Hey, folks. I know my writing here has been a bit sporadic lately, but it’s mostly because I’ve been writing posts like these for Mashable. It’s so long that one might convert it to PDF and proclaim it an e-book *cough* Seth Godin *cough*, but I’ve refrained myself from it - this time.

Together with the secret to life, universe and everything, I’ve discovered that Twitter outages have been starting points for the most interesting discussions in the last couple of months. Perhaps we should pray for more?

Usually, mashups and innovative, alternative GUIs for popular websites are slow and mostly unusable, but Tag Galaxy breaks that habit with being really functional, as well as being really, really cool.

Type in a tag - any word, really - into Tag Galaxy, and you’ll get a small solar system of related tags, with more relevant tags being the inner planets, their orbit decreasing with relevance. It’s a cute little 3D tag world, but what makes it so cool is how responsive and fast it is; for example, you can click and drag for rotation, or use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Click a tag, then click another tag, and you’ll get results for both tags combined.

Half of the fun is in discovering what this tool can do, so I’ll leave the rest of the exploration to you. Be warned, though: it’s addictive.

I did not expect Microsoft to withdraw the offer, but that’s what they did. I’m relieved that the first season of this soap opera is at an end, as I was getting bored out of my mind with all the speculations regarding the issue. But, I’m afraid that the story simply cannot end now.

Microsoft gave up, but they have another business (actually, a multitude of them) to run. They will probably try to buy themselves a different big entrance into the online ad business, although their options aren’t that great.

It will be interesting, however, to see what Yahoo does next. Having been drawn into this mess against their will, they were forced to do a lot of decisions they normally wouldn’t have done. They also explored almost all viable merger/acquisition/partnership options they have. Will they just go back to business as usual, or will they act on any of it? For example, what happens with the Google ad deal, which was - according to both companies - going so well in its testing phase? Will they just pretend it never happened?

Oh no, this cannot end now. Microsoft has ruffled too many feathers with this one, and now both companies need to do something about it, unless they want to sit at the same table in two years, negotiating the same deal under even worse circumstances for both of them. Interesting times are ahead.

Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).

A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.

There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.

You can see the latest batch of (some unnecessarily harsh) blogger comments in the discussion over at Techmeme.

I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.

All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.

To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.

Yeah, many web startups get a lot of attention with initial coverage, and then fall into oblivion after a couple months. But, it ain’t over till it’s over, right?

Still, the folks over at TechCrunch have the habit of taking some random company they don’t particularly like and pronounce it dead, even when there’s no other indication (except an Alexa graph, and we all know how reliable those are) that the company is actually doing bad. Case in point: Pownce.

I’ve invented a new word for this practice: deadpoolbaiting! So, which company should we deadpoolbait next? I’m open to suggestions. Please form an orderly line with your declining Alexa graphs.

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.

I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.

What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!

Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.

Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.

The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?

All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.

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.

Poor Technorati. They’ve had so many changes of strategy and redesigns in the last year or two that it’s hard to determine what they really want, and - a much bigger problem for the still huge blog tracker - people are likely to stop caring soon.

A clear example of the mess all these changes of focus have created is Technorati WTF, a relatively recent subsection of the site which features a Digg-like voting system on stories submitted by Technorati members. I’ve explained in detail why I think that WTF is flawed (although not necessarily a bad idea) before.

The interesting thing is that now, in the new design, this feature is nowhere to be seen. It still exists, here, it’s just not linked to anywhere on the front page of Technorati. In fact, if you don’t know the address, I don’t think it’s possible to reach it from anywhere on Technorati (correct me if I’m wrong on this one).

It’s visible in the content, too, as WTF is quite a sad sight at this moment. Several spammy stories, all over one month old, are all that WTF has to show - even in the “Recent” section. It’s probably just a matter of time before WTF gets shut down.

I still think that WTF is not such a bad idea; however, instead of stories, actual blog articles should automatically show up there, with users being able to vote them up or down. This would create a Digg-like list of recent interesting blog articles which, with a little help of crowd wisdom, might actually be relevant, instead of the seemingly arbitrary mish-mash of stories that the front page currently displays.

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.

Here’s something you don’t see that often: blog posts of Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian bloggers, gathered around blog aggregator Blogorola, will be assembled and published in the form of a printed magazine. All included bloggers will be able to actively participate in the editing of the 32-page weekly, which will be freely distributed all around Slovenia. Readers will also be able to subscribe to the printed edition and receive it at home.

The authors’ work will be financially compensated, which will probably sound like El Dorado for many of the participating bloggers, who are used to churning pages upon pages for free. This is another proof of the strength of the blogging scene around these parts of Eastern Europe; of course, one cannot be sure that this initiative will last, especially since printed magazines are struggling to survive everywhere in the world. But sometimes going against the grain pays off.

www.blogorola.com