Brian Oberkirch is blogging about the hard hitting storm/ hurricane, live from Slidell, Lousiana.

If you have additional information visit Katrina Information Map and add your marker and let people know about it. The technology is made available thanks to Google Map.

I stumbled upon two useful social bookmarking tools/ managers: frassle and scuttle. While there are many more tools available on the Net, they are especially worth mentioning because, surprise, they come with open source GNU General Public License.

That means that if you really like the tool, you can install the same application on your own hosting server. Currently, both of the web tools are in the alpha development stage.

Of both social bookmark managers above, frassle is more powerful, which not only include only one feature, but also a blog system for self-organizing web community, RSS aggregators, a search engine and advanced organizational features.

You can create a customized news using syndicated feeds with frassle, a feature so powerful for content publishers.

I would love to play with this tool on a weekend.

Project page at Sourceforge for frassle and scuttle. Visit their project page to download the software.

Jupiter Research has a new research data on blog, RSS/XML feed and podcast demographics.

That sure are a lot of exciting data for bloggers, RSS publishers and podcasters. This study seems to align with other similar studies. Just recently Forrester reported that only 2% of online households in North America were using RSS. This research reported 3%, but failed to mention the scope geographically.

According to an article by eWeek written by Lisa Vaas:

• “The average consumer of blogs, RSS/XML feeds and Podcasts is male, earns big bucks and, in the case of Podcasts, is a youngster.”
• “In a June survey of some 4,000 Internet users, Jupiter found that over the past year, only 11 percent had read a blog monthly or more frequently. While that’s a small percentage, it does show healthy growth; in 2004, for example, only 6 percent of those surveyed regularly read blogs.”
• “7 percent of those surveyed having downloaded or listened to a Podcast regularly in the past year.”
• “Only 3 percent of respondents reporting that they regularly receive information through RSS or XML.”
• “Those who regularly use RSS/XML feeds, podcasts and blogs are most likely to be what Jupiter calls “super Net vets,” or online users with more than 5 years of Internet tenure; are male, and have annual incomes of $75,000 or more.”
• “RSS/XML feed users are most likely to be in the age range of 35 to 44.
• Blogs and Podcasts are most appealing to people between the ages of 18 and 34.”
• “Of RSS/XML users surveyed, 89 percent said they regularly buy stuff online. Of regular blog consumers surveyed, 77 percent purchase goods and services online, while 69 percent of Podcast aficionados regularly buy online. That compares with 62 percent of the total online population who do so.”
• “30 percent of companies with $50 million or more in annual revenue have deployed RSS feeds, according to the report, while another 28 percent have indicated they intend to offer RSS feeds this year.”

Search the blog using the word study or research for other posts related to surveys and researches.

Via Steve Rubel, thanks Lisa Vaas of eWeek for this wonderful summary.

Aaron Wall, the author of SEO Book was sued by Traffic Power for alleged inacurracies and lies appearing in comments other people have on his blog and the confidential information available on the same blog.

As far back as June 4th, 2004 Aaron removed a comment that he thought was offensive and he thought generally he was keeping the content in bounds of any sort of legal limit. If you want to read about the blog comment he mentioned, visit Traffic Power & Cold Call SEO.

From The Intuitive Life Business Blog:

If this case goes to trial, it’ll set an important precedent in the blogging community and the Internet at large, answering a critical question, particularly for business blogs: are the comments others leave on your blog a legal liability?

It would be a pain to fight this case but if he decide to do this then I wish you good luck, Aaron!

Links: Notice! You Have Been Sued.

Bloggers who use Blogger.com’s service can now enable an option under Settings | Comments tab to add captcha to their blog. What is a captcha? According to WikiPedia:

A captcha (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. A common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.

This can help you maintain a readable and clean comments on your blog and prevent automated comment spam. Text-based browser users won’t be able to add comment if you enable this feature. This is possibly the only major drawback, but well worth it to prevent comment spam.

Many people said that the additional effort visitors have to take to have their comment submitted discourage them to comment on a post. I disagree, if people have useful things to say, they are going to take this small step of which proves to be far more useful to keep the blog clean.

Links:

• Word Verification for Comments
• What is the word verification option?