New Gadgets and Gizmos *BUMPED*
Mar 4, 2007 Blog News, Geek, Politics
(This got bounced down the page a ways pretty quickly after I initially posted it, so I’m bumping it back up for a while. — Pauley)
By now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen some of the new sections popping up over on the right.
Technorati and The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem both show how Digital Brainwaves links to and gets links from other sites in the blogosphere. Technorati scans and spiders pretty much any blog that appears, when scanned, to be a blog. TTLB only catalogs and checks on those blogs that specifically apply to be listed. Each site has a widget in the sidebar to the right; TTLB shows my standing in the ecosystem, while Technorati’s shows links to details about incoming and outgoing links in addition to a search box for the site.
Pajamas Media has set up a weekly Predidential Straw Poll, where you can indicate your interest in one candidate for each party (you can choose just one, but they encourage picking one of each). Digital Brainwaves is now a voting precinct in the straw poll, kinda like real-life voting precints in the actual election. You can vote your preference here and see how it stacks up against other readers, as well as everyone who’s voted anywhere in the poll.
Of the four new widgets, though, the one I’m most excited about is the one at the top of the sidebar. Twitter is basically an IM “away message” that isn’t bound to an IM account, and asks only for the answer to one simple question: “What are you doing?” Users can post their responses and receive updates from others via their cell phones as SMS (text) messages, via IM (AIM, Gtalk, and some others), or they can post to the Twitter web page itself. Mac users can use the application Twitterific to post and receive updates from their menu bar, and I recently del.icio.us-ed a link to a “search box” widget for Firefox that allows you to post updates to Twitter from the search box that appears in the upper right corner of Firefox.
My Twitter network is pretty scant right now, so feel free to join if you’re interested. Please let me know if you join, so I can add you to my network, too.
