That didn’t take long. Oprah now has 1,011,210 followers (which has probably changed when you read this). Remember Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to 1 million? Well, he should be glad that Oprah didn’t participate. 42 updates (the last one from May 10th) since shouting out her arrival on April 17th. Now would she please do something good with this, OK?

Beauty site Daily Makeover has added an elite group of beauty and fashion bloggers called Beauty Bloggerati. Those chosen to join the new team of experts is expected to enhance its online community of four million women with a combination of in-depth, beauty and fashion news for all women across all demographics.

The Beauty Bloggerati is an invitation only editorial initiative that brings together the leading beauty bloggers in the country in categories including: makeup, skincare, hairstyles, hair care, green beauty, weddings, travel beauty and mom beauty. The group of bloggers will serve as expert beauty beat reporters, enriching Daily Makeover’s in-depth beauty and fashion news with information from their area of expertise. This editorial initiative also creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to connect with millions of women, a highly desirable demographic.

Leading beauty bloggers selected for the Daily Makeover Beauty Bloggerati include: All About The Pretty, A Mom in Red High Heels, Beauty Blogging Junkie, Beyond Beauty Basics, Hair Thursday, Makeover Mamma, Makeup and Beauty Blog, Makeup Bag, Product Girl, Spoiled Pretty, The Jet Set Girls, Talking Makeup, These Lips are Made for Glossin

The Good News: There’s a new way to promote your blog and make some extra money, and it’s all compliments of the surprisingly popular Amazon Kindle.

The Bad News: In typical corporate fashion, bloggers are not being paid an appropriate amount for their content. read more

UPDATE: The tax on books has been lifted thanks to the supporters who mobilized through the blogs, Twitter, Facebook and rallies!

MANILA, Philippines – President Arroyo ordered yesterday the Department of Finance to scrap the taxes imposed on imported books and reading material.

Press Secretary Cerge Remonde said the directive was prompted by a torrent of criticism on the move of the Bureau of Customs (BOC), which is under the supervision of the finance department, to impose the duties.

“President Arroyo ordered the immediate lifting of the customs duty on book importation,” Remonde said in a text message to The STAR.

“The President wants books to be within reach of the common man. She believes reading as an important value for intellectual formation, which is the foundation of a healthy public opinion necessary for a vibrant democracy,” he said.

David Archuleta. “Eat Bulaga.” Philippines. The “Book Blockade.” As of this writing, these are the current trending tags on Twitter. A very interesting thing is happening in the Philippines as I post this — American Idol runner up David Archuleta just appeared on “Eat Bulaga” a noontime variety show which caused a huge soar in trending topics for the word Philippines.
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Double X is a new blog – sorry, web magazine – for women, or at least that’s what they’re aiming at, spun out of Slate blog The XX Factor. Jessica Grose, of Jezebel fame, is the managing editor, and she founded the new venture along with author Meghan O’Rourke and journalist Hanna Rosin.

Double X takes the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and applies it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We tackle subjects high and low with an approach that’s unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending.

So says the about page, and while we’ll see how well this will be executed, chances are the founding trio, along with the rest of the staff, will manage well enough. After all, this isn’t the first blog they’re running.

If you’re involved in the WordPress community you have probably heard of Ian Stewart. He’s the fellow running the ThemeShaper blog, home to lots and lots of posts on WordPress and its future. Ian is also responsible for Thematic, a popular WordPress theme that he proposes to be used as a framework for other themes.

And now he’s also responsible for a WordPress link site called Wpazo, and that was what sparked this interview, that also touches on his view of premium themes as well as the GPL and the proposed WordPress admin redesign. read more

Microblogging service Plurk may not be as popular as Twitter, but it does have a strong presence in South East Asian countries, and has even been banned in China.

What sets Plurk apart is the Karma system that rewards users with new emoticons and features the longer they use the service. It has hit that point since Plurk’s launch last year where more and more users have reached the 100 Karma cap. This is essentially a reward in itself, as once you cap 100, your Karma no longer goes down (apparently Karma decreases when you leave the service untouched for a period of time).

I did send an email to the developers asking if there’s anything beyond 100 points of karma, but alas I failed to receive a response after they told me to send the questions over. It’s been weeks.

The rollout of rewards for increasing your karma includes being able to change your theme CSS layout, a ton of new emoticons, and being able to embed photos and video on your timeline. I just think that after all that, there needs to be a nice reward that culminates such an innovative feature.

I abandoned Internet Explorer for Mozilla Firefox several years ago. But for whatever reason, I never embraced Firefox plug-ins. Perhaps it was laziness on my part or a simple misunderstanding of how practical some of the add-ons can be.

Now that I’ve discovered that the majority of my Web functions can be accomplished without ever leaving the Firefox browser, I’m hooked!

CNET’s Don Reisinger has published 15 of his favorite Firefox extensions for Bloggers. read more

Twitter’s recent change to their @Replies system has caused some controversy. TechCrunch puts it well

Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of?

What they have effectively done is removed the feature that allowed people to opt-in to all replies, regardless of if you are following all the parties in a conversation. read more

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is gradually coming round to the idea that people are going to blog about each summer and winter Olympic Games regardless of what rules they put in place.

The latest development is that the IOC will allow athletes blogs at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.

However, there are still likely to be a number of restrictions, not least because of the definition of “blogging” versus “journalism”. read more