APICTA is a network of 16 Asian and Australasian countries and economies whose common goal is to increase awareness of information & communication technologies, stimulate ICT innovation and creativity, promote economic and trade relations, facilitate technology transfer, etc. Their yearly awards are among the most coveted by all manner of IT firms in the Eastern hemisphere.

Outblaze won the award with its social media Video product.

For more details go to blog.outblaze.com

The 1 billionth photo of flickr, read more about it here.  What is amazing is how there are now over 1 billion pictures available on Flickr for public viewing and in some cases public consumption!

Congratulations!

Hello Kitty & Friends fan get a new makeover on Sanriotown.com the official home of Hello Kitty and her friends, there are some new things like the quiz section and some new games! Blog also has a new ranking feature.

Myspace is acquiring photobucket for US250 million according to TechCrunch.

Taken from the Business Wire directly:

Fox Interactive Media Completes Acquisition of Photobucket.com, Inc.

Business plugs into web 2.0

Not just marketing hype, poll claims

A recent spat between a startup CEO and a conference organizer came about when the CEO said he was going to go to a trip, apparently "lied" and got caught by his own tool which is similar to twitter in updating your status.

The CEO of the Next Web event wrote in his blog:

Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great. The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out.

Seems pretty stupid to argue about, and Felix later on goes to say that he didn’t think it was a big deal, his Kid was sick and that the e-mail was of a day earlier.

I must say I´m really confused by the commotion. My kid was sick on Tursday and it wasn´t entirely clear wether I could attend thenextweb the next day. In addition did we have some issues with the new Plazer (http://blog.plazes.com/?p=157#comments) and Stefan, my co-founder was coming to Reboot on Friday. So for professional and personal issues I decided to cancel since I wasn´t sure at that point that I could make it. Boris forgot to mention the last part of my email:

“And to be fair to you guys I rather cancel now than trying until the last minute and then not being able to come afterall.”

More details on Techcrunch.

Comments were raging and flying, and of course all sorts of conspiracy theories, but in the end who won and who lost?

Plazes CEO Felix got some loss of credibility, albeit maybe there was some marketing benefit for people learning about how he got "busted by using his own tool".

A good story was made that got attention to Reboot, Next Web and Techcrunch achieved countless newsbites and stories, and thousands more are amused by the story.

Isn’t that news sensationalism, no different than what bloggers accuse reporters of skewing facts to suit their needs? Isn’t this, in the end, a private and personal affair between two individuals?

The difference here is that a blogger is not bound by an oath, or by a job, he can be fired for transgressing or going too far, but if you’re a blogger/owner you can play entirely by your own rules, your own loss being your credibility.

In the end, he/she is still looking for a story that will be read and discussed to make his/her site popular, so ultimately a blogger and a journalist are not that different in their goals, and if this true, we need to be wary of the "masses of blogs" just how we have become wary of what we read in the newspaper. It’s mroe about managing the information flow of individual agendas rather than "group agendas" but it’s still the same. Just because a thousand blogs say it’s so, doesn’t mean it is, it could be manipulated just as much as traditional media.

Hong Kong has just passed a new anti-spam bill, conspicuosly absent are the telesales, the ones that call your mobile phone no matter when you’re in Hong Kong or when you’re travelling and incurring long distance charges because "tens of thousands of sales agents jobs are at stake" and "400,000 people relied on phone contact to promote products".

This is rather convenient, so an incredible number of people actually WANT tele sales spam and there are tens of thousands of sales agents who phone you all the time? Last I heard cold calling telesales were done out of low cost tele marketing centers in China and Macau, so the only jobs at stake are the company owners who are peddling you products, and I rarely ever receive a call from Joe Chang’s restaurant, it’s usually PCCW has a new product, Hutchinson has a new service, Smartone wants you to switch to them….i.e. not exactly "poor" companies.

I find it really difficult to believe that there are 400,000 people in Hong Kong who really WANT to be phone spammed so they can be sold rubbish they didn’t ask for. Isn’t this the age of self determination and isn’t "new marketing" all about giving to the people what they want, when they want it? Mass Tele Sales is the oldest form of intrusive marketing and is at the same category as pop-ups and interstitials and excessive UCE (i.e. spam).

Google’s CEO has mentioned in an interview today in the FT that it is Google’s ambitions to have as much personal information so that one day when it holds so much personal information that it could tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

So we can stop thinking about what we do in our life and have Google tell us instead what we should be doing.

This is chilling and frightening, perhaps we don’t know ourselves well enough but should Google really be in the business of telling us what we should be doing or not? Personal preferences can give you suggestions, but to tell you what to do is the same as Google become your personal Boss! Once Google is in the business of ordering you around, you’re talking about a whole new level of global domination! The "new web" today is a lifestyle indeed, but ultimately it is a tool for the benefit of the individual, and the trends are very much about empowering the individual and isn’t that why Google became so popular and powerful? Because it provided tools to bring power into the individuals hands? Why would it want to take away that power by telling us what to do instead, that’s like Media 1.0 all over again!

Using a good blog editor makes life a lot easier when you blog, in particular as you blog several blogs at the same time (say 5-6 blogs or so) on various different platforms.

Editor choices are plenty….there are no "best editors" although a poll by Lifehacker suggests that Performancing (also known as Scribefire) is the most popular one so far followed closely by WBloggar. What makes these editors so cool in some cases is the ability to add plugins inside your post without dealing with all this HTML messiness, this is particularly true for Wordpress. Some of them support picture editing, cropping and importing as well, spell checks and so on and so forth. Best of all, almost all of them will do the pinging for you when you post, so saves you time to go visit pingomatic or similar.

Here are some download links for good Blog Editors

Windows Live Writer, if you like editing Microsoft Word style, this one is for you. It has interesting plug-ins but I haven’t had the time to check it out. It’s also nice because it lets you custom edit tags….

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Qumana, simple fast and easy. For major editing needs it may not be suitable, but it’s pretty decent nevertheless.

http://www.qumana.com

Scribefire, this one used to be called performancing and is a firefox plugin, very popular but in comparision relatively simple.

http://www.scribefire.com/

Zoundry, don’t know it, looks decent enough.

http://www.zoundry.com/

Ecto is shareware, and developed in Japan.

http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

WBloggar

http://wbloggar.com/

Blogdesk

http://www.blogdesk.org/

Open Source Semagic

http://semagic.sourceforge.net/

and BlogJecosts money is available at http://www.codingrobots.com/blogjet/ and Rocket Post also costs 12 dollars available at http://www.anconia.com/rocketpost/ and although FLOCK offers blog editing as well, it’s really basic, so I don’t recommend it.

Just because it costs money, doesn’t make it the best however…so if you have time I suggest you start trying these tools for yourself. I currently use Qumana although it’s somewhat basic, but they all do the job. I’m going to update my findings here as time goes on…but feel free to let me know what you think! Oh yeah, all of the above should work fine with Sanriotown!

Tags: blogs, editing, blog tools

There are a couple of good places to look for search engine optimization to make sure your site is getting the attention it deserves.

Wikipedia has a good primer here and  Google directly answers how SEO can benefit you using Google, which for most company websites is all that really matters.

This also is important for your blog, you can add your URL and create sitemaps to help Google better optimize the search experience on the site.