Web 2.0

At a hipster bar in San Francisco at 5 p.m. today, Digg unveiled its official version 3.0, which will launch on June 26. To the surprise of nobody (since Valleywag leaked screenshots of a beta), Digg now lets users flag more than just tech stories. The new categories are World & Business, Entertainment, Science, and Gaming.

The product also bookmarks video files, which shouldn't be a big deal (a bookmark is a bookmark, I would think), but given the growing traffic in this media type, some special treatment might be called for.

Finally, since Digg is now … Read more

Never pay retail. Why should you? Nearly every good and service can be had at some discount, if you have the right coupon. The coupon business itself, in fact, is huge -- you can see that just by looking at your local Sunday newspaper.

But newspaper circulation is declining. So where are tomorrow's consumers going to get their coupons, and how are businesses going to reach them?

Startup Zixxo is building a new coupon marketplace. The overall concept is simple: Businesses go online and post their offers and coupons. Then users go online and find offers they want. They … Read more

Micro Persuasion always offers useful advice, as blogger Steve Rubel proved once again with his post titled, "35 Ways You Can Use RSS Today.

Some are no-brainers (as far as we're concerned, anyway), such as feeds that track your favorite baseball/football/you-name-the-sport team. But we're curious about the first entry on the list: Using RSS to track drunken athletes?

Thanks to tabloid headlines, we all know that social networks such as MySpace and Facebook can be fertile ground for sexual predators. And we have learned that information posted in the naivete of youth can come back to haunt teenagers in later years, as prospective employers and others come across them in simple Google searches.

Now, however, a much larger interested party has taken to scouring social networks in search of information: the federal government. According to this article in New Scientist, the National Security Agency "is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post … Read more

Launching at the SuperNova conference Thursday: Ingenio's Ether, a service that handles the mechanics and finances of phone-based consulting. I got a preview of this service a few days ago from Ingenio co-founder Scott Faber.

Scott calls Ether an "eBay for services," but that doesn't explain what the service does, which is this: It gives experts (consultants, therapists, authors, etc.) a phone number they can give out to the public at large. Calls to that number are not immediately connected to the expert. Instead, the expert can define fees for a discussion, as well as acceptable … Read more

One of the coolest features of Web-based productivity applications is that they enable people to easily collaborate on documents. Some, like Google's word processor Writely, and its spreadsheet Google Spreadsheets, even let multiple people to edit the same document at the same time. It's a great feature, but as I said in a previous post, it can get confusing really fast when more than one person is editing a document and each user has no idea who's where in the document and who's doing what to it. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to see … Read more

The new site, ohdontforget, will send a cell phone a text message at the time and date you specifiy. Or if you set the send time to "now," you can just use it to send regular SMS messages.

Is the service missing important features? Yes, tons of them. No outlook sync, no log of messages sent, no address book, and if you're sending an SMS to your spouse, they don't see who sent it (the return address is ohdontforget). And there's no way the site makes money, as far as I can tell.

But simplicity … Read more

The key to weight loss, I've read a hundred times, is information. Watching and recording what you eat is the necessary first step to any health regimen. There are plenty of food tracking tools out there, including the famous WeightWatchers system. And now there's a new, free, Web 2.0-ish service, The Daily Plate.

There's nothing conceptually new about this service. What it has going for it is a very straightforward interface. You search for a food item, select the right one from a list of possibilities, and hit the "I ate that" button. It … Read more

Mike Hudack, the CEO of Blip.TV, is on a mission to rescue videobloggers from video hosting sites and services that "aren't about individual empowerment." He feels that most of the video sites snag all the digital rights they can and make money on the backs of other peoples' work. Which sites? You(tube) know which ones.

Although Blip.tv does allow consumers to surf for videos on the Blip site, the core function of the service is that it allows its users to take video they upload to Blip's servers and easily push it out … Read more