The online calendar service Flogs.com has announced the launch of its free iPhone and Facebook applications which make it easier to sync calendars on these platforms.

Although you could already sync an iCal calendar on your iPhone, the app adds a range of functionality including the ability to search for local events based on GPS location and then add them to a calendar.

For Facebook users, it’s now easier to share Flogs and events with friends.

These two additions increase the wide number of services and platforms that Flogs.com calendars can be synced with.

Save the Turtles – A 24-hour blogathon is scheduled for Sunday to help raise funds for the newly-established Turtle Conservation Centre in Setiu, Malaysia. A new blog post about freshwater and marine turtles will be written every hour. If you have a question on the matter, here’s your chance to get answers from the trained conservationists.

The Biggest Loser – Blogger Stacy Woltmann is on the road to lose 100lbs, but rather than do it in the privacy of home, she is chronicling her progress on Am Skinny Jeans. Root her on!

The Verdict Is In! – Australian courts will allow court cases to be covered live via Twitter on a case-by-case basis. The decision on if Tweeting is OK is up to the presiding judge.

Blogging From the Toilet – Someone in New York can earn up to $10,000 from toilet paper manufacturer Charmin this holiday season. The job? “Greet and entertain bathroom guests. Then blog about the experience. All candidates must really, really enjoy going to the bathroom.”

I’m a bit hesitant to cover this news  item because of its sensitivity. But then I realized I’m not from the U.S. so I guess the CIA won’t be running after me in case I miss out some minor points of the news. Still, I’d be cautious and just mention the facts.

What am I talking about? Wired.com is running an exclusive piece about the CIA’s investment arm called In-Q-Tel which is reportedly eyeing a piece of Visible Technologies.  Visible Technologies is a software firm specializing on social media monitoring such as blog posts, online videos, newspaper articles, Flickr photos, Tweeter tweets and other social media by-products. read more

Happy Monday, folks! This week, we have a handful of new, newly revived, and yet-to-be-released plugins to tell you about. Let’s start with the newly revived AssetGallery. Originally created by Six Apart, it is now being maintained by Endevver Consulting. This release updates the photo gallery plugin to use the latest plugin architecture and fixes the bugs that kept it from working with Movable Type 4.2.

For those that didn’t know, Endevver Consulting is made up of two long-time MT developers: Jay Allen and Byrne Reese. Byrne has been busy this week. Besides AssetGallery, he also released CacheManager. This plugin helps you manage your template module cache, by allowing you to view what’s been cached and clear it out.

And we have one more from Byrne. AutoPrefs allows theme developers to include blog preferences in their themes. This allows themes to do powerful things, like set the default archive type or interact with other plugins via their preferences. This seems very useful for theme designers, since it allows them more control over the environment where their themes run. I wonder, though, how willing users will be to give themes that much control. read more

When I set up my first Web site in 1995, Web counters were the big thing. Virtually every site had one of those (rather pointless) rolling counters at the bottom that tracked how many “hits” the page got. We were, at that point, obsessed with the idea that our pages were being read and could care less by who. The whole idea of international publishing was still new and exciting.

Later counters became more evolved, the term “hits” became meaningless and we focused on “visitors” or “users”. A variety of new trackers, most with their own buttons, began to pop up. Those slowly replaced the hit counter as the new metric to watch.

However, as the millennium rolled over and the first tech bubble burst, we saw even more advanced metrics rise out of the ashes. Attention became the most valuable thing to track, especially in an AJAX Web where page views and visitors would be almost meaningless. It was no longer a matter of just how many people visited, but how long they stayed and what they did.

Now we’ve moved forward again, this time it’s “engagement that we’re looking at. Services such as PostRank allow you to track comments, tweets and links to your site as part of your “Engagement Score”, combining that info with your other, more traditional data.

But with so many metrics to track. There’s a legitimate question about what stats are the most important for a blogger to track. The answer is simple: All of them and none of them. read more

Envato’s Flash marketplace used to be known as FlashDen, but has now changed its name to ActiveDen. Why? Well, Adobe doesn’t want the good folks at Envato to use their trademark, being “Flash” obviously, in this fashion. Collis Ta’eed emailed the members and published a blog post on the matter, talking not so much of what he thought of Adobe’s demand but rather of the future, because obviously they complied and changed the name.

The new name amends the use of the word Flash, and it also opens up the marketplace for the future. In the last year we have added a budding Flex library and we now look forward to listing other interactive products like Adobe Air and maybe even Microsoft Silverlight!

Beware of using trademarks in your own brands and domains is the lesson here.

When I first saw this blog post at News.com, I quickly checked both Mashable and TechCrunch to see if both sites are covering the news item as well. I wasn’t wrong because who would not cover such a controversial, albeit “insane” news item? – A Wolfram Alpha iPhone app that costs $49.99.

This is rather shocking especially if you’ve heard about Wolfram Alpha before. If you don’t know what Wolfram Alpha is or have forgoten what it is all about, let  me refresh your memory. read more

One of the things I realized when I first did SEO was that your new pages and posts don’t automatically get indexed right away by Google unless you have a very authoritative, or trusted site. Also, once your pages are indexed, it usually takes time to rank for your desired keywords.

Therefore, I started preparing for keywords that I knew would get a high search volume in the near future. These keywords were based on popular future events in my niche.

read more

After (almost) embracing the hype of Tweetie, I realized what was missing from my twitter experience was push notification. While TwitBird (formally known as iTwitter) was able to do this “half baked” for its users, what I needed was an app that did it regardless of whose service my friends were using.

Long story short I discovered an app called SimplyTweet (by Motion Obj), whose $5 price almost made me weary of spending even more cash within Steve Jobs playground.

Fortunately I decided to take the plunge—hence this review. :-) read more

You probably have noticed that many blogs (including this one) use LIJIT as their search engine provider. Well now the search specialists have unveiled a new tool: Blog and Social Content Search Gadget for Blogger. read more