Mobile Stew

If you haven't already checked it out, then take 5 minutes to create a Newsvine account.  The service is out of beta now and is definitely benefiting from the extra seeders.

Combining the best of del.icio.us and digg in one site, with better category coverage this service will just grow and grow.

More:  Newsvine

This week, Sony Ericsson has signed a deal with Google, which enablesSony Ericsson to integrate Google's Blogger.com and Google Web Searchfeatures on all of its future mobile phones.

This meansblogger.com account holder with the new Sony Ericsson phone can writeand post content to his blog on the move using the bundles software. Soyou can post content to your blog even on a vacation, travel or awayfrom a computer. This is the first any mobile handsent manfacturerporviding this kind of features related to blogging. This shows howpopular is blogging in the present internet era and it looks likesurely this is going to be a hit feature.

READ MORE HERE

Thanks to some very kind Connected readers last night I've been able to try out the Newsvine Beta service and all I can say is it is amazing.  If Digg and Del.icio.us are Web 2.0 services then Newsvine is Web 2.5. 

Newsvine collates stories from various Associated Press sources, but also allows users to create their own news columns.  These columns can be seeded with articles created by each user or from links to external websites of interest.

Each article can be tagged a-la Del.icio.us, and also voted upon and in a similar fashion to Digg, with popular articles getting promoted to the homepage.

However, Newsvine has some key features that I think will make it stand out from the crowd:



- Revenue:  Any ad revenue from any articles ...

I guess I should have predicted this.  You wait months and months for a new service to arrive, in this case Feedlounge, and then along comes a better service which is free.

I've been using NewsAlloy thanks to TechCrunch's recommendation as my RSS reader for the last two days and I'm very impressed.  It does everything I could ask of it, and more importantly it is ultra-fast.  I think I'll stick with Google Reader though as it may be a bit slower, but I find it easier to use and I like the way it auto-updates.

Give it a whirl to see if you agree.

Related Posts:  RSS Reader - What Do You Use?

Following on from the success of MillionDollarHomepage.com a number of clones have no surprisingly sprung up.  I have to admit that when I saw the story even I did a quick search tosee if millionpoundhomepage.co.uk, milliondollareuro.com etc wasavailable.

I've just come across a new clone, PixMeUp.com and I'm posting about here to try and dissuade anyone who reads this article from getting sucked into investing in what is basically a Pyramid Scheme.  Lots of people are going to get hurt and I want to do what I can to stop that happening.

My article "More Ways To Speed Up Windows XP" got digged yesterday which nearly killed my site so I couldn't wait to see my stats this morning.  Connected Internet got 28K visitors yesterday, an increase of 366% over my usual average and 166K page views, an increase of 1000% over my usual!  I hope Blogware don't come after me as bandwidth usage yesterday was 9GB - my monthly allowance is only 2GB....

I'm a big fan of Digg, although I think it's becoming a victim of its own size.  For those of you who haven't used Digg yet, it is a news site that allows users to control which articles make it onto the homepage by 'digging' them.

Digg has grown tremendously fast and is proving extremely popular.  However, it does have its failings.  One major failing in my view is dupes, which I have experienced firsthand myself.  My post  10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows XP has been digged twice this month.  Although I'm not complaining about the extra traffic, I got 40K additional visitors yesterday from Digg, this shouldn't have happened.  On a sidenote what has been interesting is to see the difference responses, with the second digg ...

I'm a bit ashamed to say that I've only just checked out TailRank by Kevin Burton, who is the top poster on my blog but yet I haven't checked out his blog for a while.  Anyway, normally when I find a new tagging/social bookmarking/global site my eyes glaze over.  But, rather than being another Digg or del.icio.us clone, TailRank introduces some very cool and useful ideas that I think could make it the best site in the genre.

Suhasw spotted that one of my old posts has disappeared off my blog.  This has happened a few times to me for no apparent reason and it made me think - is there any way of viewing old versions of webpages?

I know that Google operates a cache, but this is no good to me as my site tends to get crawled everyday.  Do any other search engines or sites specialise in providing older caches?

What RSS reader do you use?  I've reduced the number of feeds that I read to a more manageable 99, but I'm still in the market for a better way to read these feeds.  If you are interested in whatfeeds I track, I've uploaded my OPML which you can download below.

I currently use Google Reader on my PC (it's also my homepage) as I find that it's the fastest because it loads the stories in the background while I'm browsing through the stories, and I just love the Ajax interface. 

On my mobile I currently use FreeNews.  I reviewed FreeNews  way back in July so I'm sure there must be better or alternative services on the market by now.