IdeaFry is a new platform that built on multi-user WordPress blogging engine, i.e. WordPress MU. With just three steps listed in the following: Create a blog, name your blog, and then choose your theme, you’re jumpstart your own blog in less than one (1) minute.

WordPress is widely used in the blogosphere, where it proved effective in customize your own blog, and you also can find lot of third-party plugins that are available in the Wordpress community. However, there is also a fact that you need to continuously watch out for update if your WordPress blogging engine is self-host, i.e. WordPress.org, unless you’re using the WordPress.com platform.

Users will find this IdeaFry similar to WordPress.com, however, they can make money instantly from Google AdSense once they’ve successfully sign-up to IdeaFry. You’ll find three (3) columns of advertisement sponsored by Google, i.e. in the right-hand side and footer of your default theme, whether you like it or not. Also, the maximum storage space for your blog is 10MB and there are twenty-one (21) themes available for you to choose if you don’t like the default WordPress theme.

FuelMyBlog is a UK-based blogging community. It was founded based on a very good idea, i.e. to bring all together the bloggers around the world. New bloggers are encouraged to sign-up to this service because they can find some useful services provided by FuelMyBlog, such as forum, as well as get a chance to promote their blogs and hence, elected as “Blog of the Day.” A first look, FuelMyBlog is functioning quite similar to Technorati, only that they’ve taken extra serious actions in fighting and curb the spam blogs. For example, a blogger can add her blog at anytime, but only if her blog is approved by FuelMyBlog, then she will be allowed to add a widget or the friends widget called “fuelroll” onto her blog.

On the FuelMyBlog homepage, you’ll notice that it look like a blog directory, where you can find several different categories range from Art/Design to Books/Writers to Technology, and etc. Each blog appeared to have a small dialog box present to you the brief information of that particular blog when your mouse hover on it, and you can either “Fuel this blog,” i.e. vote up, “Snuff this blog,” i.e. vote down, View this blog, or Add to friends of that blog. To encourage bloggers to participate on FuelMyBlog, they also organize the competition and bloggers can win prizes from their creative content.

More information can be found on a video embedded below, CEO Kevin Dixie talked about FuelMyBlog.

Twingly is a new Swedish-based blog search engine. I was as well got a private beta access for a glimpse into the future of blogs search provided by Twingly. Frankly, blog search has been a daily habit for me in order to look for the new startups to be profiled on TagEdge. As a Chinese educated and a third-generation of Chinese immigrant to South-East Asian countries, I tend to use Baidu Blog Search most for of the time; otherwise Google Blog Search. In response to this Twingly, a new blog search engine in private beta phase, my first thought is that I am oblige myself to examine it whether it will become one of blogging tools to be used in the future.

Two questions while I evaluate Twingly are how it trying to differentiate itself among all the big players such as Google Blog Search, Baidu Blog Search, Technorati, etc. in the blog search sector and will this competition drive a better blog search engine for the end-users as well as the next-generation of blog search.

If you’re giving access to Twingly, you’ll notice that below the search bar, there are few search queries entered by beta users under the topic of “Hot right now.” which they claimed these are the placeholder links on Twingly. It seem that Twingly is focused on the U.S. market right now as all the search queries such as Election, Obama, Iphone are mostly related to the American. As I type few queries to Twingly, the search results showed on Twingly can be sorted out based on Twingly Rank (their internal ranking system of blog posts), date or inlinks (this might mean the inbound links from other sites). From the search results, you can further sort the results based on your preference, by time (from anytime, last hour till last month), and languages as well.

Apparently, Twingly was trying to differentiate itself not from the aspect of frequency, since beta users will not come across the blog posts they indexed at 5mins, or 10mins ago, but from the quality of all the blogs they selected to index. The posts they indexed are reasonably reliable, from wordpress.com to CNN, Blogger.com. On the Twingly search engine, any search result pages, you can sort the result page by “Any source” or “Spam-free blogs,” and either of them, the search results will be the same appeared on your computer screen. As such, I believe spam-free search will be their most important appeal to the end-users, and their vision is to surf safe while users connected to Twingly at anytime, anywhere.

The ranking of blog posts on Twingly is very straight-forward. The post that comprised of the top number of keyword you’ve entered to Twingly or with the most “Links/likes” will always go to the top, as shown in the picture below. The offering of their blog search engine want to bring values to the end-users in a dual way, i.e. the algorithm “keyword” manner and the other user-determine manner, which mean beta users can vote their favorite blog posts and these posts will eventually rise to the top of the search result pages. In designing a complete user experience, a most thoroughly discussed and commented post should stay on the top for this reason.

I think Twingly is trying to be very open, and I like their way in operating their startup in this mode. They’ve a Tech Plan, which allowed beta users to submit suggestions on what they perceived Twingly as a startup in the future. The most wanted feature at this moment is blog claiming feature, which I think some beta users desperately want to claim the ownership of their blogs on Twingly. Others are a blog profile page, a Mac version of Twingly screensaver, a real-time visualization of the blogosphere in a map.

In overall, Twingly is not very convincing in term of fast indexing, frequency when compared to Google Blog Search, or even Technorati. I think the time is still not right for them in seeking for an architectural change, i.e. spam-free blog search instead of fast indexed blog search. Safe is not fast, and either one will require the other. However, Twingly will be included in one of blogging tools in my daily life.

I like to read the secret recipes of founding a new startup, or how those founders managed their ways to make their Web startups successful. Here’s a blog post of Mahalo’s CEO on how he manage his stress, entitled The ultimate cure for startup stress. It’s a nice write-up and well worth reading.

via [Blog Herald]

AOL is continue to position itself as a media company by launching its AOL Technology Network. This Technology Network can be accessed through a link named as Tech on the AOL’s landing page, and click the Tech will bring you to this Technology Network, which also has a separate domain name called Switched. From this Technology Network, I believe AOL is aiming to be an information intermediary, they knew that if they could make it, they’ll have real power. Imagine all the visitors visit this network everyday and reading all the latest technology news and products, it will generate a strong advertising and lead generated revenue for them.

AOL’s Technology Network comprised of some top blogs in today’s blogosphere. Engadget, Engadget Mobile, Engadget HD, Joystiq, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), DownloadSquad, Switched are the top blogs that included in this network. All these blogs are also subscribed by me through my feeds reader and I read these blogs regularly every week. On top of that, Switched will served as the network’s central hub. Seemed like they’re focusing on page views. According to AOL, this network will be the second largest technology news and information publisher online. However, I don’t think they’re capable to compete with CNet in the short run, especially the blogs under the umbrella of this network are more hardware or gadget oriented.

I am very pleased to announce that I have another blog, Facebook Watcher. It has been created by using the wordpress.com platform, and later available with my own domain, and hosted on the same grid server as TagEdge hosted on. Facebook Watcher has been existed for nearly half a month, and all the posts are randomly written by me. Despite the fact that my heavy workload, I promise myself to allocate some time to properly write about Facebook few times in a week. Of course, TagEdge will continue as my first and priority blog to look after.

Frankly, I believe that Facebook will be another hot thing not only in North America, but also in South East Asian countries. I hope that Facebook Watcher will join as a blog to disseminate the news of Facebook’s growth throughout the world. In fact, Facebook Watcher was firmly established as a blog to report every important news about Facebook, and aimed to be the best Facebook blog in Asian countries. And sooner or later, all my future Facebook news will no longer be posted here, but posted to the Facebook Watcher.

Lastly, I hope you all will like that blog, and subscribe to the RSS feed of Facebook Watcher.

Thank you.

A great news today for the users of WordPress.com, a blogging platform as the company behind it, Automattic is granting more online storage. 3G instead of 50MB will likely make their users happy about it and no doubt, for anyone who embark on blogging initiative, the revised offer of online storage size will make WordPress.com as the number one choice among other blogging platforms such as Blogger and TypePad. As mentioned on the WordPress.com’s news, you only get 1G on Blogger free account while if you want to get 3G of online storage on TypePad, you need to pay $300 in TypePad’s Premium package. Nevertheless, if an user feel that 3G is still not enough, she can upgrade to 5G for 20 credits (Credits cost $1 each), 15G for 50 credits and 25G for 90 credits. If you want to learn more about the upgrade plan, there is a help page on this issue.

I always believed the more space offered in any consumer-oriented blogging platforms is good for both the users and the company that developed it. First, there are countless blogging platforms, such as Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, TypePad, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal, Xanga, and social networking platforms like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook also allowed users blogging on their accounts. In order to stand out of the competition, more online space seemed to be a simple strategy. Secondly, to encourage the existing bloggers or would-be bloggers to create compelling content without worry of the space requirements, blogging platform providers must thus increase the online space incrementally.

Since Movable Type decided to put its blogging or publishing platform as an open source system, they seemed to be realized the payout bit by bit recently. As I closely follow-up on their progress, the released of Movable Type version 4.1 represented as a key addition to this work in progress. This version included a new user interface (UI), new built-in report for blog’s activities, and many more. It is not a coincidence that a new demo Website called Universal Web Site appeared on the Movable Type site visible at the same time with the released of version 4.1, it is much due to all of the Movable Type source code freely available for review, and the developers can build something out of it. Unless we see a lot of plugins, or themes available purposely for this platform, we’ll realize how users might be benefited from the open source movement of Movable Type.

With the upcoming release version 4.2 bundle with the new template set, called the “Universal Template Set,” according to Movable Type, they offer users not only the publishing platform for blogging, but also a home page for personal or organization. But as is often the case for a new direction, a feature rich blogging platform sometimes could be used as a successful Web site creator system or a content management system. However, I’m not sure the enhancement of functionality of this Movable Type will successfully lead them to a short-term progress, albeit that long-term pain is unpredictable.