Now, meet the guy who reads more than 600 feeds on a daily basis - famous blogger and technology journalist Robert Scoble. Here is the video interview with him, where he explains how he can handle all that information (Google Reader helps a lot).

Not only it’s pretty close to Cyprus, but it’s one of those really affordable events too. The registration is only 30 Euros, and hotel stay is only 80 Euros (b/b). The ship that I mentioned earlier, will get to you the island for only about 50 Euros.

Not convinced? Here comes the heavy artillery - Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress creator himself, will attend the event. And there will be more interesting people too, including the Google regional representative, Greek bloggers and social media people.

Mark your calendars for the 2nd and 3rd of June, 2007. And start your preparations.

If your blog uses WordPress, than you should be running version 2.1.3. It has a number of security related fixes, so if you are running anything less than that, you should upgrade.

If you don’t know how to find your current WordPress version - it’s really easy. Login to the administration interface. You’ll see the Dashboard (the one saying “Welcome to WordPress”). At the bottom of this page you will see a WordPress logo and links to documentation and support forums. Just under those links you will see your WordPress version and the page loading time.

If you see that your WordPress version is less than 2.1.3 (for example, 2.1.2 or 2.0.1), and you are not managing your blog by yourself, forward the reminder to the administrator of your blog. Maybe he forgot to update or missed the announcement of the new version.

I personally haven’t tried them all yet. Twittering from address bar or search bar is not my cup of tea. Notifications of updates don’t work very well for me too - twits are just too small to be announced separately. But I really enjoy the sidebar stuff. Twitbin is my favourite pick. Clean interface and flexible updating intervals is about all I need. The only thing missing now is the favourite star, but I bet it’s coming in the next versions.

I’ve seen this several times before - people, especially young bloggers (young not by age, but by experience), want to know if they were mentioned in any way on the Web and what people are saying about them. But the solution to the problem is not obvious, so it automatically goes into the “high-tech black magic” category and they never try to find out.

Well, it turns out, tracking yourself on the web is not that complicated. There are many ways and techniques to do it, and I’ll tell you about a couple of them here and now. Really simple ones.

Google Blogsearch.

This is one of the variations of the famous Google search engine. It search only through the web sites which Google considers to be blogs. The search results are presented in a slightly different way - with publishing dates and RSS and Atom feeds.

How can you use it? Well, just try a search for your name. If your name is unique on the web, then just use it as it is. Otherwise, you might want to search for your name and surname. In this case, use quote marks like so: “Leonid Mamchenkov”. Quotes tell Google to search for all documents where both your name and surname appear, and not just one of those. This way you will eliminate search results about other people, including, maybe your relatives.

Did you find anything? Are people talking about you? What are they saying?

Now, you can also search for blogs that link to your web site. This time we’ll use Google’s “link:” keyword. If I want to find all blogs that link to my personal blog, which is at http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/ , I’ll search Google for “link:mamchenkov.net”. This time though without quotation marks. Also, make sure that you don’t have any spaces between “link”, column, and the URL of your web site.

Did you find anything now? Is there anything you haven’t seen before?

One of the features of Google Blog Search which is not present in regular Google search is RSS/Atom feeds. When you see the search results for your query, check out the column on the left, the one with published dates. There are two links a bit lower - one for RSS feed, and another one for Atom feed. Those are basically the same things, just in different formats. Pick either one and add it to your RSS reader (you do use an RSS reader, don’t you?). Now, your RSS reader will ask Google Blog Search for any new results every hour or so and if anything new pops up, you’ll know about it.

Of course you can setup several searches with several RSS feeds and subscribe to them all too. In fact, those searches don’t even have to be about you. You can pick any subject you like - blogging, Cyprus, your relatives, your company, your competitors, your sports team, and so on. Whenever anyone posts anything new about the topic you are interested in, you’ll know about it. No need to repeat your searches manually.

Now, with blogosphere it’s all clear. But what can we do about the rest of the Web? There are web sites, which aren’t yet considered to be blogs. And there are sometimes better results from the traditional Google search than those from the Google Blog search. Is there a way to monitor those results? Yes, indeed. Differently though.

Google Alerts.

As I said above, RSS and Atom feeds are not available in the traditional Google Search. But there is another solution - Google Alerts. If you already use any Google services, like Gmail or Blogger, you can login with your Google Account. Otherwise, you’ll need to create a new account, which is quite easy.

After you have an account, you can define your alerts. An alert will be sent to your email address once there is a new search result for your query. You can search for your name or for web sites that link to you, or web sites about your favourite topic. You can choose if you want Google web search, or Google Image search, or other Google search engines, or all of them together. Once you created your alert, Google will email you every time a new result is found for your search term.

Again, you can have as many alerts as you need. You can use different accounts to direct alerts to different email addresses. Or you can use filters in your email application to sort emails into different folders.

Depending on your personal preferences, you might like email alerts better than RSS feeds. Than you can setup alerts for Google Blog Search too - it doesn’t have to be manual or RSS only.

If Google is not your search engine of choice, then check the functionality of your favourite one. Many search engines these days provide the functionality for tracking search results either via email notifications or RSS feeds.

Having any troubles? Found any interesting way to use these features? Share with us in the comments.

Well, things were happening. There is an easier and simpler way to keep track of a lot of information sources. You can do it with RSS or Atom feeds.

Until recently only the most technologically advanced people were taking advantage of feeds. But since it proved to be a very efficient technique, more and more regular users jump on the bandwagon.

Here is a nice little video- RSS in Plain English, which explains what feeds are and how to start using them. It does so with a bunch of nice drawings, and fits in less than four minutes. Post a comment here if you still have any questions.

Well, there is another option now. Twitter was specifically designed for microblogging. Any post of yours can be only 140 characters long and can’t have any text formatting like bold or italic text, or paragraphs. You can’t insert any images, sounds, or videos. But you can still have links. And you can write as many posts as you want.

The best part of Twitter is that it makes blogging really simple. You can post via Twitter web site, you can write your tiny blog posts from your instant messenger (like Google Talk), or you can even send them from your phone via SMS.

As with many other social services, you can connect with and follow other users of Twitter. And the second best of the Twitter services is that you can read your Twitter friends’ posts on the web site, or get them in your instant messenger, or, even via SMS.

Now this might not seem like a lot, but it is. Just pause for a second and think of all opportunities…

There are numerous ways people use Twitter now. Here are just a couple of scenarios for you to consider.

Shopping advice. You are out doing your shopping. You are given a choice of product A and product B (and maybe even product C). But which one is better? You can’t tell from the packaging. You need to check them all out on the web. You can either do that with your mobile phone, which has a small screen, an even smaller keyboard, and a slow GPRS connection. Or you can send an SMS to Twitter asking the question, and your friends, who are behind computers, will do a quick research and let you know what they think you should get.

Group activities. You and a few of your friends decide to meet for some fun in the downtown. Or you are going to check a new spot for barbecue. As most civilized people of 21st century, everyone drives his own car. There five or six cars around and you got a bit lost or confused. Or have an idea for a better spot. Instead of calling or sending SMS messages to each one of you, you can all use Twitter instead. Send a message and all of your friends will get it.

These are just two of common uses of Twitter. There are more. People let everyone know what they are doing, where they are heading, and where they are having lunch or coffee. Some use Twitter for software or hardware monitoring. Comedians use Twitter to post one-liners. Even politicians use Twitter to get instant opinions and let their voters know what are they (politicians, not voters) up to.

Yet another good thing about Twitter is that it has a very simple interface. There are no nested drop-down menus with millions of buttons. There are no pages upon pages of settings and options. There are no lengthy manuals. It’s dead simple. Register to get your username and password. Login. That’s it. You can already use it. There is a text box which you can use to type and send your text. Done. When you got used to it a bit, add your instant messenger and phone to start using advanced features like SMS. It’ll take you less than two minutes to figure it out.

Are you a bit worried about your privacy? Or who will be reading your updates? Or your SMS phone bill? Don’t be. You can make your microblogging private or public. You can choose who can read your posts. You can choose when you want and don’t want to get SMSes. You can choose for which people you want to be notified via SMS and which ones you want to read on the web. You can control all these either from the Twitter web site or from your instant messenger or from your phone via SMS.

For the technical people among you - Twitter has the bells and whistles that you probably expecting from a Web 2.0 web service - from RSS feeds for anything to an API through widgets and badges for your web site.

Try it out. You won’t be disappointed.

Since this is the first meeting, there won’t be a lot of agenda or anything. It will probably go any direction that the participants will take it. Given the sociality of Flickr users, photography backgrounds of some of them, and Irish alcohol spot, a few interesting outcomes are possible…

Are you coming?

Can it be done? How hard is it?

Well, it can be done. It’s not as easy as many other applications, mostly due to WordPress using absolute URLs instead of relative. There is some database trickery involved.

First of all, follow the instructions in the article that I linked to above. Prepare you domain for DNS changes by setting the shorter TTL period. Then prepare you new hosting space and database.

You can disable comments for the time being. I usually don’t do it, since my blogs aren’t that popular. And usually I move blogs from development server to a production one, so comments is not something I am very concerned with.

Dump your database and load it at a new location. Copy all files as they are. Don’t forget the wp-content/uploads directory, as well as .htaccess and wp-config.php . The last two will have to be changed according to your new settings. .htaccess file usually has the mod_rewrite rules for friendly URLs. It can be either edited manually, or re-generated from the WordPress (administration -> Options -> Permalinks -> Update permalinks). wp-content.php contains settings for your database connection (host, username, password, database name).

You are almost done. Now you have to change a few things in the database.

First, you need to update WordPress options with the new blog location. Here is the SQL that you’ll want to modify:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value,’http://old-domain.com/wordpress’, ‘http://new-domain.com/blog’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ’siteurl’;

Secondly, you’ll want to fix URLs to your posts and pages. As I said above, WordPress uses absolute URLs instead of relatives. So you will have to run the following SQL query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid,’http://old-domain.com/wordpress’,'http://new-domain.com/blog’);

Thirdly, you’ll want to fix links in your posts and pages. If you used absolute links to other posts of you blog, they’ll break with the move. So we better fix them like so:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content,’http://old-domain.com/wordpress’,'http://new-domain.com/blog’);

Now you should login to your administration (you’ll be logout because authentication cookie is for another domain) and check that everything works. If it doesn’t, check the logs of your web server and ask for help in #wordpress IRC channel on opennet.org.

If you are a blogger, or often comment on blogs, or just write text with links to other web pages, you should get yourself a Linkify bookmarklet. It makes inserting links a three-click process. You just select the text that you want to make into a link, click on the bookmarklet, which opens Google search results for the selected text in a frame on the right-side of your browser window, and then you just selct the appropriate result by clicking on “Create link”. That’s it.

Found via Matt Cutts, via Twitter. You see, how easy it is…