Nick Starr.com : Nick Starr dot com

Congrats to one of my favorite RSS companies out there, who were purchased by Google for $100,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros, granted not as many as YouTube, but this deal is all in cash money. Feedburner has become a popular tool for bloggers, podcasters and video podcasters because of its ability to translate one feed into many different types of feeds and because it offers a wide range of statistics. The company was founded in 2003 and raised $10 million in VC, meaning quite a payday for everyone involved. Congrats to the team over there.

One question I have, is people who use FeedBurner’s FAN service, will they be able to get Google Ads even if they’ve been booted from Adsense?

Everybody’s favorite blogging platform, Wordpress, has launched their latest version today, 2.2. The upgrade is quick and simple, just like all of their other ones. Copy the new files over the old ones, then hit up wp-admin/upgrade.php and your done.

Here’s a list of the main goodies they’ve included in this release:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Download it here

My online life, and let’s be honest my online life is the only one that I have, comes crashing to a screeching hault when Bloglines goes down. Tomorrow from 8:00pm-11:00pm PDT Bloglines will be down for scheduled maintenance. This is a VERY rare instance, and I have to say that Bloglines is WAAY faster then Google Reader for me.

There has already been 2 Tampa blogger meetups in the past week or so, and I’ve been unable to attend any of them. Tonight I will be up at the Panera in Oldsmar at the meetup starting at 6:30. There are a good number of confirmed people attending. Look forward to meeting everyone tonight.

You can find all of the details here.

Ever seen Blaugh? I follow it through RSS, but I figured I would post up the latest comic from the site, that and Chris Pirillo said he would give $20 to the first Twitter who posted it

It’s sort of a comic for the Web 2.0. Other great web comics include Joy of Tech, and xkcd.

This has to be the worst timing ever. I just got an offer for a 2nd job in the evenings, which will keep me busy Monday thru Friday, that I am scheduled to start this coming Monday. I doubt I will be able to make all of these events, but it would be nice to hit up the Saturday one.

Here is a list of upcoming Tampa Blogger events:

• Tuesday, February 27th, 6:00pm - Blogger Meetup - Hawks Neighborhood Grill, South Tampa
• Saturday, March 3rd, 10:45am - Blog & Multimedia Seminar - Tampa Tribune Offices, Downtown Tampa
• Monday, March 5th, 6:30pm - Blogger Meetup - Panera Bread, Oldsmar

There seems to be a Tampa Bloggers group on Meetup.com. I just signed up to the group. I hope I am able to make it to the Monday event as well.

I’ve off and on listened to the very funny Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon. It is a whimisical look at a small town with some of the funniest characters ever assembled.

During his weekly broadcast, he provides an update of the goings-on in the fictional Lake Wobegon.

Now you can download these broadcast as a podcast right to your portable mp3 player, and even burn them onto a cd for those long road trips.

Free podcast sure beats paying upwards of $20 for a cd set of these stories.

If you use iTunes simply click here to listen or go here for all other podcast clients.