King  Gary 

Business 2.0 has opened up voting to invite people to “vote for the businesspeople who inspire, inform and infuriate you, from CEOs to entrepreneurs to media stars.”

Kevin Rose of Digg and Revision3/Diggnation fame is leading the pack in terms of number of votes by an extremely large margin, with 293,422 (the runner-up is Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, with 90,229 votes.) Even with the large number of votes, Kevin is only in 9th place in terms of his rating, whereas Mel is 5th.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Recently, I’ve been seeing a little icon on websites more and more often. Sometimes, when I least suspect it, I’ll be visiting a well-known open source project or a popular web application, and then my eyes will shift to a box that shows prominently on the homepage, linking to the same site.

I’m talking about the upcoming Webware awards, of course!

The button shown above is a common image seen on websites that have been nominated by the website in a total of 10 different categories; in the end, a total of 100 of the ‘best web 2.0 products’ will be announced on June 18, this coming Monday.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

A few weeks ago, Darren from ProBlogger asked me to create a new WordPress plugin for him, one which would save him countless hours that he had to spend before. That plugin is the Group Writing Project plugin, which is now used to help simplify the process that Darren has to go through whenever he decides to start a new project.

I’ve posted about the non-technical side of the plugin and the benefits that he gained from the plugin before, so in this post, I will walk through how a plugin like this is created, and the typical workflow and thinking that goes behind creating something like this.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Read/WriteWeb has announced that today is the “day without Google“, meaning that all participants are supposed to live today without using Google search (they should’ve made it more interesting by disallowing use of ALL Google services, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader!)

I just checked the average number of Google searches that I make a day, and it turns out that I do nearly 200 Google searches a day. I also have a total of 28,555 Google searches since Google started tracking my searches.

Could YOU live a day without Google search? I know I can’t!

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I’ve recently been receiving more spam comments on my blog that have bypassed WordPress‘ spam protection program, Akismet, more often than usual. I marked them as Spam, which aids Akismet in detecting these types of spam again and protects other bloggers using Akismet’s service from these comments which currently bypass the filters.

I also commonly receive email in Gmail that are spam and that bypass the filters. The Gmail spam protection system works similarly to Akismet’s, in that they both use a network filtration system by relaying any emails that one user considers spam to all the other users; the more times the same email or comment gets marked as spam, the more the system will believe that to be true and protect the other users from receiving the same item.

I’ve reached the point in both Gmail and WordPress where the number of spam/day that I get in my Gmail and the number of spam/day that I get in WordPress are about the same; I’ve currently got 12140 spam; divide that by 30 days, and that’s 405 spam per day. In WordPress, I’ve got 6130 spam comments, over 15 days; that’s 409 spam/day. They’re nearly the same by now.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Something Awful wrote an article talking about Wikipedia, discussing that if you take two articles that are similar (the example they give is Knight and Jedi Knight), then you would see that the article that is more related to nerds, which is the latter in this case, is longer and more comprehensive than the former.

TechCrunch also picked up on this, and Michael agreed with Something Awful and the claims that it makes. He says that “People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.”

I digress.

The examples that are given include the following:

• Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
• Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
• Girlfriend v. Video Games
• Half Life v. Half Life 2
• Love v. Masturbation
• Bathing v. Acne

I will analyze the first two examples, below.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Six Apart has announced that they will be releasing their Movable Type blogging platform as open source later on this year. This is a major move by the company which made a poor decision in the past when they heavily enforced their MT 3.0 license and which gave rise to WordPress to become a major player in the blogging platform arena, and arguably, the CMS world.

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has posted his thoughts on how he thinks the battle between WordPress and Movable Type will play out, now that both will soon be open sourced. WordPress has really taken a strong foothold and has now become the blogging platform of choice among millions of users worldwide.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Yesterday, Ask.com made a major relaunch of its search engine. The primary theme among its changes seems to be that its aiming for a more simpler, sleeker look overall so that there’s not as many things fighting for your attention.

Let’s face it. Here we have a company which rode atop a gimmick that was birthed during the dot-com bubble heyday; I’m talking about Ask Jeeves. Other search engines that also had a mascot include sites such as Mamma (one of the few that I can recall), and most of those have died off enough so that they hold a negligible share of web search. Ask is still around because they’ve managed to reinvent themselves as a search engine with a pretty good domain name, and I would say that that’s what’s kept them in the game thus far. If they were named something more web 2.0-ish, like Mahalo, then they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

There’s some chatter going on with regards to Guy Kawasaki‘s latest web venture, Truemors, a “rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.” (from from TechCrunch) and how Guy mentions that it (only) costs him $12,000 for the entire website to go from an idea to reality.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

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My latest post over at Blog Herald is entitled Quick tip: How to make the ‘Categories’ box bigger when writing WordPress posts.

Excerpt:

I’ve written at a couple blogs, including my own and Blog Herald (here), and quite often, I see that there are quite a number of post categories to choose from in order to tag my posts appropriately.

Below, you can see a typical listing of available post categories that you can use on a WordPress blog. As you can see, though, there are so many categories that the box requires a scroll bar.

Popularity: 9% [?]