Have you become the Mayor of Buttita Plaza Pawn on Foursquare? Or the Archbishop of Myung Dong Tofu Cabin, or the...Deputy Sheriff of the Twilight Bowl? Yay for you! Meanwhile, bloggers in Morocco and Vietnam have become the Governor of Prison and the Water Commissioner of the Interrogation Room.
Feel bad? I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. All this technology we use and write about and enthuse on has higher stakes than we think. Here are some of them.
The news is all over the Web - Netflix is coming to the iPad! For all of you doubters and naysayers, you can put away your beloved netbooks, laptops and miniature iPads (iPhones) and...oh, wait, is this true? It might all be an April Fool's Day joke that's getting repeated by trusted media around the Web?
But this Netflix on the iPad thing is the perfect example of how half-believable information can be put out there and repeated and repeated until everyone thinks it's true. And it might be.
Posterous, the integrated small blogging platform, announced the debut of one-stop custom domain registration today.
A new "domain purchasing feature" provides a one-click on-site way to avoid what Posterous' Vincent Chu called "the geeky details" of securing and applying a personal domain to your account.
Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, have introduced VaultPress, a plugin to plug the backup gap.
Users of WordPress' hosted service have their blogs backed up automatically (so to speak). So if something goes pear-shaped, the content is caught before it hits the ground. However, if you use a self-hosted version of the software you must back up your content yourself, and heaven help you if you forget.
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?
Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google's Blogger platform will be able to take full control over the layout of their sites thanks to Google's new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger's users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor.
Last September, Wordpress made millions of its blogs real-time with RSSCloud, but today it has taken real-time a step further
What this means, essentially, is that you no longer need to wait for your news reader to ping your blog every so often to find out if there are any updates - you'll find out in real time.
Earlier this month we noticed PRManna climbing up the Hacker News front page and reached out to the creator for an interview. Ryan Waggoner started PRManna in his spare time and was open in saying that the project was inspired by Peter Shankman's Help a Reporter Out. The difference between PRManna and HARO is that Waggoner's product was specifically meant for startup companies to answer blogger and journalist tech queries. Whereas, HARO is a general news service. The question is, are the sites far enough apart to be considered different products?
Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use #samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you're tweeting about.
It's been just over two months since Google, the New York Times and the Washington Post joined together to experiment with a new way to provide news with Google's Living Stories. Today, Google has declared the experiment a success and has said that it will offer the project's functionality to the general public.
