iterating on a little script I wrote few months back (and inspired by a recent server-crash 
) I have now put this script public on Twittermon. all you need to start watching your web-servers is an OpenID- & Twitter-account. Twittermon will check your sites every 5 minutes and alarm you via SMS, E-Mail & RSS if a server goes down.
Netscape.com is the latest major brand after Digg, Netvibes and Wordpress joining OpenID. band wagons don’t get any larger, hm?
when will Microsoft release a free, ad-supported online version of their office-suite? will it be called Office Live? and will it happen before Google’s lightweight office-apps finally include a featureset that will be a sufficient replacement for mainstream-users? a - though quickly altered - blog-post from within Microsoft leads to new speculation at TechCrunch.
Freebase - currently in private beta - is generating some buzz (Tim O’Reilly, John Markoff, N. Carr - who describes Freebase as the first major Web 3.0 app). Freebase is a massively distributed, collaboratively-edited, freely structured database - or, as O’Reilly puts it - a folksonomy-based approach on weaving the Semantic Web:
“But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb [the company that created Freebase] is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.”
now here’s a cool iTunes-plugin: iConcertCal automatically retrieves upcoming events matching your music library and displays them within iTunes. current sources seem to be a bit US-centric, but that could be fixed by mashing with upcoming.org.
going to be released on monday, RatePoint will be adding avatar-rating and social networking features to SecondLife. quite amazing, considering it’s based solely on SL’s scripting language.
37 Signals is joining the growing number of wellknown sites supporting OpenID with their upcoming CRM-tool Highrise.
here’s one for the weekend: another Google-song 
obsessed with PageRank? Scott Vivian posted a list of websites with a PageRank of 9 or 10…there’s really not that many! (via Google Blogoscoped)
hosting your own WordPress-installation and fancying OpenID? Christian Spanring has tried the WordPress OpenID Plugin+ and shares his experience…
Yariv Ben Yehuda released a song called “The Googler” (via Google Blogoscoped)
as of today, WordPress.com (the hosted blog-service, not to be confused with the self-installed offering on WordPress.org) is supporting OpenID in both one direction. for now this means that users may login using existing OpenID-credentials as well as use their WordPress-URL as identity token for logging into other services (check the OpenID Directory for an extensive list) of OpenID-supporters). using existing OpenID-credentials on WordPress.com isn’t supporeted yet, but will most likely follow soon. OpenID really is taking off since the beginning of 2007, with major sites like Digg and Netvibes joining the party. seems like a good idea to check out the existing OpenID-implementations which are begging to be integrated with your next web-app …
Tariq Krim from Netvibes just announced the release of an open source javascript runtime (Universal Widget API, UWA) including the Netvibes UI-library. no details on their blog yet, but this should kick off an avalanche of additional Netvibes-module, further strengthening Netvibes’ lead in the market (click for an Alexa traffic-comparison of Netvibes, Pageflakes etc.). TechCrunch has far more details than Tariq just disclosed in his 5minute presentation…basically the API should ensure that widgets work cross-platform, including Vista, Mac OS Dashboard and Google for now, with support of Yahoo! Widgets following later. besides, Krim announced the upcoming support of OpenID, which probably makes open, decentralized authentication the hottest topic of this years fowa.
OpenID is generating a reasonable amount of buzz recently. OpenID is a vendor-independent approach on bringing the infamous concept of single sign-on to the web. in a nutshell, OpenID allows users to use a single, URI-based token to access numerous OpenID-enabled websites. this post on Read/WriteWeb features a screencast explaining the concept and a comparison with the single sign-on efforts by Yahoo, Google & Microsoft.
