I’ve set up Performancing for Firefox;  an extension to the browser that enables you to publish to multiple blogs form a single interface.   As I publish only to the one, it’s not going to add that much to what I usually do, ecxept for the note saving which is a far more flexible method than how I save draft posts.  The WYSIWYG interface is clear and easy to use, although one drawback at the moment is that I can’t add images directly.

So I publish and then come to the usual interface to upload the image.

Are you really getting into the Web 2.0 vibe? This fun Validator allows you to assess your choice of sites against the Web 2.0 meme. I currently score 9 out of 35, but figure that if I just link to the page, mention Dave Legg and Rocketboom, and refer to lots of cool words such as start-up, VCs , Rocketboom Not sure how accurate it is though, as I appear to be get a point for being web 3.0 and del.icio.us only scores 6 out of 35. Via Nancy

Lat night I attended a geek dinner where the guest of honour was Molly Holzschlag. A new venue for me, it has it’s advantages being only 200 yards from the office. Enjoyable night, unfortunately only got to hear part of the speach as the acoustics were not too good and there was no amplification. One idea that did come out of the evening was holding a London Geek dinner at SXSW in March, seeing the number of people that appear to be going along to that.

Blogher comments on Wired’s piece about women and blogging, looking at the attendance of women of the recent Podcasting conference in the US. Mistakenly called the inaugral conference (I’m sure I attended one in the UK in September), only 15% of the attendees were women. It follows the trend of ‘new’ technology, as it attracted a certasin kind of person who could manage the early set up requirements. Again, barriers are getting lowered and we’ll get more women.

Meanwhile, go and listen to Nicole Simon who’s started podcasting interviews with the speakers from Les Blogs 2 being held in a couple of weeks.

Marketing for dogs – Floor stickers and low level posters advertising Pedigree dog food provide experiential marketing for canines as they are scented with dog food smells to attract the target market.

Gnomenclature – Chris Pirillo’s new word defintitions. I particulary like:

• WEB 2.0 – I don’t know, and I don’t care.
• PODCASTING – Um… so I think… I’ll… uh… yeah. Ya know, I think… uh… yeah, so… um… where was I? Oh yeah. Ya know when, um… like, ya know when I was going to the… uh, yeah. Um… um… I think?
• SKYPEE – The act of going to the restroom in the middle of a VoIP conversation without the other party knowing.

Scott Adam’s is in the middle of a flame war of sorts after he posted about the credibility of the participants in the debate between Evolution and Inteliigent Design. His key argument:

Both sides misrepresent the others’ position (either intentionally or because they don’t know better or because of bias) and then attack the misrepresentation. Therefore, neither side is credible (to me).

Nice to see my favourite creationary force the Flying Spaghetti Monster getting a good mention in the comments.

I’m still playing Resident Evil 4. I still suck. I managed to get killed about 10 times in the last section – and those women with chainsaws are mean; very, very mean. Do they have to keep chopping my head off?

So far Measuremap is a clear winner. As Ben has noted, the Google measurement tool has not started recording at all despite it being nearly 24 hours. It took about 8 hours before it decided to recognise I had the code on the site. t Measuremaps started giving me figures immediately after I had added the javascript code

I’ve signed up for Google Analytics to see what it can do. Compared to Measuremap, the initial impression is definitely far more commercial, with reports being cut for marketing and content optimisation and the tie in with Adsense. It needs to run for a while longer to get some data in before I can assess what it does.

On signing up I found an telling little content error. You have to choose your country, so I scrolled down to the bottom of the list to find United Kingdom. It was not there this time, which usually means they’ve used the incorrect Great Britain (not a country, just an island). So up to the ‘g’s to find, sitting next to Gibraltar, the choice of United Kingdon. So some-one had changed the reference term, just not the alphabetical position ;o)

A Brazilian agency(?) Academia de Filmes have produced a website holding page that is a little more interesting than the usual…some thought has gone into managing the waiting period for the file to download (only visible if you have a slower speed) and it does act as an introduction into their capabilities. Via ThreeMinds

Along with many other people, I’ve been playing around with Amazon’s new tool Mechanical Turk, a mechanism to apply distributed human intelligence to mundane tasks that are still too complicated for comouters. I’m guessing I’m one of many given the poor availability of the service over the weekend – it was ‘unavailable’ for the majority of time I was trying it, stating it was too busy. Amazon seriously underestimated the desire for people to earn ‘free’ money.

However, I have managed to earn the grand total of 9c, which I could now apply as a discount to one of my next purchases (although I’m more likely to just leave it there). I’m waiting for another 60c to come through, waiting for someone to approve my choices. Which does beg the questions – I’m paid “… when your answer is approved by the person that listed the HIT”. So, if someone has to go in and approve all the HITs (‘Human Intelligence Task’ don’t you know), why don’t they just do the job in the first place? How much time is saved through the two stage process than just getting a single team to do it? Although I’m guessing this process may be better for the person’s snaity 😉 To do any serious earning on this, it will take a lot of tiome – and a lot more power on the Amazon side to keep the service up and running.

Microsoft are currently announcing some new services, one of which is live.com. errr….isn’t this start.com, with added email? I can sign in with my Passprt so it recognises me. Iit currently only works in IE (although Firefox appears to be coming soon) I can add feeds (no mention of RSS) and a few widgets, such as weather, a clock and horoscopes. (Nothing different to MyYahoo yet then.) It appers to offer UK focused feeds only by default for me, based on my recorded location. However, we are also going to get Windows Live and Office Live, which make it far more interesting. Via Dave Winer. Crunch Notes has great notes onthe talk

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A new site from the Royal Schools of Music, backed by the UK Government has been lauched to provide teenagers to learn more about music, according to the BBC. I tried to give it a go, but unfortunately could not get the sound on any browser and it seemed to completely crash Firefox – so looks an interesting idea, pity about the execution.

Google are having to change their domain in the UK due to ongoing legal issues over the gmail name. They have FAQ page up, stating that they are no longer issuing gmail accounts, but have switched to googlemail.com. The question about whether I will have to change domain remains open:

# What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will that address ever change?
Unfortunately, we don’t know. We would love to say that your address will always remain the same. But the trademark issue is still unsettled, and unfortunately, we cannot predict what the other party or the courts might do here. You can always use your same username with an @googlemail.com address to avoid this issue later on. But trust that we will do the best we can to make sure your email address won’t ever have to change.

# What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will I also need to change that address?
No, this change doesn’t affect existing Gmail addresses. For now, our plan is only to issue @googlemail.com addresses to new users. Trust that we will do the best we can to offer all our users a reliable and consistent email experience.