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following the links on William Gibson’s blog, I found out about Kevin Kelly - co-founder of Wired magazine and author of various books and articles on technology and economy (’Out of Control’, ‘New Rules for the New Economy’). I haven’t read anything by Kelly yet, but he seems to be involved in countless interesting projects, of which I want to recommend the following two:

• on his blog Cool Tools, Kelly introduces a field-tested tool each day. Cool Tools isn’t restricted to ’software’-tools, it rather covers handcraft-tools, books, gadgets and practicalities like the Cuban Mop
• True Films, another of Kelly’s blogs, is dedicated to his passion for documentary film. the blog, which is also available as USD 3,- PDF-download, currently holds more than 100 film-reviews.

by the way: similar to Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’, Kelly publicizes the ongoing work on his current book ‘The Technium’ on his blog - think ‘book in progress’.

Microsoft Windows Live Writer is a free offline/desktop-blogging tool released as beta last friday. like similar tools (TechCrunch mentions Qumana, which is available for both Windows and Mac OS), Live Writer allows users to write and edit blog-posts using a local application rather than the common browser-based richtext-editors. every blogger who has lost a post due to a browser-crash will find the idea of local editors intriguing - same goes for users who want to draft posts offline.

in terms of editing-features, Live Writer offers pretty much everything you’ld expect from a blog-editor: wysiwyg-formating based on your blog’s stylesheets, image-publishing, access to already existing posts and drafts. advanced features include a spell-checker (unfortunately only on-demand, not as-you-type like f.e. in Microsoft Word) and integration with Windows Live Local maps.

the Live Writer-installer is embedded with Windows Live Toolbar, which installs Windows Desktop Search and lots of additionial buttons into Internet Explorer - fortunately the installer allows to opt-out from most extensions. Live Writer works with Microsoft’s homegrown blogging-service Live Spaces, but also supports Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress. testing Live Writer on my self-hosted WordPress-install worked pretty well, including image-uploads and web-preview - all that after entering only my blog-URL and user-credentials. looks like the development-team has really put much effort in supporting other platforms and standards like the Metaweblog API.

after closing his (rather sporadic) ZDnet-blog InfoRouter, Steve Gillmor is now independently blogging about the rising attention-economy and post-pageview business-models at GestureLab.com. while you’re subscribing, check also out  the Gillmor Gang podcast, which just got rebooted recently.

Michael Arrington’s CrunchNetwork launched another blog-outlet today: CunchGear will be ‘…covering gadgets, gear, and computer hardware’, therefor competing with top-notch blogs like engadget and Gizmodo (both currently belong to technorati’s worldwide top 10). CrunchGear-editor John Biggs (formerly editor at Gizmodo!) plans to differentiate the blog by offering in-depth reviews and a weekly featured product-comparison. the market for gadget-blogs currently is crowded with competitors trying to outperform each other in posting blurry, pre-release product-snapshots, and I think there is probably quite an audience looking for coverage less shallow.

futurenews.at - a consumer-tech-centric blog hosted by my fellow blogger Martin - is currently up for vote as ‘Gadget-Blog 2006′ at german magazine Maxim. both futurenews and the poll are in german language, but I’m sure u’ll manage to fill out the voting-form - thx! oh, there are two MacBooks to win…

gnomedex-mastermind Chris Pirillo started his very-own personalized web-advertisement-platform earlier this week. after loosing 30 pounds of body-weight , he is now selling ad-words on his chest, starting at 50,- USD. though the offers seriousness might be questioned, this could be your chance to spread your message among the blogosphere! I’m thinking about getting the keyword ‘vacation’ for the micro-site I did last night…

just in time for its third birthday, RSS-search-engine and -syndication-site Technorati received a major overhaul today (details are found at the Technorati-blog). despite the new design seems lighter (though a bit too colourful) and more aimed towards the live-web-newbie, the frontpage still fails to communicate Technorati’s unique selling point over conventional search engines in clear words - non-bloggers won’t see why they should use Technorati for search. on the upside, there is a new ‘discover’-section, an improved ‘popular’-section (including the infamous a-list of bloggers) and better management of your favorite blogs (read customization). what’s still missing to make Technorati the single-most important tool for many bloggers, is an integrated feed-reader. behind the curtains, the Technorati-developers also improved the index-algorithms in terms of ‘live-ness’ and accuracy (more on TechCrunch).

if you’ve never used Technorati, you might want to check out the profile of this blog

just discovered & subscribed to dead2.0, a blog by a guy nicknamed skeptic, who’s obviously tired of all the web2.0-hype. besides plain criticism and sarcasm, skeptic actually has something to say, like he recently proved with his post ‘11 suggestions for not being a dot-bomb 2.0′.

(reminds me of the great book ‘dot bomb’ by J. David Kuo - Kuo has been Senior VP of ValueAmerica.com, an early & famous victim of the bubble burst. In ‘dot bomb’, Kuo gives detailed insight of an ‘internet goliath - from lunatic optimism to panic and crash’ - highly recommended!)

Guy Kawasaki asks David Sifry - CEO and founder of Technorati - 10 questions about the blog-searchengine and blogging in general. in case you wonder what distincts a blog-searchengine from classic web-search: while google & co. let their spiders visit each and every website once every 1-3 days (depending on relevancy, i.e. google-rank) to index fresh content, Technorati works the other way round: the moment a blogger hits the ‘publish’-button, the blogging-system notifies (’pings’) Technorati and other blog-searchengines of the new post. ideally this leads to an index which is always up-to-date.
competitors include Icerocket and Sphere, still Technorati is favoured by most bloggers, probably because of the ranking-algortihm and top-blogs-list.

without a doubt, todays hottest topic on the blogosphere was Amanda Congdon leaving rocketboom. rocketboom is (or was) probably the biggest success-story in the young history of video-podcasting. the geeky news-cast with mainstream-appeal founded by Amanda and her partner Andrew Baron attracted enough viewers to sell a week worth of advertisment for no less than 40.000 US$ on ebay. watching Amanda’s and reading Andrew’s statement I assume it’s safe to say the split happened in disagreement. without its anchor-woman, rocketboom will surely have a hard time…meanwhile Amanda is already wooed by Robert Scoble (ex-Microsoft, soon-to-be Podtech) and Jason Calacanis (AOL/Netscape)…

update: now scoble muses on hiring calacanis as well… don’t think so