Question: How To Add 150+ Social Links On A Website or Blogsite?

Answer: If you would like you can free signup at proflactic.com and which is generating 150+ social bookmarks and social networks, covering video sharing websites and photo sharing networks and so on. You can get a list all of your networks from profilactic.com.

After signing up, you have to submit all of your social links and they will generate codes for your site. You can customize the codes or attach extra css effects. See below the same codes.

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Hmmm...   my brain is about to explode because of the frustration so best leave this here, and go take a walk before I throw Bob out the window.

Cheerio

Inziamo dall'annuncio principale, che ormai i più sapranno: ieri, 17 Giugno 2008, è stata rilasciata la nuova versione del nostro amato browser: Firefox 3.0; lo potete scaricare qui.

Per avere un'ottima panoramica di tutti gli utili applicativi attualmente disponibili vi consiglio vivamente di dare una lettura a
questo interessantissimo e completo post.
Forse è un po' lunghetto, ma vi garantisco che vi divertirete!

Da un po' di tempo ho installato un'utilissimo applet che permette di monitorare i propri commenti lasciati in giro per la rete; il suo nome è CoComment. Non mi dilungo oltre, la rete è piena di articoli esplicativi. Ecco alcuni link

- Cos'è CoComment
- Panoramica dettagliata
- Integriamo Cocomment sul nostro Browser (al momento non c'è versione compatibile con Firefox3)
- CoComment sul proprio blog (per gli utenti wordpress è necessario aver comprato un dominio).

Al momento il mio Firefox3 è equipaggiato con le seguenti estensioni:

1. ScribeFire: per scrivere articoli direttamente sul proprio blog in modo semplice e veloce
2. Cooliris
3. Download Status Bar
4. Foxmarks
5. TwitterFox: ottimo per usare Twitter senza perder troppo tempo
6. Zotero

Per informazioni più dettagliate sui programmi sopra elencati vi rimando ancora qui
E voi? Come avete personalizzato il vostro browser?

I saw a Tweet for the 31 Day Comment Challenge. So, I headed over to Kim Confino’s site and read about it and decided I would participate. Yesterday I went to two sites and left comments. Today I found out there are some suggestions/rules for the challenge. For a change I’m ahead of the game. One I did yesterday was on a site I had never commented on before and I disagreed with what the person said-I think that’s an upcoming activity. So, now I’ll back track and do yesterday’s activity and answer the self audit questions.

• How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?-Less than once a week.

• Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?-I keep track of comments on my own blog and try hard to respond now that I know that’s a good thing to do. About a week ago I signed up for coComment. I use it to see read what other’s have written since I was there and to see if the blogger responded.
  

• Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?-I’m not a regular anywhere.
  

Then I took a look at Gina Trapani’s Guide to Blog Comments. Since I’m still pretty new to this and haven’t done much commenting I’m doing well with her suggestions. The one thing I need to do is own my comment. I usually sign with open ID and that puts down my web name and I don’t sign my name in my response. So, that’s something I’ll try to remember to do on future posts. I agree that’s important. Sometimes my comments start to get too long or I start to get off topic but usually I catch that and fix it before posting.

I’ve been giving some thought to why I don’t comment more often. One reason is that often what I want to say has already been said, so according to Gina Trapani I’m doing the right thing by not saying it again. Another reason is that I’ve never been much of a writer so when I do a post, even if it’s short, it’s probably taken me quite a long time to put my words down in a way that I like. Hopefully, the more I write the quicker I’ll become at posting a comment.

Ok, now off to read a few posts in my rss feeder, I have over 1000 to choose from, and find one to comment on. Shouldn’t be too hard….

Sometimes I think that this is time wasted; but today has proved to be incredibly constructive in terms of writing my blogs. The amount of information which I have picked up has been absolutely incredible and it is a pleasure to be able to utilize it; unfortunately, I think it's going to require the purchase of some more memory as things are becoming very slow...

Just this morning I installed an Interactive Food Map of Ireland

over on Vinca's In Tha Kitchen and opened an acount with CoComment, which will allow me to keep up with the many conversations that I seem to be joining in with on the sites that I visit. As I get used to that facility, I will probably add the widget to my blogs so that my readers can share the conversations too.

In the course of all this I noticed that my foodie blog has now got a Google rating and I am absolutely delighted with this. It has only happened since I registered the blog on Google analytics, which is what I'd already done with my general blog Polly's Peri-wrinkle's & Peircing's! It seems that things are beginning to take off since I did that and it makes me wonder why so many of the more established blogs with huge readerships and numerous awards haven't even got a foot on the ladder yet.

Could this be something to do with the pay per post fiasco? Apparently, Google have been penalising people who subscribe to this form of generating income by withdrawing their page rankings! While this appears to be true, as in I've heard it from a variety of sources ; my friend Jean recently joined the pay per post ranks and has recently got her big toe on the ladder at least. I'm going to be watching her blog with renewed interest now; waiting for the bar to change from white to green...

There is only one problem with my checking in to monitor the page ranking situation and that is that I prefer to use my Mozilla Firefox browser over Explorer. The reasons are pretty simple; I find that Firefox is quicker to load than Explorer.

If I need to do some research on either myself or the rest of the blogging community I have to switch browsers which isn't very hard at all. Unfortunately now that I am using so many downloaded and uploaded programmes this is affecting things quite badly here; but at least my conscience is clear now that I have evidence of my hours of hard work banging away on the computer!

Maybe having enrolled in a couple of affiliate programmes will generate some income thereby allowing me to upgrade the computer and install some memory...

Polly Peirce

Purveyor of Fine Hand-made Irish Greeting Cards & Wedding Stationary

Just when I thought I'd put the 21st century newsroom to bed, along comes a further brainwave about conceptualising newsgathering in an online environment (the area I covered in part 2: Distributed Journalism). It seems to me that the first stage for any journalist or budding journalist lies along two paths: subscribing to a reliable collection of RSS feeds (and email alerts); and exploring a collection of networks. The first part is passive; the latter, more active. So I've called it, tongue-in-cheek, "Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering". But if that sounds too Woody Allen for you, you could call it "Aggregating-Networking Newsgathering".

Not quite as catchy, though, is it?

Note: an edited version of this was published in Journalism.co.uk as How to: use RSS and social media for newsgathering

As you can see from the diagram above, each RSS element has a social equivalent. Here's the detail:

Blog and site feeds/Social RSS readers

This is a basic requirement for any journalist: know the news sources - mainstream and blogs - in your specialist areas, and subscribe to their RSS feed using any of the many RSS readers out there. The result should be a one-stop page that you check into every morning that aggregates any new stories since you last checked. You may want to develop further strategies, such as folders for different areas, or for feeds that you check every day, every week, or less often.

But some RSS readers do more than just allow you to subscribe to feeds - they have social elements. Google Reader, for example, will "recommend" feeds you might be interested in (in a panel on the right of the screen), based on the feeds you already subscribe to (and what their subscribers also read). Bloglines, in addition, allows you to click on any of your feeds and see others who subscribe to that feed - and what other feeds they subscribe to (see image below - although this feature doesn't appear to be included in their latest beta). Other readers will have similar functions (if they don't, consider switching reader - you can export your subs across very easily). This is a great way to find new sources of news and information.

Twitter and Twitter tools

Microblogging service Twitter is a particularly up-to-the-minute source of news - again, with RSS feeds you can subscribe to, as well as mobile notifications. Twitter is by nature social - you choose to 'follow' someone's 'tweets' (updates); and people choose to follow you. You can see who someone is following, and who is following you. There are also tools like Twubble, which will recommend twitterers based on your friends, and Twits Like Me, which recommends twitterers based on interest. These can lead to useful contacts and sources of news you might not otherwise have come across.

A good way to find Twitterers in your area is to look for links on their blogs and article pages, while Twitter is searchable too. But that's just the start. You can search Twitter itself for specific people, but if you're covering a local patch, Twitterlocal allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of tweets within a certain geographical radius, while specialist reporters should subscribe to results of relevant keyword searches using Tweetscan. If you know an event is coming up that is likely to spark protest (e.g. the running of the Olympic torch) then it's a good idea to set up this feed in advance.

Bookmarking site feeds, networks and tags

Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit (plus all of these) are a goldmine of information and leads. As well as being searchable, most offer RSS feeds of individual tags, contributors (anyone who uses the site to bookmark webpages), and networks (collections of contributors). At the very least, a journalist should be subscribing to feeds of keywords in their area (e.g. this is the feed for the tag 'social bookmarking'), and if possible, prolific bookmarkers interested in the same topics (here is the feed for my bookmarks) or networks of bookmarkers (here's mine).

But to do the latter, journalists need to use the sites themselves - the more active you are, the more you will get out. Every time you bookmark a webpage, you can see who else has bookmarked it (see image below). You can see who bookmarked it first (and is therefore potentially the quickest source). You can see their comments, and the tags they use. You can see what else they're bookmarking. And you can add them to your network so you're kept up to date on what they're bookmarking generally.

All of this can generate more useful contacts (the bookmarkers), more sources of news, and more understanding of your area.

Facebook feeds/Social networks

Journalism is all about contacts. Social networks are a fantastic way of finding and managing them, whether those are existing contacts, contacts of contacts (which you can now see), or members of relevant interest groups (the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group is one you may consider joining ;)). You may want to join more than one social network: Facebook is a good catchall, but LinkedIn is good for more professional networking, while there may be specific 'beat' networks you can join - such as for doctors. Alternatively, you can create your own using Ning.

One great feature of Facebook is its feeds, which include Friends Status Updates and Friends Posted Items (both in the lower right corner). Again, subscribe.

Google Alerts/'similar pages'

Google's whole success is built on social media: its rankings are calculated (in part) from how many people link to a site. But it's worth exploring other features too. Every result from a search, for example, will include a link to 'similar pages'. This is a great way of refining your search. Similarly, the advanced search feature includes the ability to search for pages that link to a particular website.

Meanwhile, it's basic journalism practice now to set up email alerts for particular search terms. You can do this through Google Alerts - the default setting is 'Comprehensive', but it's better to use the drop-down menu to select the more specific 'News', 'Groups' or 'Blogs'. Alternatively, any search done through Google News or Google Blog Search or Google Groups will give you the option to sign up to email alerts or, for the first two, an RSS feed.

Flickr feeds, tags and clusters

For anyone who needs images or needs to talk to photographers, Flickr allows you to subscribe to feeds by individual photographers, or to particular tags (you'll find them at the bottom of each page).

But the site's real strength is its social features. A simple search will bring you simple results - but click on any tag in those results, and you'll be presented with a tag cluster (see image below). This draws on user behaviour to suggest other tags you might be interested in, as well as omitting irrelevant results. You can click through to results from the cluster, generate another cluster from another tag, or go to results from an individual tag. From there you can rank results based on recency or - another social feature - "most interesting".

And of course you can see a tag cloud of the most popular tags at the moment - a good way of getting a feel for the zeitgeist.

If you're more interested in people than pictures, clicking on any photographer's profile will allow you to see their 'contacts' and groups, while you can browse profiles based on interests and other biographical information (you can also search groups and people).

YouTube feeds/related videos

Like Flickr, YouTube is a social beast. Click on any video and you'll be presented with related videos; click on any user page and you can see who they subscribe to. You can rank results by how users have rated it, or how many times it's been viewed. And you can click on a video's tags to browse through content that way. The site also hosts a number of groups under the Community tab.

In addition the site offers numerous feeds - a list of the main ones, plus instructions on how to create feeds for individual users or tags, can be found here.

Technorati feeds, fans and tags

You'll see the orange RSS icon throughout Technorati - you can subscribe to headlines and 'rising posts and stories', and filter by 'attention'. You can subscribe to results from a particular search, or a specific tag (a motoring correspondent, for instance, might subscribe to search results for "Longbridge plant", or the tag 'Ford'). You can even subscribe to blog reactions to a particular site.

Equally impressive are the social features. Search results are presented with recommended tags you might also want to click on; blogs and posts are ranked by 'authority' (numbers of reactions); and you can see which Technorati members have declared themselves a 'fan' of a blog - then browse through the other blogs they've 'faved'.

And like Flickr, you can get a flavour of "what's percolating in blogs now".

LibraryThing feeds and tags

Finally, it's worth noting the social and RSS features of books community LibraryThing. As well as the traditional author and title fields, the search facility allows you to search by tags, members, groups and talk messages. You can then subscribe to a feed of results for that search, or to a feed for a particular member, group or tag.

It'll come as no surprise that the site also offers related tags and members whenever any search is made, while the site's groups offers one way to find leads and contributors.

coComment feeds, groups and tags

coComment is a service which tracks your comments for you, so people can subscribe to a feed of comments you make on other sites, or communicate with you directly. This has obvious applications for journalists - if you find someone in your 'beat' who is a good source of leads, you're going to be interested in their comments, and what they're commenting on. If they're a member of coComment, you can subscribe to their feed. If not, a flattering email suggesting they check it out might be required...

Aside from the feeds there are plenty of social elements at coComment - you can browse tags, look at popular 'conversations', join groups, or browse commenters themselves.

Some journalists might think it's too early for coComment to be useful to them - at first glance, most 'conversations' appear to be in the technological sphere - but getting in there early and spreading the word could give you a significant advantage as the technology spreads.

All this, however, is only laying the foundations for having your 'ear to the ground' - saving yourself time through use of RSS, and generating contacts and engendering serendipity through social media.

No doubt I've omitted some RSS and social service-providing sites (for example, other RSS readers, while a social podcasting service must be out there) - and overlooked some tricks on the above sites. I'd love to know your recommendations and tips.

Wuala - "the skype of online storage". Simple, neat. Watch these guys.

Mixin - a really exciting new way to organise your (online) social life. Gra is going to love it. Destined to be very popular with the Twitter/Dopplr/Upcoming... possibly even the Facebook set. Can't wait to try it out with the Brighton/London folk. Well mashed and stirred. "Social applications have a long way to go, currently in their infancy and strangely disappointing." Mixin is meant to take things on to the next level. Let's see how it goes. "Helping you digest the noise". Scoble is rawther juiced up about the whole thing. Rightly so.

Pixelux - interactive physical simulation technology.... brand/media experience channels, multi-sensory. Takes the stuff we have seen in conceptual art spaces forward into super slick stuff that the retail marketing folk will clamour for. It will be in our face, seducing us to buy buy buy before you can shake a mouse at it. But beautiful, beautiful stuff. Will be good to see what the cultural and heritage sector can do with it. LCD, Plasma screen, projection on to floors.

Cocomment - "Helping you track your conversations on the web." You know how we struggle to manage our conversations in the blogsophere? Well here's a great free tool that really helps. Let's all get on and give a go... Enhances conversations, helps you track what you said and who said what to whom. The speed has improved a lot recently. More work to be done on the useability we hear from early adopters (eg. Scoble). Another social networkto maintain though? I'll let you know...

clipperz - "think of it as a web rollodex"... "free and anonymous online password manager"

and more to come.

Downloading Wuala closed alpha trial right now, just registered for cocomment. Love it. Love seeing the response from the expert, whizzbang panel, asking all the tricky questions that Gra would be thinking and asking if he was here. Sniff.

So far every venture that's been chosen is fantastic. Really enjoying being in at the ground level with "The New".

Somewhat ashamed to have posted the question about "where else if not Venture night..." on the LIFT community blog.

Battery just about dead, brain full, drinks are calling... out the door right now...

Basically, CoComment is just a program add-on that sits in your browser that collects and keeps track of anywhere you leave comments on a blog. Why is this handy? Because I have a terrible memory and have a hard time remembering where I leave comments sometimes, so I can look in one place and go back to those exact places to read follow-ups etc. Plus it eliminates those annoying email notices of follow-ups that some blogs offer.

Besides, you get to put a cool little button on your blog like this one if you want, and who doesn't like little buttons on their blog? Oh, and it tracks comments via RSS, so you can keep up with your comments in a reader.

Dang, I sound like a salesman here. Oh well. As I said, I just really dig the program, it's free, it's useful and uber nerdy. Can you go wrong?

Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with, work for or officially advertising for CoComment. I'm just pitching it because I think it's cool.

Join the CoComment bandwagon.

Don't let the deformed, yet seemingly happy, mascots turn you off from CoComment. They kinda grow on you...

CoComment, for those of you that haven't given it a try yet, is a great plug-in that aggregates all the comment threads you contribute to on various blogs. There are so many great conversations that take place around blog posts; however, most people leave a comment and never check back to follow up. With CoComment it makes it easy to keep tabs on various threads and increases interaction, which can only be a good thing.

I'm not affiliated in anyway, but I love the app and hope all my regular readers check it out so we increase the chatter in this blog.

Look forward to hearing more of everyone's insights.

Sounds awesome right? Track every self-important comment you make, and then share with other commenters and even subscribe to their comments, bringing a further social element to the world of blog commenting? Yeah, it would be amazing - if any of it worked. While co.mment was simple, it did what it was supposed to. coComment, after releasing their v2 beta this week, hasn't worked properly at all. Not only does it track that which you'd never want followed - your Twitters, for example - it often interferes with Firefox and AJAX on other sites. Flickr is unusable, while even basic sites have pauses and glitches while coComment figures things out. To top it all off, it nags you when an update is available but won't let you actually click on the popup that tells you.

I have no desire to bash the folks over at coComment - after all, they have a really great idea: allow people to track what they're saying around the web while forming social connections with other commenters. Trouble is, as Scoble points out, a comment tracker that gets in the way of you commenting just isn't on (you can thank my dad for that phrase: "That's just not on"). For the time being, I have (reluctantly) disabled the extension in my browser. For such a great idea, I hope the folks over at coComment realise what potential their product has and sort out the bugs and hiccoughs. With the sort of impression they've made this week, it can't be soon enough.

Here's what's going on. I just tried to upload a comment over on CNET, and another one here to respond to someone. But Cocomment is giving me an error message on both and keeping my comments from uploading.

Cocomment should NEVER keep a comment from being posted. Even if the service is down. But it does. It's very frustrating.

Until I stop seeing these kinds of error messages I can not recommend Cocomment which pains me greatly because it provides a great deal of utility when it does work.

To be fair, they are loading up version 2 today. Hopefully that fixes this bug. But for now it's frustrating me to no end. Luckily I have a browser that doesn't have Cocomment loaded. Praise be Parallels on the Mac!

I'm now signed into CoComment in preparation for the launch of the service on Monday. My username is: RobertScoble. It'll be interesting to see how the new version works -- they are turning on a ton of new features, CEO Matt Colebourne told me at the Satisfactory party on Thursday. That's a photo of Matt included on this post. I'm off to comment on some other people's blogs and I'll let you know how it goes. This service has come a long way since I broke the story about the first version from a Swiss Chalet.

While I'm here I'm including some code to claim my link blog over on Technorati.

Technorati Profile

Per una volta localizzazione è da subito anche in italiano, per cui copincollo dalla presentazione:

"Entra nella conversazione -Seguite le vostre conversazioni su differenti piattaforme (blog, forum, comunità in linea…). Segui - coComment segue tutte le tue conversazioni online che stai seguendo in un solo spazio e ti informa quando delle nuove conversazioni sono state aggiunte. Condividi - Pubblica le tue conversazioni sul tuo blog in un click o inviale per email ad un amico. Esplora - Guarda i top commentatori, quali articoli o posts generano più traffico, chi commenta nelle stesse tue conversazioni."

Insomma, una piattaforma web-based (con in + l'ormai quasi immancabile Firefox extension) per tenere traccia dei propri commenti. In modo molto comodo - e maneggevole.

WP ha qualcosa di (parzialmente) simile, ma limitato ai commenti fatti sui blog ospitati da Wordpress stessa. Altri plugin di blog e forum consentono di essere informati via mail sullo stato di una conversazione / thread / commenti a un post.

CoComment è su questa stessa linea. Due passi avanti.

A me, che sono un commentatore medio/mediocre (10 commenti a settimana, forse meno) CoComment piace e risulta utile. Immagino possa esserlo molto di + x hard-bloggers & cia.

"Un investisseur entre dans coComment, la start-up de Swisscom
L'entreprise de capital-risque japonaise Netage Capital Partners, Inc entre dans le capital de la société de services Internet coComment, maintenant autonome. Cette semaine, Netage a acquis 40% de coComment pour USD 1,5 millions. coComment a vu le jour en février 2006 en tant que service web 2.0, dans le cadre d'un projet de développement lancé par Swisscom Innovations. Le service proposé offre aux utilisateurs une gestion simplifiée mais étendue de commentaires sur Internet, notamment via les blogs. (...)

The Swisscom web 2.0 start-up coComment raises 1,5 million USD in venture capital. Surely you did not expect the day you'll see the words Web 2.0, start-up, venture capital and Swisscom in the same sentence? Thanks to coComment, it's a done deal!

Investor acquires stake in Swisscom start-up company coComment
Japanese venture capital company Netage Capital Partners, Inc. is to invest in the new Web service start-up company coComment. This week Netage formally acquired a 40% share in the company at a cost of USD 1.5 million. coComment started out in February 2006 as a Web 2.0 service launched by Swisscom Innovations as part of a development project. The service enables comments posted on the Internet, for example in blogs, to be managed simply and transparently. (...)"

Communiqué de presse de Swisscom en français, 21.12.06

English press release by Swisscom, 12.21.06

technorati tags: coComment, Swisscom, Netage Capital Partner, swiss start-up, web 2.0

가입된 사이트들 정리하다가 다시 이래저리 돌아보니깐.
blog commenting 말고도 웹사이트에 대한 commenting을 정리할 수가 있네.

"Blogger Web Comments" 하고 같이 사용하면 재미있을듯 하다.
블로그로 포스팅하기는 좀 그런... 그런 내용들을 정리하면 될듯하네.

- Performancing 에서 blog tag 추가할 수 있는 방법은 없을까? ㅎㅎ

Ce n'est pas de la science-fiction. Je peux réellement le faire en un clic, grâce à un de ces nouveaux services que certains étiquètent web 2.0. Aujourd'hui, j'ai voulu marquer, pour pouvoir le retrouver plus tard, le commentaire que j'ai laissé sur un blog dont tout le monde parle malgré l'anonymat de ses auteurs.

Sur le tableau de bord, les lumières bleues clignotent paisiblement. Un aéroport calme en pleine nuit. Le vol de Moscou a atterri dix minutes en avance. Les passagers de Lisbonne attendent calmement leurs bagages. Quelques baillements à peine réprimés. Il n'y a que les douaniers qui sont éveillés. L'écran se rafraîchit. Tout en ordre, rien à signaler.

Soudain, le clignotement s'affole. 355 blips simultanés. Des centaines de signaux radio en provenance des quatre coins de l'univers. Tous en même temps. Qui a découvert une exoplanète?

Arekarlsen dit: "Amen! We are some in Norway sharing your vision". S'adresse-t-il à moi? Je ne me rappelle pas avoir écrit un sermon qui puisse inspirer les ouailles norvégiens. "What's the controversy" se moque ChickyBabe. "I'd wish you a Happy Monday back, but it's Monday, not a reason for happiness", répond Fence. "That was funny :)" conclut Eddie.

355 commentaires s'affichent, signés de leurs auteurs, précipitant leurs voix dans une cacophonie. Ce n'est pas la conversation que je croyais suivre. Je suis tombée dans un trou spatiotemporel. Une sorte de salle d'embarquement géante où patientent des voyageurs intergalactiques. Des messages qui n'ont pas encore atteint leur destinataire. Politique, religion, relations entre les hommes. Trucs de nanas. Bribes d'intimité ou affirmations péremptoires, c'est selon.

C'est la quatrième dimension. J'entends tous ces messages. De quelles conversations ils font partie, je n'en sais fichtre rien. Elle a lieu partout, dans toutes les langues. Elle rassemble parfois une poignée de personnes, parfois des milliers. Plusieurs se ressemblent. Les mêmes idées émergent en même temps à plusieurs endroits. Ma radio de bord capte quelques instantanés de cette conversation globale.

Il y a une explication rationnelle. C'est ça. Mon vaisseau s'est échoué dans la ZoneX de Blogger.

clicca qui o su foto per visionare recensione

Fonte:Mobile-review

"They should roll out a plug-in for the major blog services so that CoCommenting is natively supported. I, as a blogger, would install the plugin, and then CoComment could look the user up based on the email address they leave behind in the comment fields."

Out of the 10 last times I left a comment somewhere, in about 12 I forgot to push the friggin' button.

Thankfully, they said they're working on it.

An important part of the event will be the startup competition : 24 companies presenting themselves in 5 minutes (that will be 300 seconds sharp). Currently, 22 companies are known, the last 2 will be choosen by the community early next week. Let's have a short look at some of these startups (in alphabetical order) :

1. andUnite : a German startup with the powerful idea of connecting people that do similar searches on search engines
2. Backbase : the providers of a robust Ajax framework (3 million copies in 80+ countries)
3. Bemba : Dutch startup, providing a button allowing to share any content with your network
4. Beezbox : out of Paris, they enable companies to engage with their communities on social networks
5. ConfNetwork : a tool to facilitate networking at conferences (premiering at TheNextWeb)
6. CoComment : a strong swiss startup that materialized the "commentosphere", an underlooked component of the blogosphere
7. eBuddy : based in Amsterdam, their browser based chat & messaging service allows millions to connect to MSN, AOL, on the web or on the mobile (recently raised €6.5M funding)
8. Empressr : Ajax/Flash based web presentation company out of New York (they've been out for a while)
9. Fav.or.it : plays in the RSS aggregator category, with a twist (or two), allowing to post comments without leaving the window, and to cut 'slices' of what is of interest to you
10. Fleck : based in Amsterdam (and with an overlap with TheNextWeb people), brought the social dimension into the browser
11. Goojet : manages your mobile "spaces" ; has won LeWeb3 startup competition and raised a €2.3M 'seed-round' (now this starts to sound US-style)
12. Hoera : under construction at the time of going to (word)press
13. Introniche : facilitates cross-promotion between niche sites
14. Lookery : an ad network for Facebook and social networks, using (anonymized) profiling data ; has raised $900K seed round (and more) from prominent investors
15. Netlog : this belgium-based company would be a heavyweight by European standards : >30 million registered users, it is sometimes compared to a "european facebook"
16. Radionomy : french and belgian team, wants to revolutionize the online radio, by allowing anyone to setup one
17. Symbaloo : with a name that sounds crafted by Kipling, this startup is a new iteration on the "personalized home page" trick
18. Twingly : this links the blogosphere to traditional media (and back)
19. uberVU : a Romanian startup that aims nothing less than "manage all your content and all your conversations in one place"
20. Wakoopa : tracks and shares application usage on your desktop, has been compared to Last.fm and Alexa for desktop apps
21. Wauw.fm : allows to transfer and process the media files of your PC to make them available on your mobile
22. Webnode : web-based website builder and manager
23. ZiLok : last but not least, winner of the public award at Plugg, this company pitches itself as the "eBay of rental"

So it looks like it will be a hot and contrasted show among all those startups, demonstrating that the European web 2.0 scene is alive and kicking. We will profile some of them in more detail.

And also wait anxiously for the last 2 candidates...

Rebecca Jennings from Forrester Research gave us some facts and figures about the European social demographics. Her study splits the public depending on their degree of involvement with social media ("participation ladder") into Creators (10%), Critics (19%), Collectors (9%), Joiners (13%), Spectators (40%) and Inactives (53%).

Max Niederhofer from Atlas Venture got us excited about the online gaming market, and offered four ways to build a 100 M$ company :

• build the world's largest casual game ("Poke" on Facebook being the current leader...)
• build Europe's digital distribution platform for games
• get micro-currency applied to gaming
• successful browser based MMOG (that one would have to be bootstrapped by its founders)

An entrepreneurs panel moderated by Colette Ballou offered insights by Rodrigo Sepulveda (vpod.tv), Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (several startups, including Flock and TheNextWeb), Simon McDermott (Attentio.com), Andrej Nabergoj (Noovo). Some highlights :

• markets are local by default ; it is important to find the right partners to help launch in other countries ;
• beware of cash flow : sales cycles tend to be really long, companies are often afraid of dealing with startups, and pay with long delays
• Rodrigo came up with some delightful analogies : starting a company is like having sex for the first time (you don't have a clue) ; and setting up a subsidiary in Spain is like a wedding (with a long ceremonial by the notary)
• Andrej : people are key, take the time to find exceptional people for the initial team ; it will be the matrix out of which the company will grow ;
• Boris : the hardest thing is just to start ; get started !

The startup rally saw the presentation by 18 companies (2 had forfeited). Some projects depended on a quite technical platform, like Cellity, Floobs, MyOwnDB, Trutap... Other were mostly a nice idea, well put into form, such as HumanGrid, TVTrip, Mobiya. After seeing all of them, Alenty and Radionomy remained among my own favorite, truly "2.0" in essence (some of the former still smelled a bit "web 1.0", I won't tell which).

The three finalists ended up being :

• Bragster : a platform for sharing "dares", in a "Jackass meets Facebook and YouTube" fashion (and indeed one founder threw a pie on his co-founder's face on stage)
• Viewdle : a platform for doing elaborate searches on videos (with a COO in a nice suit and tie, in complete contrast to the Bragster guys)
• ZiLok : a rental marketplace, started in Belgium, France, UK, US (and two cool founders as well, even without pie-throwing)

Viewdle won the Jury award, while ZiLok went away with the prize of the public. Two companies to watch ! (Bragster is already being watched by 800.000 unique visitors monthly)

The investor panel gathered Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Paul Fisher (Advent Venture Partners), Reshma Sohoni (SeedCamp), Alexis Bogaert (Dexia Private Equity / Arkafund), moderated by Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK & Europe). Some points :

• Paul Fisher : eastern and central european markets are very hot ; so is the next wave of internet advertising ;
• Julie Meyer : a core group of people build companies counter-cyclically with the stock market, that's a smart timing
• Reshma Sohoni : there are a lot more angel investors now ; start thinking internationally early on
• Mike Butcher mentioned "Enterprise 2.0" as an area of interest for the future

The panel on the Social Web was very promising, with very competent people like Olivier Creiche (Six Apart), Matt Colebourne (coComment), Lorenz Bogaert (Netlog), Jan-Joost Kraal (eBuddy). I found the discussion only mildly interesting, with people agreeing that it was very important to offer fine privacy control ("I don't want my mother /girlfriend to see that I'm doing this"). Brands and companies better beware of these new social venues, as put by Matt Colebourne :

the era in which you can control what people say about your brand is gone.

Still, François Petavy from Eyeka tried to show how brands can indeed try and organize the creativity that can spring up from a dedicated user community.

Rudy De Waele (from m-trends.org) delivered an insightful presentation on the future of mobile, citing dozens of new innovative startups.

As always, it's also in the alleysides that we get to meet some interesting entrepreneurs and projects, such as : Rummble, MyID.is, or TripSay.

All in all, a pretty good harvest of new and exciting projects to share with you in the next days and weeks.

fortunately there are easier way to such stuff

1- Essentials : web browser

If you are a blogger then you need a modern web browser that helps you do the job faster easier and can integrate tools to help you with specific tasks .

First of all : STAY A WAY FROM IE.

there is a lot of browsers but the most important ones are :

Firefox: The award-winning Web browser which just celebrated 500.000.000 downloads , it's very secure, and fully customizable via extensions to your online life.

Opera : The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser ,that's what it's website says any way . BUT it's not open source and it doesn't support extensions .

Flock: which is basically Firefox modified to work better with tools like internal blog editor, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook .

it's the perfect choice for your social cyber life and my own personal choice

here is a video to demonstrate how to use Flock

2- Easier posting

i'm assuming that by now you use either Flock or Firefox .

Flock already has an internal blog Editor that works with blogger, Wordpress and most blogging platform ,but honestly i don't like it very much .

So i use an extension called ScribeFire which works perfectly with both Firefox and Flock .

Here is a tutorial on how to install and use Scribefire

3- Easier reading

If you follow a lot of blogs it will be very hard to just go to every one of it and view it manually .

the answer to that is to use a feed reader

the feed reader is either an offline or web-based

the most famous readers are Bloglines and Google reader

personally i like google reader since it integrated into my all in one google account

here is a video to demonstrate google reader

4- easier comment tracking

i comment on a lot of blogs every day and i often forget where i was commenting and i don't know if someone has replied to my comment or not  .

the solution lies in a comment tracking tools like coComment .

which basically acts like a firefox extension that tracks the posts you comment on and inform you with the new updates .

you can install coComment for here or view their getting started section .

Enjoy an easier life :D