2005

The Favor Exchange

3:51 pm PST • December 30, 2005

It’s the last business day of the year, which obviously leads me to think about last minute tax writeoffs. One of the best tax writeoffs, of course, is a charitable…

There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of…

Dave Winer's Newest Adventure

10:06 pm PST • December 29, 2005

Dave Winer announced today that he’s built a new RSS aggregator, built on his OPML editor platform. He’s released it to the OPML community for early testing. Some details are…

Magnatune's Answer to the Music Problem

10:34 pm PST • December 28, 2005

Magnatune, founded by John Buckman in 2003, is a music label with an associated website. Today was the first time I heard about Magnatune (thanks to Ajay Juneja), but I…

I’ve been testing Omnidrive‘s very early beta product over the last few days. Omnidrive will be launching in January, 2006. I’ve spent hours with it (and previously posted a brief…

WordPress 2.0 – The Good and the Bad

12:04 am PST • December 28, 2005

We’ve switched TechCrunch over to WordPress 2.0. Not everyone is interested in the feature set of the WordPress blogging platform, so I’ll keep this brief. To see a good overview…

Gaming Digg

9:39 pm PST • December 27, 2005

Getting on to the home page of Digg (profile) sends a site a lot of traffic, and some folks will do just about anything for traffic. I know a lot…

Hugh McGuire’s goal is to make all public domain (expired copyright) books available free online in audio format. He’s created LibriVox to reach that goal, and it is a terrific…

Diigo – Enough Evolution?

12:25 am PST • December 27, 2005

Diigo, which stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”, is a social bookmarking site that allows users to highlight multiple content areas, including pictures, tag the page,…

The Hyperwords Plugin

12:41 pm PST • December 26, 2005

I generally don’t write about Firefox plugins, but Hyperwords is one that’s gotten my attention. Like Om says, it’s a must-have product to aid the browsing experience. And I see…

I’ve been talking to Nik Cubrilovic, the founder of Sydney, Australia based Omnidrive, since I posted about the need for a good online storage service in November (see no. 1…

Outlook 12 to have RSS Integration

1:09 am PST • December 24, 2005

In news that certainly is not making the existing RSS Aggregator companies happy, Microsoft Outlook program manager Michael Affronti has soft announced that RSS will be integrated with Outlook 12.…

TalkDigger 2.0

12:51 am PST • December 24, 2005

I’m a little late writing about this, but TalkDigger 2.0, which launched a week and a half ago, has really evolved since the original version that I wrote about back…

Browsr Has One Interesting Feature

12:10 am PST • December 24, 2005

I first heard about Browsr in a comment to one of my posts. In some ways it’s a standard bookmarking site, but at this point lacks most of the advanced…

PostSecret Book Arrived

12:08 am PST • December 24, 2005

The PostSecret book that I ordered back in October arrived from Amazon. I spent some time going through it last night and I really like it. PostSecret is one of…

Wink Launches

12:46 am PST • December 22, 2005

The Wink user-enhanced search engine, in private beta for the last few months, launches Thursday morning to the world. Wink has evolved substantially since my October 12, 2005 review. Wink…

Flock Says "Enough"

11:09 pm PST • December 21, 2005

Flock has gotten a lot of criticism lately. The reason for this particular round of naysaying is the launch of the impressive Performancing Firefox plugin that allows extremely easy blogging,…

GoodStorm's Feel Good Capitalism

7:50 pm PST • December 21, 2005

Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season, but it seems impossible to me not to like San Francisco-based GoodStorm. It’s a competitor to Kleiner-backed Zazzle, and CafePress – basically they…

Oodle Does add Events/Tickets Category

6:27 pm PST • December 21, 2005

I wrote about this last week – and Oodle now has officially added events and tickets as a category. This seem to be primarily a combination of meetup events and…

Gravee Takes a New Approach to Search

12:22 am PST • December 21, 2005

Gravee soft launched tonight. It has an interesting business model. In addition to pulling in search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo (Alexa coming soon), Gravee also allows publishers to…

I’ve been testing out ajchat tonight with Brian Benzinger (a fellow web 2.0 workgroup member). Like Meebo, Gtalk and e-messenger.net, ajchat is an ajax instant messaging on the fly, that…

Web 2.0 WorkGroup Expands to 25 Members

10:49 pm PST • December 20, 2005

The Web 2.0 WorkGroup continues its expansion with the addition of three awesome new bloggers – Ben Barren, Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel. Robert Scoble joined last week. It’s becoming…

Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something, because I don’t think I’ve ever used a…

Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren have launched the Automattic site, which organizes their various WordPress and other projects. Matt Marshall at Silicon Beat has the details. Also, and as predicted…

Three Cheers For Bloglines

8:21 pm PST • December 20, 2005

I have to admit, I was hoping for the best but feared the worst as Bloglines moved over to a new data center last night. Their regular outages have enraged…

V4S – Voicemail for Skype

11:45 am PST • December 20, 2005

I read about Orb’s V4S product on Scobelizer and Skype Journal. V4S is a good, free tool for sending voicemails to Skype and Outlook contacts. V4S joins a whole bunch…

Microsoft Wallop in User Trials

11:51 pm PST • December 19, 2005

I’ve been hearing a bit about Microsoft’s Wallop project from users (apparently its at least two years old). Microsoft describes Wallop as a place to ” share photos, blog, and…

Indeed's Launches IM Interface

1:28 pm PST • December 19, 2005

Check this out: add “IndeedJobs” as a friend on Google Talk and say “hello”. You’ll get a nice (and fast) interface to the Indeed job search engine. Nice tool.

Edge Of Network Reviews – KritX

11:37 pm PST • December 18, 2005

KritX is very raw, but they are on to something big – aggregation of reviews from blogs (the edge of the network). I wrote in a recent post (no. 9)…

Canadians Sure Do Love Beer

10:20 pm PST • December 18, 2005

This mashup certainly caught my eye – The Beer Hunter. Unlike California, where you can buy alcohol just about anywhere until 2 am, parts of Canada have very restrictive alcohol…