Webware

Comcast announced Thursday that it has rolled out its DOCSIS 3.0 service to four more markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The company now offers wideband services in 10 cities. Comcast claims it now reaches 20 percent of its customer base with the addition of those four markets and by the end of December, 10 million homes and businesses in each of the cities will be able to sign up for the service.

MapQuest was busy Thursday announcing the launch of two new widgets for Twitter and CareerBuilder users. According to the company, its Twitter widget on MapQuest Local will allow users to see what Twitter users are talking about in their city or town. For any city a user displays on the MapQuest site, a Twitter link will be displayed showing Twitter entries made by people in that area and a link to reply to or follow that person's stream. MapQuest's new Careers widget will store up to five different sets of search keywords and pull in job matches in an area the person is mapping. Both widgets are available now on MapQuest Local.

Online casual gaming service Outspark announced Thursday that it has officially launched a portal on its page that will allow its community of users to interact with each other by creating profiles and become friends to share user-generated videos. The company also announced that it's now using the open application programming interface from YouTube to host and embed user-generated videos directly on its own site.

Domain squatters acquired the domain name GeorgeWBushLibrary.com recently and sold it back to Yuma Solutions, the Web development company that forgot to renew it, for a profit of $34,990. Yuma originally purchased the domain name in 2007 for $3,000.

Blog publishing service Tumblr announced Thursday that it raised $4.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. The company's executives said they will use the funding to bolster cash reserves over the next few years and deploy paid features to increase revenue.

Posterous is a new blogging tool that forgos some of the traditional dashboards and will simply let you write the post in your favorite e-mail tool. Any photos, music, or videos you attach to your message will show up in a new blog post, which can later be administered on the Web. There's no sign-up, and in fact the first time you send a message to post@posterous.com it'll automatically create your blog and Posterous account for you.

Once registered you'll still get a way to create posts in your browser. There's a simple WYSIWYG editor, and a way to go back and edit previous creations. Like Tumblr, there's also a network of other users you can subscribe to, so their posts show up in a centralized stream. In many ways, Posterous resembles Tumblr, albeit with less structure when it comes to figuring out what you want to write about.

Writing blog posts via e-mail is definitely not a new thing. Google's Blogger product has had this for quite some time now, and will support both links and images that get pushed straight to a live post. Hosted WordPress blogs and Tumblr itself also support this feature. However, none of these products support comment forwarding, which lets you keep track of community discussion while you're away from your computer. In Posterous' case you'll get a new e-mail for every new comment with the option to reply. If you do (through your e-mail client of course) that reply will be pushed live as a threaded comment. Not too shabby.

[via DownloadSquad]

An example of a finished Posterous post. Any included photos get slapped into a photo gallery.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Simple blogging service Tumblr is launching an exciting new feature in the coming weeks. Founder David Karp swung by our offices yesterday to give me a sneak peek, and it's a brilliant idea. In short, it lets you add a submit button to your Tumblog that lets anyone and everyone write something for you to put on your blog.

It uses Tumblr's vanilla-flavored posting tool, so users can add pictures, links, audio and video--or write a full-blown blog post with the WYSIWYG editor. Those posts then go in a queue the blog owner (or fellow administrators) can give the once over, then push straight to the blog.

Users who submit a link or story to your Tumblog get the same publishing experience they'd find on their own Tumblr blogs. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Tumblr / CNET Networks)

The service is soft launching the new submit feature on about a dozen popular community blogs, followed by an invite-only private beta to regular Tumblr users. Karp told me they got the idea for it after watching a makeshift group blog by a collection of female Tumblr users called the Tumblinas. They were using Tumblr's special e-mail uploader to let readers send in content that would be instantly published to the front page of the blog.

To solve the problem of having inappropriate content being published, Karp's solution was to take those submissions people would have sent directly to the blog and drop them into an upcoming queue. That way, anyone who is administrating the blog could go over the posting and give it the yay or nay to post to the front page. Administrators also have the option to go in and edit a post before publishing, adding their own wrapper of analysis or commentary around the original post.

To help source the content, proper attribution is given to whoever submitted the news. Since Tumblr is a social network in itself, posters can either post the news anonymously or with their Tumblr username, which will give readers a link back to their Tumblogs. In many ways it's like taking a comment system and turning into a publishing medium.

The new submission tool will be available as a standard feature to Tumblr Pro members, a level of service coming later this year. Pro members will get some other goodies, like new and highly tweakable themes and special page layouts. There are 10 features currently in development that have been designed specifically with pro members in mind--the rest of which Karp is keeping close to his sleeve.

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For quite some time I've been playing with Tumblr, the latest darling of the New York tech scene.

Tumblr (earlier coverage here), founded by 21-year-old David Karp, has been making headlines because of its interesting not-quite-a-blog-platform format and its big-name investors: Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Next New Networks co-founder Fred Seibert, and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick. (Lodwick recently started a Tumblr blog with his girlfriend, Star magazine editor-at-large Julia Allison, and everyone around the Alley likes to pretend they don't read it.)

I like Tumblr. I think it could be a whole lot more "social," since the friends list function does leave quite a bit to be desired, and I'm still not quite sure how exactly the company plans to make money. But on the positive side, it's simple, fun, and aesthetically pleasing. I also have quite a few friends who have been jumping on board; Tumblr seems to appeal to "creative" types as well as Web 2.0 early adopters, so it makes for a fun mix.

Yikes! All I wanted to do was share a photo of my hair!

(Credit: Tumblr)

Unfortunately, on Tuesday morning I was attempting to upload an extremely awesome photo to my Tumblr account--to be more specific, visual proof of how badly I need a haircut--and I was greeted with repeated error messages. Ouch. Is my hair really that atrocious?

It finally worked after about 10 minutes of trying (yes, I was that desperate to show the world a photo of me with my bangs falling past my cheekbones), so I'm glad that Karp & co. are being attentive about monitoring glitches. Microblogging platform Twitter, after all, was plagued by downtime in its early days, which some might connect to the fact that it has still failed to expand beyond the early adopter "nerd herd" (credit NBC's Chuck). Let's hope Tumblr scores a better shot.

By the way, I still need a haircut.

Soup is a microblogging service, very similar to Tumblr (review), which gives users a quick and easy blog to post all sorts of small bits of content to. It also lets you plug in any old RSS feed, or add your user name on popular services like Digg, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, and Twitter to have your activity on any of the sites automatically republished to your Soup blog. The goal is to have an easy-to-use blog that doubles as a visual feed-hub of your content publishing habits on other services.

Import your feeds from all sorts of services to your Soup microblog.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Like Tumblr, there's an integrated community. You can have friends whose Soup blog posts get thrown together into a master feed. There's also a neat feature where you can repost anything that's on their Soup blogs onto your own with a single click. Soup also posts everyone's newest posts to the site's front page if they've made their blog publicly available.

Setting up the service is a snap, and Soup even lets you create an entire blog before requiring you to register for an account. There are five themes to skin your blog with, along with a color chooser that lets you tweak every aspect of the page. Sadly missing, however, is a way to resize the width, as all of the themes are almost excessively narrow, which ultimately makes reading longer text stories a pain.

Soup is worth a spin if only to play with its editing interface, which is slick and functional. Feature-by-feature Tumblr's got it beat, but both accomplish the same thing with a fun, care-free feel. How things like Twitter and the Facebook status message have created this new style of fitting as much "oomph" into a small space fascinates me. It's a writing style with such stringent limitations on its structure, that it's almost like a haiku.

[via Read/WriteWeb]

HeyCast is a new service from the folks that made HeyWatch [review], the online video conversion service. It lets you grab videos from popular hosting sites such as YouTube, Google Video, and Apple's Quicktime movie trailers site, and clump them together into a handy RSS feed you or anyone else can subscribe to in iTunes or other feed readers. The feed isn't just your standard RSS though--HeyCast grabs the Flash videos, converts them, and makes them available for offline viewing on your computer or portable devices.

I gave it a go this morning and came across a few hiccups. My main qualm is that HeyCast seems designed to be incredibly restrictive to novice users who want to use it for free. Since the service grabs these Web videos and converts them into iPod-friendly MP4 video files, it requires users to purchase encoding credits from sister-product HeyWatch. Users also need a place to host the files, which requires them to have their own FTP server or an account with Amazon.com's S3 Web storage service. If you don't have access to either of these, you're limited to just five videos that get capped off at one minute each.

I love the idea of letting people make their own podcast feeds using various Web video content, although HeyCast makes it a little harder than it should be. On a publishing level, simpler solutions can be had setting up something short and sweet with Tumblr, or creating a full-fledged blog with services such as Blogger or WordPress.com. For full-fledged media aggregation and distribution like what HeyCast is attempting to offer, simple solutions don't seem readily available--yet.

HeyCast RSS feeds can be viewed as video microblogs, or subscribed to in iTunes or other RSS subscription services.

(Credit: HeyCast.com)

Tumblr blogging service, which launched last month, gives people the chance to publish brief or full-length, media-rich posts using their browser or mobile phone. It's a happy medium between a tidbit posting service, such as Twitter, and a full-fledged blogging tool, such as WordPress or Blogger. Tumblr is aimed at folks who feel they may not have enough content or time to write a full blog, yet still want to write and share links and media.

Each Tumblr user gets their own "Tumblelog," a short-form blog that contains one of six types of media: word posts, photos, videos, quotes, URLs, and IM conversations. Each type of content has its own visual style and corresponding form for publishing. It's delightfully simple, and within minutes you can add a wide range of content. There's also a bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar to post items without having to navigate to Tumblr's home page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Tumblr comes with some pretty advanced options for power users. You can give your Tumblelog its own domain, and even set the length for stories on your RSS feed. There are five themes to pick from, and you can customize the color of every aspect of the interface. If you are integrating Tumblr into your blog or Web site, there's an option to paste in your CSS.

What really sets Tumblr apart is its speed. It's blazingly fast. According to founder David Karp, the service gets in excess of 10,000 posts an hour, something you can visually track using an in-house tool called Radar. Currently in alpha, it shows the last 20 pieces of content published to the service. It's a little bit like Digg's DiggSpy, but without autorefreshing.

If you're on the fence about blogging or just want an easy way to publish interesting tidbits you find while browsing, give Tumblr a try. Our semiofficial Tumbleblog can be found here.

Note: From 2003 to 2007, Tumblr creator David Karp was a partner and CTO of UrbanBaby.com, now owned by CNET Networks, publisher of Webware.com.