While I’ve been away the Pro Blogging scene has been as busy as usual (in fact I’m sure it gets busier when I’m away). I’m slowly working through my RSS feeds but here are some of the stories that broke and posts that interest me from the last couple of weeks. Expect another one of these posts later today or tomorrow as I’m barely scratching the surface of my Bloglines list so far.
Andy Wibbels has a great post documenting the story of the launch of his new blog. Sounds like a pretty exciting day!
AdSense have introduced a referral program for AdWords so now you can earn $20 for referring a new advertiser to the program (once they spend their first $100).
AdSense have also reintroduced the option to generate your AdSense code all from one page rather than using the new multi page wizard (that many of us complained about).
Google finally launched Google Calendar – I’ll give it a go this week but am interested to hear what others think of it?
Blog Editor Qumana announced a deal with Lycos where by Lycos are using Qumana as the basis for their new desktop blog editing tool. Congratulations to the Qumana team.
Comment spam plugin Akismet has been released for Movable Type.
Elliot Back names his top 10 best designed blogs – there are some nice blogs there in the mix.
So far I like the new google calendar. I’ve only used the basic “add an event” and notification features. I’ve not gotten around to testing the more advanced sharing and iCal features yet.
I liked how easy it was to set up SMS notifications to my phone. It was much faster and easier than yahoo.
I do not like that it doesn’t offer the option to be notified of an even at the exact time of the event. I’m reading and writing so much that I easily lose track of time and forget events even if I’ve been notified 5 minutes beforehand.
So I simply schedule all events up five minutes and use the 5 minute notification. To be fair yahoo makes me do the same thing.
Jeremy
Rad. Thanks for all the information. Your blogs are always very informative. Welcome back!
I might have to try a hand in AdWords referring.
Cheers,
JP
The Google calendar is great, but I just tried the new hotmail interface. It is much like Outlook, which will impress MS users. It is in built with a calendar and place to easily manage your contacts.
I have only been using gmail of late, but Microsoft has given a reason for people to go back to hotmail.
The interface of Google Calendar is alright. I do not like the fact that you can only have email notifications of events sent to Gmail only.
I also don’t like that Verizon (my cel phone provider whose contract I JUST renewed) is not listed in the celphone provider list for text message notifications.
There are hacks already out there for both of these issues, but I don’t think one should have to use hacks for those two simple things – which makes Google Calendar pretty useless for me.
-dm
The Google Calendar works just fine, but I’m surprised they released a calendar without task/todo capability. Yahoo has it. Hotmail has it. But somehow Google forgot it. I guess the argument would be that they are still in beta, but who makes a calendar these days without task/todo capability?
Google Calendar may be very useful but need somw time to apply it for myself
The link to Elliot Back’s top ten designs didn’t work for me… but I found it here:
http://elliottback.com/wp/?p=1351
wierd Tim – works for me….hmmm