Imagine being able to flip through pictures, links and articles just like you would with the pages of a book? No need to imagine anymore, this is just what Flipboard is all about.

Flipboard is a personal magazine based on content you care about, and how does it know what content you care about? By gathering these information from your friends.

Flipboards connects to your social networks like Facebook and Twitter and gathers all the stuff your friends are sharing like blogs, articles, photos and videos. Flipboard also has content you can browse through and view content from interesting sources on the web.

The nice thing about Flipboard is that you can’t just only browse through the content, but you can also interact with it and share it with the world because Flipboard is connected with your social networks.

Flipboards is currently only available for the iPad, but I must say it looks real promising and makes me want to own an iPad now!

Check out the video about Flipboard.

WordPress just released the wonderful news that every self hosted WordPress site out there is about to get more real-time thanks to some new behind the scenes developments.

WordPress announced on its official blog that it has turned on support for PubSubHubbub, yeah that’s a mouth full, a move that will get RSS content of WordPress blogs to RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines in real-time.

How RSS feeds current works is readers poll the feed every few minutes checking if there is new content available, how it will work with PubSubHubbub is that the WordPress blogs will now push the feeds to the respective RSS readers as new content is posted.

Just today I wrote an article on the South African blog aggregators, this now opens up a hole new field for them as well. Blog aggregators like MyScoop and Afrigator will now have the ability to get your content in real time without you needing to log into the aggregator and ping your blogs. Real-time aggregation, I would like to hear if the local blog aggregators will make use of this service.

Here is a nice demo of PuSH (PubSubHubbub) in what WordPress call a “cheesy video”, for even more info on the PuSH protocol you can head over to the PuSH project page.

MyScoop the new South African blog aggregator and social bookmarking site by Nicolas Duncan has built upon what the community requested.

MyScoop launched about a month ago with limited functionality just as Amatomu shut its doors. The blog aggregator started out with only functionality to fetch the latest blog entries from subscribed blogs and displaying it. Now things has changed and on track to provide the same functionality that Afrigator has to offer and Amatomu used to offer.

Nicolas Duncan has improved MyScoop allot during the last month and added a badge and ranking system. MyScoop now has the ability to keep track of your site hits and what pages users access on your blog. MyScoop also introduced a ranking system that keeps track of what blogs is most popular and what blog posts receives the most traffic, they also added a stats section to the control panel that shows you how many hits your site had on different dates.

The possibilities are endless now that MyScoop has the badge system in place and can gather all sorts of stats from your blog to display to you. What I would like to see is perhaps a Unique visits and Page views combined graph, and maybe one to display weekly, monthly and yearly stats.

Also perhaps Nicolas can provide us with some insight as to how the ranking of the blogs is calculated.

If you have any suggestions about features you would like to see on MyScoop, please leave a comment.

Just last night I wrote about Amatomu closing down until Mail & Guardian finds a new buyer for the product. And now upon the closing down of Amatomu a new South African Blog Aggregator has surfaced.

MyScoop is the latest addition to the South African Blog Aggregator familly. Although I alway welcome competition MyScoop is rather limited when it comes to functionality.

A great thing I noticed upon signing up was that I could make use of my Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID or Blogger accounts to sign in with. Another nice thing about MyScoop is that fact that I do not need to install a badge of any kind, this may be needed for some nice functionality, it looks like MyScoop periodically fetched rss feeds and adds new posts when they appear in the latest fetch.

Now I did say it is rather limited, and here is why. Too put it simply MyScoop only displays latest posts from the blogs it crawls, this is due to the fact that is does not make use of a badge on your site. It would be nice to have some stats about your site and a ranking system. Another nice thing that is missing is adding categories, would be nice to be able to add you blog to a certain category, and even be able to view blogs of only certain categories.

I would say it is a good start for now, but to keep up with the competition the guys from MyScoop will need to add some of the functionality Amatomu had and Afrigator currently utilise.

Good luck to the guys at MyScoop and hope you guys make a success of the site.

Lately I have noticed that when I leave comments sometimes the readers leaving comments aswell has no idea that I am the author of the post. This made me realise that I had to find a way of showing that I am the author of the posts in the comments section.

After some consideration I decided on just changing the background colour of my comments, I’ve seen many other blogs using this approach and it seems to work well and looks nice and clean.

Here is how I did it:

Open up comments.php and find

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>

Replace it with

<li class=”<?php if (1 == $comment->user_id) $oddcomment = “authorcomment”;

echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>

After that add the following to you style.css file

.authorcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

And that is it, all the comments made by admin will now be displayed with a background colour. If you would like to change the background colour just modify the hex value you put in the style.css file.

Amatomu a South African blog aggregator has been out of Alpha phase for two months now and still it is plagued with errors.

When Amatomu moved into Beta stage two months back you could have seen that the site has been improved with faster loading times, almost real time aggregation of blog posts just to name a few. Lately it has been a whole different story, with constant DB errors when visiting the site and even showing as logged in as ThoughtLeader who I am not.

Amatomu it’s time to step up and either fix your product or just take it of the market. I’m actually a fan of Amatomu as I like the layout of their site and the way they show whats hot currently in the blog sphere and rankings per category, but I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that the site is slow as hell when you try to access some features and aggregations that does not occur almost instantly but rather a few days after you posted your blog entry. Not to mention that I’m sometimes showing as logged in as another user.

A while back Christopher Mills owner of iMod launched a campaign to get bloggers to refrain from using Amatomu, I’m currently feeling the same vibe at the moment, maybe if all the bloggers just boycott Amatomu they will get their act together and start focusing on releasing a product that works. In the mean time if you are a sole user of Amatomu check out Afrigator, they are an example of how to run a aggregation service.

Facebook has lately seen a huge growth in registrations from people we know as our parents, uncles and aunts.

In India a new social networking site was started with just them in mind. Verdurez is a social networking site aimed at people older than 55 years of age.

Verdurez has already a userbase of just over 4000 registered users with the oldest people in their seventies. Users older than 55 years can use Verdurez to read blogs and health news, aswell as chat to other users and even build puzzles online.

To be older doesn’t mean you have to stop living, Ishita Sukhadwala owner of Verdurez said. There is so much to do specialy now in a internet era.