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this wednesday (30.4.) vienna’s (I guess) bloggers meet up at Blogtail 3. I just decided to join them for a beer or two, maybe you’ll come to

sign up here or on Facebook to get a free drink.

so I got an invitation to Microsoft Mesh last night (it pays to stay up late and follow @stevegillmor). in some way Mesh is Microsoft’s answer to offline webapps (think Google Gears, AIR), weaving the fabric that is supposed to connect multiple devices, and applications. in its current rendition (don’t forget, this is labeled ‘Tech Preview’), Mesh sets up a virtual desktop, which is used to synchronize file-folders among different computers and different users (if you wish to collaborate). next to each folder, a small history & message-board is displayed. being Ray Ozzies brainchild, it should be no suprise that this sounds quite a bit like what Groove has been doing for ages.

while you can access mesh through the browser [screenshot above] (and Microsoft obviously has learned a lesson here, since it works flawlessly on Firefox, and also on Mac), the real fun starts after installing the Mesh-software to your local Windows(XP/Vista)-PC. mesh-folders are now transparently included on your local desktop [screenshot below], syncing existing folders to the cloud is only a matter of few clicks. if nothing else, Mesh is a slick way to backup local data to the web (5gbyte for free doesn’t sound too bad, right?).

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meet Vienna’s finest geeks at Tuplao’s @ PLAY.FM. tomorrow night. no excuses!

while twitter.com still doesn’t provide search, Tweet Scan does a great job in monitoring the twitt-o-sphere, especially since you can subscribe to search-results via RSS. smart people may use this to monitor their brand/name/service, like Comcast apparently is doing.

if you’re still running WordPress 2.3.3, now might be a good time to consider an upgrade. a recent exploit seems to turn your blog into a spamlink-farm, which might ultimately lead to a site-wide ban from Google’s index (as happened to Austrian proto-blogger Helge). to check if your blog is affected, look for the existence of the folder “wp-content/1″. more info on the exploit can be found at wordpress.org, as well as an upgrade-guide to 2.5 (highly recommended).

I’ve installed WordPress 2.5 on my blogs last week, and so far everything is running smooth. plus, the new backend-interface is really looking niiice. however, keep in mind that some minor plugins aren’t working on 2.5 yet!

ps: 2.5 finally features automatic update of plugins… however this doesn’t work on both of my installs - everytime I try to update, I’m just prompted for FTP-credentials - any ideas? thx!

pps: is there a tool to import UltimateTagWarrior-taggings into WordPress’ own tagging-system?

when Andy Pealting sold BuddyPress to Automattic (makers of WordPress) a month ago, buddypress.org went into maintenance-mode. now that Andy had a chance to bundle the code into a handy SVN-repository, the site is back up again, giving every developer the chance to toy with BuddyPress. But what’s BuddyPressm you might ask?

BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each plugin adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

got it?:) [note, this won't work with your typical Wordpress-install, it's for WordPress MU only!]

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just found a very cool Adobe AIR-based desktop-app for accessing Google Analytics…try it out!

YouTube just announced some major extensions to their APIs (see official blog-post), which finally enable uploading of video to their site. seems like my own hack, PHPTube, is therefor rendered obsolete, and for good… :). the new API (see the developer guide) seems to allow both user-triggered authentication (similar to what Flickr has been doing for ages) and direct uploading (similar to PHPTube). there might still be a future for PHPTube though, if I ever find the time to adopt the new API. compared to PHPTube, implementation of the new API’s process-flow seems rather complicated, so there might be demand for a simple wrapper. we’ll see… for now, well done Google!

update: Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch points out what the new API basically means: Google offering YouTube as a (almost) whitelabel video-platform (”almost” since I guess videos will still be watermarked with the YouTube-logo)…

very cool: 5.000 VR-panorama-shots in more than 40 cities: 360cities.net …

(via Google Blogoscoped)

here’s a little challenge for my fellow readers who are registered at Last.fm…

• log in to your (free) account.
• pull out your stop-watch.
• check how long it takes you to find the right link for upgrading to a premium account (2.50 EUR/month).
• please don’t use STRG-F, that’s unfair and probably not the way intended by the user-interface designer.

one has to wonder if Last.fm really wants users to pay for premium services… anyway, after 4 years of free-surfing & several minutes of search, I’m now a paying customer of Last.fm…rock on!