“My name’s Scott. I’m 13 and have launched a web startup.” So began an email exchange over last weekend which culminated with me chatting to Scott’s mum today to verify, that, indeed, he was actually 13 and really had launched a blogging site for people in Scotland. ScotBlog.net is essentially a social network for people in [...]

One of the most effective ways of using Socialbrowse is to grow your audience of followers and increase your reach. The more people following you, the more people see the links you share and the comments you submit.

Since many of our Socialbrowse users are also avid bloggers, we have now created a way to increase your Socialbrowse audience while simultaneously personalizing your blog and improving its community.

The new Socialbrowse embeddable widget provides a simple way of broadcasting your latest Socialbrowse activity to all your blog readers, and promotes your profile to them to increase your audience.

It's ...

An Australian woman accused of setting her husband's genitals on fire because she thought he was having an affair has been charged with murder.

Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it's worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the idea that the global economy can grow indefinitely. I grew up on the idea that humanity would grow out into space, and that resources were for all practical purposes infinite. It...

One thing that didn't make a lot of sense about the 33 celebrity Twitter accounts hacked this morning - the messages left on the various accounts weren't consistent and were clearly written by different people with different agendas. Fox News got “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay," and Rick Sanchez from CNN got "I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today." But other Twitter accounts had links to sites to generate affiliate revenue. Facebook's Twitter account had a message pointing to getlaid.info (now shut down), which redirected to a porn site ...

Online community developers and managers appear to be increasingly accepting of inactive members. I don't like this trend. You should never stop working to increase your proportion of active community members. You can and should get more of your members involved.

Flush with the success of its G13 gameboard, Logitech is now creating a whole series of peripherals that will all work together to celebrate the seventh letter of the alphabet. The G-series line includes a new $199 G19 keyboard, offering a 320 x 240 color LCD mounted on top and 12 "G-keys" that can have up to three macros assigned to each. Next up is the $129 G35, a 7.1 surround-sound headset with integrated "voice-morphing" options for those who'd rather sound like a space squirrel than domestic gamer. Finally, there's a new flavor of the G9 mouse ...

Artiklz is debuting its conversation search engine to the public today, and it's definitely worth taking a look. What the service does is aggregate comments from the more popular blogging and commenting platforms as well as a number of services including Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. and make them available through a single search engine. This is very similar to what companies like Crunchies finalist BackType and also uberVU are all about, and I definitely see the need for this type of service: regardless of one's interests or line of work, dedicated comment search engines make it easy ...

The Wall Street Journal is bar none one of the best newspapers in the country -- except when its Editorial Board is having a bad day. And today the Board is having a very bad day, having published an editorial that declares Al Franken's provisional win in Minnesota, which the state just certified moments ago, to be illegitimate, while accusing Minnesota's Canvassing Board of being inconsistent and biased in favor of Franken.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking such a position. The Journal's editorial, however, has several basic facts wrong, makes several other assertions based on flimsy ...