It’s been a slow tech news weekend, so I thought I’d share some of my favorite articles from the past week in case you hadn’t caught them yet.
- Hype Machine Zeitgeist: Listen in Full to the 50 Most Blogged Albums of 2008, For Free - for someone who doesn’t know anything whatsoever about popular music, this great article by ReadWriteWeb highlights a great service I was unfamiliar with for the music lover in you. Marshall Kirkpatrick writes, “Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.”
- Windows 7 - The Agony and the Glory - Inquisitr blogger Steven Hodson covers his first experiences with Windows 7 for those of us too cowardly to try installing the free trial themselves. From the article: “ARRGGG! A frikken BSOD right in the middle of the last step.” Oops! Sounds like other users are having great experiences with it so far, though.
- 10 Ways to Maximize Your Google Reader Link Blog - Louis Gray finally covers a service average users have heard about before, but with a twist. Why does he cover link blogs? He writes, “I believe that while Google Reader has grown in visibility, arguably becoming the most popular RSS reader on the Web, the utility of shared link blogs is less known.”
- How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic - Sorry, but I’ve got to tip my hat to Marshall Kirkpatrick again with this one– a great and surprisingly pro-level guide to make sure you’re attending to the important voices in your niche. Hit up this article and ”find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.”
- 40 Key Elements to Getting Started in Social Media - My favorite article of the week, courtesy of Mike Fruchter, is an excellent and comprehensive guide to covering all your bases when it comes to social media. If you haven’t read this, make sure to catch it immediately– it’s really that worth it. Mike writes, “Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account,” and he’s absolutely right.
What were your favorite reads this week? Feel free to share them here!
FriendFeed to Disqus Sync Tool increases blogger cognitive dissonance
Hot off the presses today, in part as announced by Mashable, is a new tool courtesy of Cubanlinks.org’s Carter Rabasa designed to sync your in-blog Disqus comments with input you’ve received via FriendFeed. In a description of version 0.1, Rabasa writes,
Today, Rabasa has launched v.0.2 of the service, a hosted version located at https://ff2disqus.appspot.com that automatically syncs your comments every hour.
Needless to say, this plugin is causing a bit of confusion as until recently nobody’s known exactly what’s been causing Disqus comments to reemerge within FriendFeed.
So what?
This is a big deal as it provides bloggers with one new reason to adopt the Disqus commenting system. Unfortunately, though, adoption of Disqus means one of two things: movement away from preexisting comment frameworks (e.g., WordPress’ solid commenting system), or movement away from alternative comment kits such as IntenseDebate. For bloggers such as myself that prefer to protect comments within my own walls, so to speak, this increases the restlessness I feel when considering my alternatives1. There are definite drawbacks to using solutions like Disqus, and it’s getting to the point where there’s no proper solution.
As I mentioned in my predictions for 2009, I hope this commenting mess gets sorted out soon– I want comprehensive and reliable comment support within my native blogging client.