David Pogue Explores Blogosphere

David Pogue, my favorite New York Times technology columnist, talks to some famous blog celebrities on CBS News including Blogger.com founder Meg Hourihan and Wonkette.com founder Ana Marie Cox. [full video available online]

Meg shares an interesting story behind coining of the term "blog" - "A friend of ours said, I decided I'm not gonna call it 'web log' anymore; I'm gonna pronounce it 'we--blog.' So, we changed it all to blog."

Another eye-opening Blogger survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project has revealed that people now see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media but most Americans who run them do so as a hobby rather than a vocation.

About 77 percent of bloggers said they post to express themselves creatively rather to get noticed or paid. 37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.

Download Full Blogger Survey Report

Update: Patrix makes an interesting observation - "only 60% of the bloggers are white compared to 74% of Internet users, so effectively the minorities are making getting their voice out, if not getting heard."

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include Gmail Mail Merge (send personalized emails with Gmail ), Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and File Upload Forms ( receive files in Google Drive). Also see Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

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