Digg API contest finalists announced today on digg blog. 10 finalists have been chosen from the submissions. Now users can vote from now onwards up to 8pm PDT May 30th.
Checkout the finalists here, these are cool applications built around digg API.
Last week rumors started that Google is interested in acquiring Feedburner, today Techcrunch reported that the deal is confirmed. Feedburner to receive $100 million from Google for this acquisition. Feedburner is a popular service among blogs for RSS management.
Feedburner has RSS advertising network, Google can integrate its Adsense in to this and expand its Adsense feed network. It can also integrate Google Analytics for pretty RSS stats.
Feedburner is growing faster than MySpace and Digg at a rate of 385% according to Nelson/NetRatings.
Technorati has introduced lot of changes to their site, its no more a blog search engine, we can call it as social media search. Technorati CEO Dave Sirfy says now users come to technorati for not only blogs but also to find other social media, in response to these changes in user needs technorati now provides searching all user generating content.
Technorati has unified search, previously one has to search for blog posts, key words by selecting options, now you can search everything in one single search.
This is being facilitated by the phenomenon of tags and tagging, which helps to unify and organize the rapidly expanding world of user-generated media. As more and more publishing tools support the use of tags, the better we are able to assemble collections of social media based on the interests of our users.
The world has changed. This isn’t just about blogs anymore. And to be of service to you, we have changed too.
For the ones that don’t like all the stuff in one search or you just want to search only blogs, they have added a new location search.technorati.com with a nice and clean interface. Look at the above pic
Other things you will notice are scrolling of the popular tags on top of the home page. All the Technorati widgets available are categorized like browser buttons, blog widgets etc.
Google introduces an online security blog to keep users up to date with the recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security particularly malware. I wrote about Google’s efforts to identify malware sites, now they have started this blog to encourage discussion on this topic.
To protect Google’s users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.
Google”s online security team clarifies that 0.1% of the websites are malicious in nature. Google analysis shows that majority of malware activity is happening in China and US followed by Germany and Russia. See the below image to get a picture of the geographical distribution of these sites. Green color indicates that Google didnt find any suspecious activity in those locations and red indicates highly effected.
FormLogix is a online form builder tool that will help to create any kind of web form. FormLogix service is free, you can create any form like contact us forms, Feedback froms, registration forms, surveys, or online polls etc.,
It uses a WYSIWYG tool for creating forms, so you need not worry about coding. The created forms can be embedded in to your websites or blogs.
FormLogix’s WYSIWYG tool is well designed you just need to drag n drop elements to create forms. If you are not comfortable with designing your forms you can use their templates to start with.
When your visitors submit data through your form, that data is emailed to you. Once data is submitted you can view it using a web interface. The information viewed can be sorted and sliced for preparing reports. You will also be able to create, edit, and delete data.
You can also add forms as widgets, check the available widgets to add to your blog.
Google Adsense is disabling all arbitrage publisher accounts from June 1st onwards. Google is sending emails to all these account holders saying that their business model is not suitable.
What is Arbitrage:
From wikipedia “arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets: a combination of matching deals are struck that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.”
In Adsense case arbitrage publishers will use less expensive keywords from Adwords to drive traffic to their sites and place content that attracts high paying ads. Some of these sites are made for adsense (MFA) sites which are no value to the users. Reportedly these publishers are making more than $10000 dollars per month.
I to got the “friendly account disablement” email today, May 18. It came out of the blue. It says my business model is not a good fit for AdSense and that the account goes down on June 1. Payment will be made normally though. I am a UPS club+ size publisher.
I will be the first to admit that I have been running substantial arbitrage and MAF sites. They have just grown exponentially lately due to all the efficient AdWords tools. Yet, MAF and arbitrage is not a breach of TOS in and of itself right?
I admit that they are not the greatest user experience out there. Yet I do believe they do comply with the specifics of the TOS, there are no blatant breaches. I run dozens of sites/domains with AdSense and I have been careful to abide with the specifics in the letters of the TOS.
This will appeal to other webmasters as these MFA site ads will pay pennies. Lot of us are trying to block these MFA sites with Google Adsense competitive ad filter.
Phozi is a new service to for hosting photos to share in social networking sites or blogs. With phozi you can upload photos from your computer, from your webcam or from mobile.
What is unique about phozi is it allows you to add borders, phozi stamps and free form text to photos. You can share these photos in myspace profiles or in blogs.
On the down side you can not customize the picture after generating the code.
Lifehacker came up with a firefox extension to pimp Google Reader in Firefox. Better greader is a Firefox addon that rolled up three greasemonkey scripts (maximizing the viewing area, skipping Google’s default subscribe mechanism, and adding keyboard shortcuts.) in one extension.
What it does:
You will get maximum amount of space for the feed viewing area.
Adds keyboard shortcuts to reader item link.
Places a direct subscribe link in all websites by skipping the default subscribe feed mechanism.
Install this extension as any other firefox extension. To see the changes restart firefox after installing the extension. Turn or off of features can be done from Better Greader firefox addon options. To see options select, Tools->Add-ons->Better Greader.
flickrSLiDR is the easiest way to embed your [tag]flickr[/tag] photos as slideshows in your blogs or sites. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address, photo set or group you would like to embed along with some options like width and height. You’ll receive the HTML embed code in return. (Via)
Last week rumors started that Google is interested in 
FormLogix is a online form builder tool that will help to create any kind of web form. FormLogix service is free, you can create any form like contact us forms, Feedback froms, registration forms, surveys, or online polls etc.,
Phozi is a new service to for hosting photos to share in social networking sites or blogs. With phozi you can upload photos from your computer, from your webcam or from mobile. 
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