Is John Mayer buying an engagement ring for Jennifer Aniston?

Did singer Erykah Badu and producer Jay Electronica just have a baby?

Were Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore teaching other stars how to start their own charities before the Super Bowl?

Yes, yes and yes.

Oh, and who cares, who cares and who cares.

All of the above are true, at least if you believe the stars’ Twitter accounts.

Times Online has just released the “Top 50 most popular Twitter celebrities.” Did you make the cut? ;-)

Stephen Fry: The actor and comedian has 98,616 followers.

Lance Armstrong: Cyclist and cancer survivor boasts 53,813 yellow bracelet-wearing followers.

Britney Spears: Over 53,290 people check in to read Spears wax poetic.

“I love Japan! I think all the tiny cars are so cute! –Britney”

Get the entire list here.

Do you think Twitter will create more stars or attract more existing stars over the next year?

When I first heard about Paul Thewlis’ new book, WordPress for Business Bloggers, I was very excited. As an avid WordPress user and a business blogger, I was very keen on the idea of reading a book targeted specifically to my kind of blogging. Though I’ve owned and read many books about WordPress and about blogging in general, none have seen so targeted to me.

However, the title of the book doesn’t do a great deal to describe it. One could not possibly do a thorough job of describing business blogging and WordPress within the confines of the same 350 page book so it has to either be A) A book about business blogging that touches on WordPress or B) A book about WordPress that touches on business blogging.

The book, for better or worse, is the latter. Only one chapter, the first, really delves into the business blogging and most of it is about planning. The rest of the book is a basic, if solid, overview of blogging and WordPress in general.

This is not to say that it is a bad book, just that those who might be most excited by the title may find it a bit basic and frustrating. On the other hand, there are others that might pass it over that could find it very useful. read more

Many people sit in their offices in front of their computers and think about changing the world, and do nothing. Some take an impossible idea and convert it into the possible. Others look around them and say, “Let’s make a change.” Then there are people like Joe and Carlos who look around and say, “Hey, let’s make a change in how we live and work and change the world by example.”

Beginning May 20th, 2009, Carlos Urreta and Joe Philipson will be taking to their bikes to ride across more than 3,000 miles of the United States to make such a point: “If WE can do this, we think other geeks can at least ride to work.”

Their goal is to persuade 1,000 geeks to get off their geeky buns and start biking, and their invitation is open to all geeks and geek wannabes.

Real Geeks Ride is a dream come true for these two young men from Hawaii. As blogging geeks, they felt slighted by their peers and want to prove to the world that geeks are adventurous and active, while encouraging other geeks to step out of their geeky shells to prove to the world they are more than their geek. read more

Tech news aggregator Techmeme is now accepting tips via Twitter, which is pretty cool. They’re using the search API to scan their Twitter accounts for incoming tips, so if you find something interesting online, you can easily tweet it to the now partly humanly edited site. And naturally, that means that you’d want to encourage your readers to do so, which means that a suggest button has been released. It’ll probably prove essential if you think your stories are Techmeme worthy every now and then.

Naturally, there’s more on Techmeme about this story.

A raise of hands please: Blogger? Joomla? Moveable Type? WordPress?

In the world of blogging, these are more than likely the top platforms you’ll recommend to friends if they’re out to set up a new blog. But how many out there will actually recommend using iWeb? Wait, let me rephrase that question. How many Mac users will actually recommend using iWeb for publishing your blog?

How many of you are running blogs built on iWeb? read more