With Pownce closed and sold to Six Apart in December of 2008, Kevin Rose apparently had more up his Diggnation shirt sleeves. Say hello to WeFollow a user-generated Twitter aggregator that makes use of common hashtags to determine your “niche” as a microblogger.

What’s brilliant about WeFollow is that there is no need for sign ups: all you need to do is tweet hashtag categories (you can see recommendations in the WeFollow sidebar) to @wefollow and the service organizes you into up to three

Kevin Rose blasted WeFollow into Digg today and the results are epic. There have been a number of creative ways to monetize Twitter and WeFollow may just be another portal to do so. Categorizing Twitter users according to niche adds more value than the regular mess of the front page time line.

As promised in my last post, I’ll cover the process of finding good long tail keywords for your blog.  Here is the first part.  Part two will be next Sunday.

Part 1: Generate an initial keyword list.

There are a couple ways to come up with your initial list of keywords.

First, use an SEO tool.  My favorite ones are Google AdWords: Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Tool.  If you’re not too tech savvy, don’t worry.  These tools are easy to use.

Basically, you enter in the name of your blog’s niche and the tool will spit out a bunch of related keywords.  So, let’s pretend I have a sports car blog.  I typed in sports cars in Google’s tool.  Here’s a sample of what came up. read more

I recently spoke with Bradley Blinn, Chief Officer of Sales and Marketing at Mingle360 (Twitter: @mingle360). Here’s what he had to say about the way his company’s MingleStick could change the way bloggers meet and mingle at blogging conferences and trade shows.

In what ways are blogging and the MingleStick similar?

It’s all about connection. A blog connects the author with its readers. The “connection device” is the article itself. In a similar way, our MingleStick product connects two people together. The MingleStick is a physical device that enables two people to connect with a simple press of a button. The MingleStick has proven itself to be great event technology within the convention and tradeshow industry. read more

If you are looking for someone intersting to follow in Twitter, why not Sean “Diddy” Combs via Twitter.com/IamDiddy. Don’t worry, this is not like the fake Dalai Lama Twitter account. In fact, Diddy is taking the 140-character Twitter to another level by adding a video blog component through the launch of P. Twitty TV.

By launching “P. Twitty TV,” Diddy hopes to create a personal social networking experience with his Twitter followers, giving them a nearly real-time view of his daily happenings… like this one.

TweetMinster.co.uk, the service that shows which UK politicians are using Twitter, has just launched a “tweetometer” that will allow people to compare and track what the hot topics on Twitter in real time.

Of course you could put any terms in to the system (predictably, I tried “apple” versus “microsoft” – sorry about that) but the service is no doubt hoping users will try “Gordon Brown” and “David Cameron”.

It’s a nice little Flash application, and though you can get similar statistics using other services it does at least lighten up politics a little.

Jason Calacanis tweeted an offer to get on the Suggested list that Twitter now displays as a part of the registration process.

@davewiner It’s actually a standing offer to Twitter. $120k for one of the twenty slots. In fact, I’ll pay $250k for two years in advance.

TechCrunch confirmed it with, and got this from Calacanis:

I believe that in five years the top 20 recommend slots will be worth $1m a year each–super bowl commercial level in fact.

. . . this is 100% dead serious. I’m thinking of sending the check today anyway…. if it sits on their desk they might just cash it.

I think this will happen, as I’ve written previously. Calacanis might just speed it up with this little stunt.

Social Media gets a bad rap in the media, and in discussions. How much of it is warranted, and how much is just bad press and spin? read more

WordPress Plugins reach 100,000 milestone. Jane Wells working to build new WordPress Community team where everyone can help WordPress. Lots of tools to search for WordPress help out. iPhone for WordPress new version in testing phase. WordPress 2.8 delayed to April 1. PollDaddy has new API and Twitter tool. Want to publish a WordPress Plugin review for the Weblog Tools Collection blog? And a lot of news for WordPress Plugin and Theme developers.

WordPress News Changing: Your input is needed to help the Blog Herald WordPress News evolve. See “Changing the Blog Herald WordPress News: Your Help Needed” to share your thoughts on the shape of this weekly report.

WordPress News

WordPress Plugins Crack 100,000: According to Westi, WordPress Plugins reach a great milestone and surpassed 100,000 subversion repository check-ins. At 8:17am GMT, Jeff Yen checked in the Google Maps GPS Link WordPress Plugin and goes down in WordPress history with the 100,000th Plugin check-in. Congrats!

There are currently 4,245 Plugins, 22,152,788 downloads in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Have you searched for any interesting Plugins there recently? read more

F-secure reports on security vulnerabilities with Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader for reading PDF files.

While this could be seen as another day-in-the-life update, the warning came with an interesting twist:

Do note that while we are recommending users move away from Adobe Reader, we are not recommending any particular replacement.

…Instead, we recommend users to find their own Adobe Reader replacement.

This way we get more heterogeneous userbase, which is a good idea security-wise. Nobody wants to repeat what happened with the great IE —> Firefox switch. As 40% of users switched to Firefox, about 40% of the attacks switched to target Firefox.

Monocultures are bad.

In the new world of online social, more and more people using the same tools, putting us all at risk as hackers and attackers move towards the natural migration of popularity. Monocultures are bad as they open the door to mass risks. read more

Twitter is not just for answering the question “What are you doing?” anymore. How about using Twitter to help you look for a place to live?

RentWiki.com has added a feature that streams Twitter conversations of neighborhoods and allows renters to post specific questions via Twitter. Via live feeds, conversations give renters an idea of the local residents, social scene, and reviews of the area.

From the Twitter feeds posted on each wiki, renters can glean the type of people that live in the area, listen-in on the conversation, and interact with locals by asking for advice.

Not all neighborhoods though have conversations going on. Also, businesses can obviously ask people to talk about their neighborhood to get some traffic going. Any other downside?