Recently, startup Pikk.com joined the ranks of Digg, Mixx and other social news/blog links aggregation sites.  In the company’s own words:

Pikk is a link aggregation service that lets users submit and vote on stories. Every story is submitted with two choices, such as “thrive or fail.” Stories with the most votes make it to the front page.

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With the war over blogging apps slowly cooling down, it looks like BlogSpot fans have yet another premium option to choose for their beloved iPhones.

Created by Kiloton Applications, altBlogger provides a simply way for Blogger users to publish text entries to their blogs, as well as check who has posted a comment on their blog. read more

After initially pulling their iPhone app due to frequent crashes, TweetDeck’s iPhone app is now live on the App store!

While I was never a fan of their desktop app (as I loathe all things Adobe AIR), their iPhone app has features that put premium apps to shame by striking a balance between power and elegance.

TweetDeck has created a video highlighting its best features, although here is my take on the app thus far. read more

If it were not for the WordPress iPhone app’s ability to moderate comments, I would seriously consider deleting it right now.

BlogPress, an iPhone app by CoolLittle Things has recently updated their app which now supports direct image uploading to WordPress and Movabletype blogs, instead of uploading them to Picasa Web Albums like before. read more

It looks like another BlogSpot app has entered the scene, this time from TotoCaster of Georgia (the country, not the US state).

Called Blogium, this app gives BlogSpot fans the ability to not only upload images to their Google powered blog, but also delete unwelcome comments from within the app as well (which probably means bad news for trolls and spammers). read more

Of the 3 dozen plus Twitter apps available, very few of them support push notification. Even the “big 3” (Tweetie 2, Twittelator Pro and Twitterrific Premium) still lack push support, despite the fact that smaller rivals like SimplyTweet have already enabled them for their users.

While there are many apps out there with push notification, Echofon (formally known as Twitterfon) is the first that I have seen that uses what I call “smart push technology,” a feature that I wish every iPhone app had. read more

When it comes to keeping up with the latest traffic stats for your WordPress blog, iPhone lovers had very few options outside of a host of Google Analytics—until now.

Menial (who is located in the UK) has developed an iPhone app called “Statistics For WordPress” that lets users of both flavors (self hosted and WP.com fans) to use the native WordPress.com stats package to monitor their traffic.

I was able to snag this app at $2.99 before it inflated to $4.99, so if you are wondering if this app is worth the extra $2, here are some pro’s and con’s before you consider spending more money within Steve Job’s playground.  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

After spending a couple weeks in Apple’s purgatory, it looks like Newsie has received Apple’s blessing and is now available for the masses.

Created by Instant Voodoo Magic, Newsie seems to be created for bloggers interested in reading their news NOW rather than waiting for the rest of their feeds to sync first (which can be a pain if you are subscribed to over 300 plus feeds).

Priced at 399 pennies, Newsie’s introduction may seem a little pricey to RSS geeks (both newbie’s and veterans), so if you are wondering whether or not this app is worth it, here is the good, the bad and the buggy about this app. read more

In late August, shortly after comment hosting companyJS-Kit announced the public launch of their Echo service, I forked over my credit card and paid $12 for one year’s worth of service.

With commenting becoming more and more fragmented, taking place increasingly on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, Echo appeared to be an interesting way to unify all of these references and create one giant world-wide conversation out of the feedback. Though JS-Kit said that that ECHO would be “death to commenting” they had found a seemingly innovative way to keep the conversation alive.

The idea seemed simple and powerful and, with the 30-day money-back guarantee, it also seemed to be worth a shot. However, as I jumped into the system, I found it to be more of a mixed bag, a strange combination of really great features and big ideas but also of frustrations and headaches.

Though there is clearly a lot of potential for ECHO, there’s also a lot that needs fixing. There’s no doubt they have a good thing going, but the devil truly is in the details. read more