901am

New Media News Every Morning

Friendster launches all-new blogs and forums

By 1 Comment

Friendster, Inc. announced that the all-new Friendster Blogs and Forums are now available to Friendster’s over 90 million members worldwide. Both products have been enhanced with new features and redesigned.

The newly enhanced Friendster Blogs, built on WordPress, enable members of the Friendster community to quickly and easily create a personal blog. Each blog can be customized with themes and skins available on Friendster, and thousands more available across the web, or users can create their own style, colors, fonts and page layout using common HTML and CSS web languages. Friendster users can also add a variety of widgets and a personalized badge for their blog right from the design tab of every Friendster blog. Users can also embed into their blog photos directly from their Friendster photo albums and videos from popular video sites such as YouTube.

Friendster’s new Forums allow Friendster users to participate in discussions within a variety of categories including music, sports, lifestyle, celebrities, TV, fashion, health, religion, food, dating, finance and more. Users can join a current discussion or start a new one under a specified category. Posts are organized under each category by most recent. Each post is time stamped and includes a thumbnail photo linked to the Friendster profile of the user, so users can easily meet others in a discussion.

Originally posted on December 31, 2008 @ 11:11 am

Dr. Andrew Weil launches daily updated blog

By Leave a Comment

Time-crunched? Who isn’t? But there’s no reason why a busy schedule should keep you from getting the essential natural health information you need to make smart health choices.

That conviction inspired Andrew Weil, M.D. to begin Dr. Weil’s Daily Blog. Regularly updated, Dr. Weil’s Daily Blog provides practical advice that Americans living in today’s busy world want and need. Topics include:

  • Fundamentals of Dr. Weil’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet
  • How to get the most out of vitamins and supplements
  • The most effective exercises
  • Stress-relief tips
  • Green-living guidelines

The new blog will complement Dr. Weil’s existing web sites, each of which provides a unique focus. The flagship site, DrWeil.com, features more than 5,000 pages of detailed and comprehensive information on all aspects of natural health. In addition, Dr. Weil on Healthy Aging explores how to minimize and manage age-related health conditions naturally, and Dr. Weil’s Optimum Health Plan takes plan members through an eight-week program that optimizes the health of body, mind and spirit.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 5:41 pm

iBegin Labs Releases WP Lifestream Plugin

By 2 Comments

iBegin Labs has announced the release of its WP Lifestream plugin for WordPress, which enables bloggers to consolidate all their “life streams” into one handy page on their sites.

The Lifesteram Plugin is simple – used with WordPress, it lets you create one single feed for all your activities online. One feed that can collate what you are listening to, what you are buying, and what you are doing. Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, your blog, Flickr, Steam, and a lot more – all in one easy to read place.

The Lifestream plugin includes the following features:

  • Unlimited number of feeds.
  • Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two.
  • Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code.
  • Customizable display using stylesheets.
  • Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam.
  • Localization ready
  • Daily digest available to summarize your activities.
  • Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website.

A sample lifestream using the plugin can be found at davidcramer.net.

I think this is a good way to consolidate one’s feeds from outside of a blog, rather than, say, publish your tweet summaries in a daily digest (which I have done before, but decided it’s a bit tacky). Having all of these in one dedicated page gives readers who are interested in your lifestreams the opportunity to follow your tweets, photos, and whatnot, but doesn’t necessarily clutter the main areas of your site.

The Lifestream plugin is scalable, and iBegin is considering creating a WordPress theme that already incorporates the plugin and a dedicated lifestream page.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 11:08 pm

Boing Boing launches gaming blog Offworld

By Leave a Comment

Boing Boing announced the launch of Offworld, a new gaming blog edited by Brandon Boyer with regular contributions from all of the ‘Boingers.’ Offworld aims to distill the fractured, esoteric world of gaming forums, academia, communities, websites and blogs, into an easily digestible feed of the most important and interesting developments in the gaming world.

Offworld covers everything from major mainstream gaming titles to the world of small, independent game developers. Keenly aware that most gamers don’t have the time to troll through all the scattered news sources and sample all of the new games, Offworld contributors will do all the heavy lifting for their readers and profile only the clever, innovative, interesting and fun games that get released.

Originally posted on November 18, 2008 @ 9:22 am