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If you've ever used Read It Later, you'll probably like a new service called "I Need to Read This." It does the same thing, letting you bookmark stories that you want to read, but not right away.

What's nice about I Need to Read This is that you can use all of its services through bookmarklets instead of having to install anything in your browser. There's simply "I Need to Read This" and "Read an Article" bookmarklets, which you drag up to your browser's toolbar, and on any story … Read more

That tauntaun sleeping bag that was all over the Internet on April Fools' Day just might go from being a geek dad's dream to being a real product. Think Geek has updated the fake product listing page with this information:

ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life. We have no clue if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant little ThinkGeek a license, nor do we know how much it would ultimately retail for. But if you are interested in ever owning one … Read more

To make buildings more efficient, Regen Energy is equipping them with a bunch of miniature brains--in the form of wireless mini-controllers.

The Toronto-based start-up announced on Monday partnerships with solar energy-monitoring firm Fat Spaniel Technologies and with carbon-management software company Zerofootprint to optimize buildings for efficiency and clean power production.

There are already automation systems that allow commercial building managers to view data from HVAC systems or lights and set policies to improve energy efficiency.

Regen Energy CEO and co-founder Mark Kerbel asserts that its system of building a "swarm" of autonomous controllers is a quicker and less … Read more

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose is at it again with a Twitter directory called WeFollow. And although it's capturing much of the limelight right now, it's not the only service of its kind. In fact, there are quite a few sites that let you search for other users or see who the top users are on Twitter. While some are quite useful, you probably won't be surprised to find out that not all are created equal.

TwitterCounter. TwitterCounter shows you your worldwide rank in terms of how many followers you have. The site includes a full list of the top 1,000 Twitterers, and regardless of whether you have 5 followers or 5,000, you can look up your own Twitter account to see how many people have added you in the past few days, how many you'll likely have in 30 days, and more. It's also a great spot to find folks you might not have known were on Twitter.

TwitterHolic. If you want all the functionality TwitterCounter provides, TwitterHolic probably isn't for you. Sure, you can search for yourself and others to see how many followers they have, and how many they've added over the past few months, but there isn't nearly as much in-depth data on the Twitter community at large. That said, it features the same list of 1,000 Twitter followers, and based on my testing it's just as accurate as TwitterCounter, which means follower counts are usually within 10 to 15 followers of the real figure. It's also a great place to find who the top Twitterers are.

WeFollow. It might be new, but WeFollow has already made an impression on the Twitter Community. The site groups together Twitter users and messages using hash tags--words that can be added to your Twitter messages and begin with an "#". Twitter users can update their stream with a tweet containing up to three hashtags they want to be included in and WeFollow adds their messages into the proper categories. The user list in each category is organized by the number of followers they have. I was generally impressed by the service and found that it's the best of the bunch, even though it's not as full-featured as I would have liked. But for directories, it's top-notch.

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The headlines are dreary but parts of the country actually are reporting upticks in demand for IT products and services.

I know. Sounds crazy. What with more than a few on Wall Street ready to contemplate ritual hara-kiri as the economy goes from bad to worse, this sounds implausible. But paging through the Federal Reserve's district-by-district review of current economic conditions, a couple of counterintuitive nuggets suggest that there remain pockets of strength. Consider the following:

•  IT companies serving the districts around Kansas City and Minneapolis describe conditions as "stable to up."

The Minneapolis region particularly … Read more

WriteOnIt is a simple service that lets you caption and manipulate uploaded photos. Just like BigHugeLabs' Flickr toys project (story), it can take uploaded photos and stick them into magazine covers. It can also slyly insert them onto coffee mugs, billboards, art easels, and fake mirrors within ready-made photos.

You have very little control over the complicated bits, like transparency, placement, and cropping--which are all absent. However, with that simplicity you can very quickly put together something that both looks polished, and that could fool your viewer.

Of all the tools my favorite is the newspaper creator. You have five … Read more

Updated section on Jing on 3/6/09 at 8:30 a.m. PT.

Even if you don't use a screen capture application regularly, there are good reasons to have one on standby. Instead of copying the ID number of an error message into a customer service e-mail by hand, you can quickly take and send a screen shot. Screen shots also make excellent archivers. In a click you can save an image of a flight itinerary or other receipt that you don't want to hang around in paper form. Gamers have another use case--documenting killer performance to … Read more

It used to make sense to talk about open source as a separate line item in the enterprise IT lexicon. However, open source has become such a standard way of delivering enterprise IT that maybe it's time to update the lexicon. It no longer makes sense to ask CIOs whether they plan to "deploy open source" as if it's somehow a separate and distinct question from, say, "Do you plan to deploy new database servers?" The questions are largely one and the same.

Apparently Baseline didn't get the memo though a few weeks … Read more

Even as the global server market contracts by 14 percent, and Linux server sales decline 7 percent (Windows dropped 17.8 percent), according to IDC, Red Hat's Linux server business is swimming against the current.

A February 11 Piper Jaffray report ("Red Hat Inc.: Buy. Survey Shows Red Hat Will Be a Top Share Gainer") says its "survey of 89 domestic Oracle applications customers indicates that Red Hat is gaining IT budget share."

This isn't surprising. In late 2008, a Goldman Sachs report found that 44 percent of enterprises surveyed were planning to increase … Read more