Feedburner, the RSS feed service that Google now owns, is both loved and hated in the blogosphere. Some swear by it, others at it, but more importantly, a great many of us use it to get proper stats and whatnot. Every now and then there’s buzz around feeds being unavailable, but I must say that an uptime of 99.94% doesn’t sound too shabby. Sure, could be better, but still.

Check out the Pingdom report on the matter, along with details on how the tests were performed, along with this conclusion:

We have to say that Feedburner definitely gets a passing grade, although both uptime and performance has room for improvement. Google says it’s still working on improving Feedburner behind the scenes, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months.

Do you use Feedburner? Why or why not?

Astronaut Mike Massimino has sent the first tweet from space, making all the rocket buffs green with envy I presume.

From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!

You can follow Mike yourself for more in the future (also: Techmeme). However, don’t get too worked up by getting real-time twittering from Space, because that’s not how it works. A NASA spokesperson told OrlandoSentinel.com that the space shuttle doesn’t have an ever present internet connection. So what Mike does is that he writes an email that gets sent to Mission Control whenever the shuttle has a connection, and then the folks there update his Twitter account for him.

Still, pretty cool.

If you’ve been following the NBA Playoffs, then you would agree with me that the series between Denver Nuggets and Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks is exciting. The series is laced with flagrant fouls and thrash-talking (typical NBA). One fight that’s brewing also is the war of words that’s going on between Mark Cuban and Kenyon Martin.

So here’s what happened. After his team lost game 3 on a controversial non-call, Cuban heard a fan screaming about the Nuggets being thugs. Cuban turned to Martin’s mom and said, “that includes your son.”

That started it all. The press reported it as if it originated from Cuban.

“Don’t say nothing to my kids or my family. If you got something to say, say it to me. But I’m going to take care of it. I’m not going to do the whole media thing, back and forth. That’s his thing. I’m more of a face-to-face type of dude. So whenever the opportunity presents itself, then I will address it,” Martin responded.

With the possible confrontation between the two, Cuban quickly issued an apology to Kenyon Martin and his mom through a blog post.

“So at this point I would like to apologize to you and your mom KMart for my comment. I should have not said anything and I was wrong. Hopefully you will accept the apology and we can move on.

When the series comes back to Dallas, your family, and the family of other Nuggets players are welcome to stay in my suite, with my family. Its amazing how tempers mellow when real people talk to each other and realize that its still just a game.”

Friends?

Regardless of whether you are an iLover or an iHater, all the geek groupies next month will be panting about Steve Jobs latest iDevice, also known as the iPhone.

While the latest features of iPhone 3.0 will take blogging to a whole new level (mostly thanks to copy & paste), it may be the hidden code underneath that will promote one iPhone app, 12seconds to super stardom. read more

One of the best investments I made when I first started blogging was the purchase of some business cards. Not your regular standard ones – but mini cards from MOO. With their unique size and the ability to give each one a unique image – the purchase has paid dividends. People always ask where I got them and they always stick out in the pack.

But overall, I’m not a fan of business cards. Actually, I’m not fan of beef jerky either. But put the two together, and you have one of the most unique business products I’ve read about in recent times. read more

A new service has launched which offers bloggers (and aspiring blog network builders) the opportunity to run their own branded WordPress MU-powered cluster of blogs.

Offering both free and paid options, the Blogs.mu concept is simple: allow anyone to set up blogs quickly and simply without having to worry about web hosting, server configuration or installation. read more

Purists will likely raise their hands and emit anguished cries at the news that classic novels from such literary greats as Dickens, Sallinger and Austen have been reduced to tweets.

The Telegraph interviews writer Tim Collins who has collected some potted summaries of classic novels. His compilation is supposed to be taken lightly, but he does believe that Twitter really comes into its own when it’s used for logging real-time events: read more

You might not know this, but Twitter doesn’t support two-way SMS (mobile phone text messages, that is) all over the world. In fact, most of the world is limited to updating your Twitter account with SMS, but you can’t get updates to your phone. I’m not sure why you’d want that, especially since any decent phone has a web browser that can manage the mobile site, but that’s up to you.

Anyway, if you’re Canadian and want to use SMS for updates both ways, well, now you can! Twitter obviously thinks this is a good idea, to manage your twittering via SMS, and are planning to add more countries to the list. To me it feels old and boring, but then again there might be a business model here. After all, the mobile carriers probably like any increase in texting since they make money from it. That’s a thought…

Full disclosure: It’s been a year and a half since my Google PageRank slid into mediocrity and I am still carrying a grudge.

My six-month foray into the gray world of paid posts resulted in a hardcore spanking when my blog was punished by Google for cashing in with PayPerPost. In exchange for a lousy few dollars, my blog experienced irrecoverable harm.

But here we are…in a world when the economy is hurting. My wallet is hurting. And Google PR is probably more irrelevant than ever before.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that an e-mail announcing a new and improved PayPerPost landed in my inbox the other day. read more

That’s right. Leave. Get out of here. If you got nothing to say to the world through your blog, leave, quit, stop. Get away from your desk, your computer, your office, your home, your life. Go away.

Not forever, just long enough to clear your head and mind and find your creative juices again.

As part of this new series called Nothing to Blog About, we’re looking at the various ways your blogging creativity can be temporarily dried up and plugged up, and how to break the dam. My first recommendation is for you to leave your blog for a vacation. read more