Webware

--Self-promoting Google tips disappear (CNET News.com) After coming under the collective assail of tech bloggers for using "tips" to promote its own products, like Google Calendar and Google Maps, Google appears to have pulled the feature.

--LinkedIn launches LinkedIn Answers (Mashable!) Business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn has introduced a feature in which you can ask questions to members of your "network," somewhat like Yahoo Answers and the now-defunct Google Answers.

--Web 2.0 hits The Street (CNET News.com) Wall Street news site TheStreet.com, a very Web 1.0 operation, has … Read more

I heard the pitch for BizMileTracker at the New Tech Meetup last night. This service collects your car trip data so you can later deduct the expenses from your taxes. It sure beats keeping an odometer log in the car. Just identify your starting and ending points, and the application calculates your mileage.

You can set up repeating trips, which is handy. You can also see how much of a deduction you can claim for each trip, depending on which purpose you assign (business expenses are more deductible than medical trips, for example). The service is especially useful if you … Read more

Blorq is a straightforward RSS and Atom feed aggregator that compiles all the newest content you want to track. Blorq uses a relatively snappy interface that enables you to quickly browse and add feeds. There's a few neat Ajax effects thrown in, so reading stories doesn't require actually visiting the site, just clicking the title. There's also some simple keyboard shortcuts that let you navigate through stories and rate them for later viewing.

There's also a fairly extensive library of RSS and Atom feeds you can browse through and add to your favorites. Most of this … Read more

Meet the latest contender to plunge into the deep end of the YouTube-killer pool. Say it five times fast: Next New Networks. The bloggers are all talking about this recently-announced Web video endeavor today, and most of them are pretty cynical--especially since Next New Networks is not the brainchild of some ambitious entrepreneurs, but rather a bevy of big-media veterans, led by former Nickelodeon president and MTV Networks vice chairman Herb Scannell. After all, when the broadcast TV networks announced a plan to team up, Captain Planet-style, on a YouTube rival, bloggers were skeptical. (They're more optimistic about … Read more

Social networking via cell phones seems to be making a strong push lately. In the last few weeks alone we've covered Joopz, Groovr, PL8Scn, MySpace Mobile, and Gimme20, all services that let you use SMS text messages to communicate with others. Zemble, which launched its public beta version last month, is a free, group-based communication service that lets members send messages en masse to other members.

Similar to Joopz and 3Jam, Zemble lets you create your own group of phone or e-mail contacts and save it as a preset of sorts. Zemble calls these group presets "Zembles." … Read more

Comic books are hard to take seriously sometimes. They're even harder for the casual reader to pick up, which is where Comic Vine comes in handy. Like Wikipedia, Comic Vine is a user-created encyclopedia that can make you an instant expert, but just about comic books. The big difference between Comic Vine and a site like Wikipedia is the community and user submission, which is where Comic Vine steps it up in a big--make that super--way.

User profiles on Comic Vine let you become a superhero or villain. Instead of listing the usual social networking details, such as what … Read more

At the San Francisco New Tech Meetup Wednesday, Podaddies CEO Nate Pagel presented his new company, which puts ads into user-generated videos so that people can make a few bucks from their wacky cats' antics.

The service inserts a call to its ad engine at the end of a video, and displays a streaming QuickTime ad from its library. No matter where the file goes, the ad call goes with it. But not the ad itself; this way, the company gets to serve the ad on demand and can track ad plays and bill the advertiser for them (and cut … Read more

There are a few big question-and-answer sites out there--including Microsoft's QnA and Yahoo Answers--which partly explains why the small Q&A site FunAdvice.com has only 26,000 answers on it, even though it's been online since 2003. But FunAdvice has one feature that's unique (as far as I know): a widget that lists your outstanding questions, or latest answers, or areas of expertise (your choice). See my question widget at right.

FunAdvice doesn't rely on a points system like the big sites to encourage participation, nor will it help you monetize your expertise … Read more

Getting in touch with people from your past can be difficult, especially if they don't show up in a Google search or on popular social networks. The truth is, without a large Internet presence or a last name such as "Einstein," you're going to be tough to find for the casual searcher, which is where Long Time Lost attempts to fill in the gaps. Long Time Lost essentially lets you create a beacon to get the attention of the person for whom you're searching or others who know their whereabouts. This virtual beacon shows up … Read more