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Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study FindsOctober 31 2008

Blogging is fast, informal and easy to do. Spelling, grammar and factual errors happen - but do they make a material impact on the success of a blogger? A small but interesting survey run by crowdsourced copy editing service GooseGrade concludes that they do.

Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren't a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media - or not.

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The Details

The company asked a demographically diverse group of respondents on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website to fill out the survey and published the results today on the GooseGrade company blog. The bulk of respondents spent some time reading blogs but were people who remained dependent on "mainstream sources" for most of their news.

We thought tha

Microsoft Updates Live Mesh: Worldwide Availability, Mac and Windows Mobile ClientsOctober 31 2008

Today, Microsoft will release a major update for Live Mesh, its consumer oriented cloud storage and synchronization service. Among these updates are more granular permissions for sharing folders, better support for large monitors during remote connections, and support for drag and drop between the online desktop and local devices. Live Mesh is now also available for Mac OS X (10.5.1 or later) and Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft also announced the worldwide availability of Live Mesh.

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Mac and Windows Mobile Clients

Mac users can now sign in to Live Mesh, go to 'Add Device,' and click the "limited Mac Tech Preview now available link." However, it looks like Microsoft is only releasing this as a limited beta so far and will only allow a limited (and unspecified) number of Mac clients to connect to Live Mesh at first.

Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 users in the US and the UK

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS FeedsOctober 31 2008

Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

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How to Get the Feeds

All the other major search engines make it really easy to grab a feed for any web search, but Google is probably concerned about spammers finding bizarre and unscrupulous uses for their feeds. We're all inconvenienced as a result.

To get a feed for a Google search you have to go to the web page for Google Alerts and set up an alert for your search. You can enter most queries here. including site: queries. (site:http://readwriteweb.com semantic

Google Releases Third Beta of Chrome: Better Security and PerformanceOctober 31 2008

Google just released a new beta version of Chrome, Google's first web browser, which addresses a number of issues we had noticed in earlier releases. Besides improving the performance and stability of a number of plugins, including Flash, Sliverlight, and Quicktime, as well as fixing some security issues, Google also finally added the ability to add words to the built-in spell checker.

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Other updates include fixes to scrolling with laptop touchpads and better reliability for those users who access the web through a proxy server.

If you are using Chrome, your browser will update itself in the next few days, or, if you are impatient, you can also just download the new version directly or go to "About Google Chrome" and see if the update is already available for you.

Trojan Horse?

Earlier this month, we also

Read It Later Comes To Google ReaderOctober 30 2008

Popular Firefox addon Read It Later has just introduced an updated version of their plugin which adds new functionality to Google Reader. With the new extension, which now works in both Firefox and IE, you can now get through your RSS feeds faster by checking off the items you want to read later in more detail. You can then access those saved items from any web browser, whether it's Firefox at home, IE at work, or even your iPhone.

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The updated Read It Later extension adds a Greasemonkey-esque feature to your Google Reader feed list that places a check mark next to your feed items to the right of the star. As you go through your feeds, the posts you check will be automatically added to your reading list - the saved list of items you can access at anytime at readitlaterlist.com. With the extension's included offline functionality, you can also queue up a number of articles to read when you know you're going to be away from the net - like when you're on a plane trip, for example.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.