalomaniacal approach to all things intermaweb-related.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

03.12.2008 Tech View Comments

Disqus – making blog comments social

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

I came across a service called Disqus today thanks to the blog over at Readburner… and I’m rather glad I did!

Disqus effectively creates a “forum” for your blog, allowing for threaded commenting and a community to grow around the comments themselves.

Disqus

I’ve added it to my blog as you can see – however as a consequence the existing comments are masked – the only drawback I’ve noticed so far. Disqus are looking at a comment import system – its listed within the settings for the plugin, but its not enabled just yet.

Anyway I’d urge anyone who blogs on a regular basis to check out Disqus

Popularity: 6% [?]

22.04.2008 Tech View Comments

The new side of social webpages

Friday, February 1st, 2008

I came across something this morning that I thought was pretty cool – its a tool that will essentially turn any webpage into a social page, and will eliminate the need for unsightly shoutboxes.

Its called “Thats My Mouse“, and I read about it on Mashable – and found that it launched at 8am this morning, so thought I’d give it a whirl – so I’ve installed it on this blog for general useage. Its a small javascript installed that allows anyone on the same webpage to see what each other is doing, and chat too.

Thats my mouse - demo on a Forum

Now being at work, I can’t install the Internet Explorer addon needed (yes, I work for a retarded IT company that still uses IE6… they don’t get that Firefox or Opera are infinitely more secure), so I’ll have to wait until I get home before I can check it out – though you can check out a demo here, which I thought was quite nice.

Anyway check it out, see what you think… and in the meantime I’m going to try and get it working on my blog.

Popularity: 1% [?]

01.02.2008 Life, Tech View Comments

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