Sometime in 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, which was a collection of links to various stuff on the web that he somehow found interesting. Now, he gives to Wired 10 tips he thinks all bloggers should know.

Here’s the first one.

“A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)”

Erm, this is 2008. and we’re not doing it like that anymore, Jorn. Not that there’s anything wrong with a linkblog, but blogs are something else. Sometimes, when you coin a term, it takes a meaning of its own over the years.

Needless to say, all his other points are completely irrelevant to bloggers, but are quite cool if you have a linkblog.

Twitter is now banned in the United Arab Emirates because its content is “incosistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates“. I guess the fact that Twitter has no content per se doesn’t play a big part here; they’ve basically banned a tool for communication. Twitter now joins the army of other sites banned by the Emirates, most notably Flickr and Facebook.

Here’s the short scoop on two new interesting Digg-related tools.

One is an unofficial recommendation engine for Digg called Digg Filter. It’s really simple: enter your username and you will get a bunch of stories that are “recommended” for you. I’m not a big fan of automated recommendation engines but this seems to be a much-sought feature, and one that Digg plans to implement soon, so Digg Filter can be seen as a “preview” of this upcoming option. Read Muhammad Saleem’s interview with the author over at RWW.

The other tool I’ve dug up in Digg’s upcoming stories is called Digg Explorer, and it offers a neat visual representation of certain Digg statistics: often used words, popular topics and subtopics, most active dates, etc. It’s all based on the last 500 front paged Digg stories, so don’t expect data from a year ago, but it’s still a great reference, with the added bonus of looking really nice. Read my coverage at Mashable, too.

Google has been testing an interesting new feature which lets users vote search results up or down. It’s a part of Google’s experimental program, and it’s not known when or whether it will ever be implemented in actual Google search results.

This is not a new idea. A search engine called AfterVote (previously called Younanimous) has had this feature for several months, as well as some other interesting ones, like bookmarking, prioritizing, or blocking certain results altogether. It’s a meta search engine, which means that it combines results from Google, Yahoo and Live search; unfortunately, this also means that Google can simply add their ideas to their products and cut them out of the loop. It would be a pity, because AfterVote is one of the most interesting alternative search engines around. Check out a screenshot below:

Google’s new feature is actually quite primitive: vote up, vote down, or suggest an alternative. The screenshot from the official site explains it well:

[via Parislemon]