Feedbeat: The Coolest WebApp You Haven’t Heard Of

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I recently had my blog “Philly Sports Net” redesigned and intentionally created a premium spot above the fold for video highlights. At first, I figured I’d just edit the WordPress sidebar.php file with a new YouTube or Google Video embed file every time the writer for my site wanted to switch out a sports highlight.

But I knew there had to be better way. Rather than swapping out videos, wouldn’t it be nice to create something like a Video Channel that played the newest video first and then sequenced through subsequent videos in temporal order?

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All the Cool Web Apps You Could Need, All In One Place

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Web Apps are popping up left and right, and keeping track of the good ones can be a chore. So it’s always nice when others do the work for you.

The Aviva Directory has a nice beefy article on the Top 25 Web Apps to Grow Your Business. While they market the tools to small business entrepreneurs, there are some great productivity tools on the list for everyone, including bloggers.

One of the great things about Web 2.0 apps is that the good ones introduce new, more effective ways of doing old tasks. From collaboration tools like Campfire and ConceptShare to online office suites like Zoho and ThinkFree, the productive blogger can’t go wrong.

But I have to say that the most innovative idea of all has to be Prosper. Prosper transforms the lending process so that people with good ideas might get hooked up with lenders who believe in their ideas. That sounds pretty awesome to me.

GoogleTube: We’re sharing profits with content producers

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According to Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, users who produce content for the massive online video sharing site will get a chance to share in the profits.

We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.

How exactly this will be executed is less clear, but speculation has been going around for some time now that Google’s acquisition of YouTube signalled the beginning of widespread ad supported video.

Hurley hopes that the revenue share program will provide incentive for users to produce better content. But if AdSense is any indicator, we’ll soon probably see a spike in spam video (spideo anyone?).

Source

A Guide For The Introverted Blogger

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Only about 25% of the population are introverts, so we’re clearly in the minority. I’m not sure how well that percentage translates into the blogosphere, but I’m sure it’s probably a bit higher because of the good fit that blogging offers for the introvert’s tendency to work in physical isolation.

What I want to do over the next few months is explore what it means to be an introverted blogger, how bloggers can use their introvert tendencies to enhance their blogging, and how to overcome the most common stumbling blocks that an introvert faces when writing material for public consumption and comment.

So what exactly is an introvert? Being an introvert involves many of the following characteristics:

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PageRank Update Part Deux – January 2007

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Looks like Google’s Toolbar PageRank has been updated for a second time in January, marking a stark difference in the way Google is now conducting it’s toolbar PageRank rollouts. Sites that hadn’t been assigned PageRank in early January, are now receiving their first PR. Sites that didn’t go through any changes in the first January update are also seeing upswings and downswings this time.

Google ToolBar PageRank Update In Progress

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A search on Google’s Blog Search reveals that many people are seeing material evidence of a Google ToolBar PR update. Since this has become such a big event for webmasters around the world, we thought we’d help spread some of the joy.

So far, the news is that many 4-6 month old sites are showing PR in the toolbar for the first time, but also that many older sites have dropped down to PR 0.

The consensus seems to be that the drop to PR0 is not a penalty, but actually part of an ongoing data push for the current update. Let’s hope so!

The best way to get a picture of your forthcoming pagerank is to use this tool called LivePR which allows you to see Toolbar PageRank across a sampling of many Google datacenters.

Using Blogs To Teach

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Co-authored by Abe Witonsky

Students in higher education come to college to learn, but there are many things competing for their attention, besides what goes on in the classroom. The competition includes the Internet, social networking, email, online chatting, etc. As our students’ world changes, so too must the methods by which we teach and engage our students. In this article, we propose one way that teaching can be significantly enhanced by the integration of blogging. Our plans are to implement this proposal in the coming semester and to report back on its success or lack thereof. [Read more…]