Whatever you do, don't download StumbleUpon! I'm telling you: this little Firefox extension is totally addictive - in between surfing random StumbleUpon sites and feeding your four-hour-a-day Wikipedia habit, you'll never get anything done. StumbleUp...

I'm a big fan of what the 37Signals guys are doing (and yes, I love Ruby on Rails!), but it's also good to see new and interesting things being done in the project collaboration space. ProjectSpaces, from ForumOne Communications, is like Basecamp on ...

Scoble and others have been talking about a new mashup called Longtail. At least, it used to be called Longtail - all of a sudden it has changed its name to BaeBo (it seems that Chris Anderson has registered "longtail" as a trademark). So what does B...

Mercora is certainly interesting, although I don't think I'll ever find a need for it. At first glance Mercora appears to be a music search engine - the irritating limitation being that you need to download an application to actually listen to any of...

You know that feeling when you discover a cool band that no one has heard of, then suddenly the band hits the big time and it's not yours anymore? That's pretty much how I feel about AllPeers, a project I've been following (via their excellent blog) ...

Via Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes podcast comes news of Top 10 Sources - a site which adds an editorial layer to RSS feeds, picking out the top 10 sources of news on any topic: At Top 10 Sources, we publish a daily "Top 10" site of the best newsf...

Via Rocketboom, Diggnation and others comes news that DiggSpy - the live stream of user ratings on the popular news site Digg - is now wonderfully ajaxed-up. From the Ajax Blog: You can choose the posts are shown, newly submitted or promoted, dugg st...

I like Smarkets a lot. I'm not sure that it's a really profitable business idea, but I'm genuinely fascinated by prediction markets and the wisdom of crowds. The Smarkets setup is similar to a service I profiled before - Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game - but ...

This is slightly off-topic, but I've been researching blog networks for an upcoming project (BlogNetworkWatch is a great resource, by the way). While catching up on the latest issue of Trendwatching, I was reminded of a really savvy city-based blog n...

Yelp launched back in the pre-Mashable era (circa 2004), but after hearing John C. Dvorak evangelising it on the This Week in Tech podcast, I figured I'd take another look. I also dug up this old TechCrunch post which explains how Yelp works: Yelp is...

I just caught an excellent edition of Inside the Net featuring Tim Westergren, the genius behind the Music Genome Project and Pandora. It provides some pretty interesting insights. I didn't realize that the Music Genome Project (the system that power...

Mike A is way too optimistic about Clipfire, a service that's trying to be the Digg of deals. He writes: I like Clipfire , which allows users to submit ecommerce deals, and other members can vote the best deals to the top of the site, and add appropr...

I just discovered an intriguing Wired article about how Lego has applied "Web 2.0 peer-production techniques" (Chris Anderson's words, not mine!) to the development of their latest Mindstorms robotics kits. The company called up a bunch of Lego fanat...

I've just been testing out Lexxe, a natural language search engine that's currently in Alpha. It claims to be "50% more accurate and relevant than any other search engines. " I conducted a variety of searches and although Lexxe delivered correct answ...

UPDATE: Whew! I'm all out of invites. I was forwarding the extras to my friends (who had invites to spare), but I've now gotten at least 100 people into this thing, so let's wrap it up there. Newsvine, an intriguing news site featuring revenue share,...

Ajaxian has a post today about EgoSurf, a really simple service that helps you inflate you ego to epic proportions - brilliant! Just type in your name and blog URL and - voila! - you'll see just how popular your really are. And if you want a regular ...

Kevin Burton has a post about how Google is aggregating film reviews. A search for King Kong, for instance, gives a link to Google reviews as the first result - it then takes you to this page. Commenters point out that this isn't a new feature, but K...

I'm not a heavy user of paid-for software (almost everything I use is open source), but I thought I'd mention this cool video-editing package that Steve Garfield tested at CES. Muvee saves you the pain of editing your video by automatically editing y...

In a recent post about Digg, I wrote: "it’s obvious to see that Digg users are growing in power. And while this could be a force for good, it also means that an unsupported claim on a blog could quickly be blown out of proportion." Unfortunately, thi...

Paul Kedrosky reports that the video-search company Truveo was acquired by AOL late last year. It's the first I've heard of it. UPDATE: Paul must have been early - looks like the rest of the blogosphere just got the news. Some are saying the price wa...

Not only does Vizu have a really nice interface (who's the designer?), but it's based on this power of many, wisdom of crowds philosophy that I'm always talking about. And, unlike Digg, Vizu actually sticks to the rules - you can't see the results of...

I must have visited the Webjay site about 10 times in the last few months, and every time I have the same reaction: what the heck is it? Anyway, Webjay was back in the news yesterday after being acquired by Yahoo! (Kevin had the scoop), so I'm once a...

So the latest episode of the Gillmor Gang podcast is out, and once again it's a lengthy (65mins), but fascinating look at the state of online media. The blurb: Doc Searls from CES, Dan Farber from SF, Dana Gardner and Jon Udell from New Hampshire, an...

Chatsum is a great idea - and you gotta love that tagline! So what does it do? Simple: Chatsum is a browser extension that lets you chat with other users who are looking at the same site as you. You can also leave messages for others. I've signed up ...

Mike Arrington has covered two really interesting edge players recently - iNods and KritX. He writes: iNods aggregates blog and other edge review content and displays it in a centralized way for users. Unlike similar services kritX and blogcritics, w...

Blish is a digital content marketplace. Like so many sites these days, it seems to be positioning itself as the "eBay of digital content", selling everything from ringtones to how-to videos. From the site: Blish is a new online marketplace designed t...

Mike at Techcrunch has been looking at the classified ad space - picking out BlockRocker, rbloc and theadcloud as the most exciting additions. But as far as I'm concerned, theadcloud is the only really exciting service here. So what does theadcloud d...

Oyogi appears to be a question and answer service in the style of Yahoo Answers. The service is fairly sparse right now, and they need to work on getting you involved from the second you hit the site. Yahoo Answers does a great job here by displaying...

TechCrunch profiled Browsr back in December, but I figured the site wasn't really innovative enough to merit a review here. Nonetheless, it seems like Browsr is becoming more interesting over time and the categories are turning up some fairly useful ...

I don't normally write about services I haven't tested out, but this time it's different. The service in question is Agatra, a new way to store your passwords and automatically log in to your favorite sites. From the FAQ: Agatra is a free service tha...