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  DiggFilter vs. DiggSuggest: Third Party Recommendation Engines Head-to-Head

  Digg's long-awaited recommendation engine might be the most anticipated upcoming feature at the social news site. It was first mentioned by Kevin Rose at the EmTech conference last September, and a month later in an interview with Jay Adelson. In December of last year we published an interview with the...

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  The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere

  We've seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we've questioned whether they're adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.The truth...

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  Google Releases AJAX Language API

  Google today opened up the machine translation software they implemented on their own Google Translate site via a public API. The AJAX Language API allows developers to perform translations in their applications for all 13 supported languages and 29 translation pairs.As an example, Google engineer Ben Lisbakken cooked up a...

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  MyBlogLog Launches Topical Meta Lifestreams

  Blog-centric social network MyBlogLog, which just a few weeks ago added lifestreaming to their app, is today launching a new feature that aggregates lifestreams across the network by topic. The streams are presented in reverse chronological order. It feels a little like Technorati's ill-conceived Topics feature, but for all user...

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  Amazon’s Newest Web Service: Shipping Center APIs

  Amazon wants to do for physical product shipping what it's done for web storage and computing power - leverage its surplus infrastructure built up by Amazon.com to offer cheap and easy infrastructure for all kinds of other activities. Last night Amazon announced the newest addition to the Amazon Web Services...

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  Diigo Tackles Recommendations

  Diigo is a social bookmarking and research tool that offers so many features it's overwhelming. I've been excited about it before, only to find that after a short period of time, I stop using it - in favor of something simpler. I have been really excited about it, in fact,...

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  Aggregate Knowledge’s Content Discovery – How Good is it, Really?

  Aggregate Knowledge, which operates a content discovery network under the brand name Pique, today announced a deal with BusinessWeek to deliver "user-driven content suggestions" on their website. It's the latest in a string of similar deals - Aggregate Knowledge powers "discovery" of both editorial content and product recommendations for over...

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  Comment of the Day: Time For iTunes to Become More Social

  In our post Social Networks Will Be Tomorrow's iTunes, Sarah Perez reported on new research indicating that social networks have the potential to be the content distribution platforms of tomorrow. "MySpace the next iTunes?", said Sarah, "It's coming."However commenter Rian from DailySplice.com thinks it should be the other way round:...

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  New Facebook Privacy Options Go Live – May Overwhelm Users

  We've just spotted the new Facebook privacy options in the wild. As we wrote earlier this week, "the new privacy features will increase the granular control that Facebook has been known for. Users will now have the option of showing private information, including photos, to only specific friends (entered one...

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  Is It Time for a Blogging Union?

  Blogging is now big business. Mike Arrington reminded us of that with a rant this morning. According to Arrington, about $25 million of VC money went into the coffers of top-tier blogs and blog networks last year, $8.5 million the year before. And maybe I'm reading him wrong, but I...

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  Twitter Is The Tech Water Cooler

  We've written in the past about Twitter's emergence as a platform for serious discourse, and it's true that some serious discussions about technology, politics, religion, and all sorts of important issues are taking place twenty-four hours per day on Twitter. It's also becoming an increasingly more important distribution point for...

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  Facebook Could Use a Little FriendFeed

  I came across a post this morning on Jonathan Lane's blog that used the word "Facebook" and the term "jumped the shark" in the same sentence. Lane's basic premise is that while Facebook is great at accomplishing its core directive of connecting people, it sucks at all the peripheral services...

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  Social Networks Will Be Tomorrow’s iTunes

  We all know by now that social networks aren't a passing fad. They're no longer used solely by early adopters, young adults, or tech enthusiasts - social networks are now mainstream. However, a recent UK study conducted by media research company, Entertainment Media Research, reports some figures that point toward...

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  NetSquared Mashup Challenge: 120+ Mashups for Social Change

  Nonprofit tech assistance project NetSquared has opened the voting for their Mashup Challenge this week and it's a great place to discover a long list of interesting mashups being built to make the world a better place. We've written about one participant here before, MoveSmart, and another really good one...

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  SemanticHacker Offers Cynical Bounty for Semantic Apps

  Contextual ad platform Textwise launched SemanticHacker.com today, a contest for applications and business plans built on the company's semantic analysis technology. While the new API is offered for free, the contest will award three winners with $100k and one winner could score up to $1 million based on subsequent commercialization.Semantic...

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  Mefeedia Launches Extensive Multimedia Search

  Online video community Mefeedia has officially launched its media search engine indexing more than 15,000 sources of video, TV, music and podcasts. It's even indexing SlideShare presentations. It's a good place to find media on almost any topic and a good excuse to check out some of the truly innovative...

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  Web-Enable Microsoft Project with New Version of Clarizen’s PM Software

  Last month we featured online project management software from LiquidPlanner, but if that wasn't for you then you may be interested in an alternative SaaS from a company called Clarizen. The Clarizen project management software came out of stealth mode last year and has now just launched a new version...

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  5 Ways To Have Fun with Twitter When You’re Bored

  We've all had one of those days when the universe seems to be playing games with us. Things haven't quite worked out all day, there's nothing good on TV, all your friends are out with each other and forgot (didn't want?!) to call you. Even 10 years ago this sort...

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  Comment of the Day: WiMax is The Future of Web Access

  Today's winning comment comes from Aziz Poonawalla, from our post What Happens When WiFi Goes Away? Aziz wrote that "the future of web access will be 802.11n in the home and office (assuming it ever gets out of draft!) and WiMax everywhere else."Congratulations Aziz, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher...

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  Exclusive: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo

  Blog search engine Blogdigger will be announcing shortly that it has been acquired by SonicMountain, parent company of Odeo - the podcast network that is currently being rebuilt as a full-fledged platform for digital media. Blogdigger's aggregation and media search technology is being integrated into the new Odeo, and Blogdigger...