There’s a gadget that has had our interest for a little while now. The first encounter was in St James’ Park, where this wallet sized device was enabling the real-time uploading of photos in the middle of a picnic. Vodafone has now launched the Novatel Wireless Intelligent Mobile Hotspot 2352 – or MiFi to its friends – available on a data package from now.

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One of the great things about social media and web 2.0 tools is just how easy it is to take content from one place and put it in to another – it is also why it so terrifies many it traditionalists.

This screencast shows how to take a image gallery from photo sharing site Flickr and place it into a WordPress blog post. The screen cast itself is embedded from Jing/Screencast.com to this site (which is a WordPress blog – did you see what I did there?). [more...]

The ‘Twitter Hack’ is all over the blogosphere, although it isn’t really a hack on Twitter as such. An individual (or team) going by the name “Hacker Croll” gained access to the personal accounts of Twitter employees and associates, according to an email from Evan Williams (@EV – Twitter founder).

Based on the screen shots circulating the web, it would appear that admin staff at Twitter were using gmail for sensitive activities such as domain name administration – this meant that the hacker could potentially have used their access to redirect Twitter.com to a malicious site. Of course this is all great blogging fodder for the likes of TechCrunch, which is clearly enjoying baiting its readers. I don’t see that publishing Twitter’s company confidential information on a blog helps anyone, other than gaining traffic for the blog that posts it. [more...]

Automattic, the team behind blogging platform WordPress have announced the release of version 2.8 of the platform. Code named “Baker”, in the tradition of the platform’s jazz inspired naming, the release focusses on making the blogging experience even simpler than before, whilst adding over 180 new features.

2.8 builds on the developments that lead to the plugin browser, to add a theme browser into the WordPress interface. It enables you to search the WordPress theme directory, without leaving your wordpress blog. Tick box selection narrows down the theme choices from the thousands of free themes available. I’m not yet clear on how this will work for commercially supported themes, important to businesses that are blogging. Most businesses have a custom developed theme, so this will most likely not be an issue. [more...]

Today Imagini launched the VisualDNA Shops Beta. Behavioural Targeting is an increasingly hot area. On-line advertising models have a direct lineage from the off-line print world. Although the broad range of digital media enables marketing to be more targeted, most advertising is still based on a broadcast style model – everyone gets the same advert.

What if a web site had enough information about a visitor that it could target ads towards a specific user? Arguably this is better for the user (less irrelevant adverts) and better for the advertiser (better yields from each ad). The sensitivity – and sometimes the controversy – is how that additional information is gathered. [more...]