The process to enable the integration is fairly simple (steps blatantly stolen from the Disqus blog post):

1. Visit Account Services
2. Click Enabled
3. Retrieve your FriendFeed Remote Key and fill in the blanks
4. Then, visit The Administration Panel
5. Choose Your Site from the drop-down
6. Click the Settings tab
7. Check FriendFeed comments

If you don’t already have your blog in FriendFeed, add these additional steps:

1. Visit The FriendFeed Services Page
2. Click Blog
3. Add your RSS feed

If you want the full story with illustrated steps, I recommend checking out the Disqus Blog post.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

Developed by Effigent for Automattic, it seems like a very sweet little app! You can learn more about it at iphone.wordpress.net.

Below, hopefully, will be a gallery of screenshots of the app.

Caleb has added a new feature to his socialized RSS feed sharing app, Toluu today.  Now, anywhere in Toluu when you see a feed name and you hover your cursor over it, you will get a pop-up dialog with the feed name and the last 5 articles titles.

If you click on the article titles, you will be transported directly to the article in question.

This new feature will reduce the amount of context switching you will need to do as your peruse feeds in your friends list and other places.

If you haven’t registered at Toluu yet, it’s quick and easy to get started.  You can always email me (phil – at – scribkin) for an invite!

Apparently, people assume too much and don’t promote enough.

You know what they say: If you assume, you make an a out of Su and me. And believe me, Su doesn’t like being an A. So don’t do it.

If you think a product is great, promote it! Tell people. Write up an article. Whatever. But don’t say, “Gee, yeah, I really loved that last week when I used it for 5 minutes and now you’ve missed the bus.” Because that is what you are saying. To me. And to Su.

Su doesn’t even have a car. Now he has to walk.

So what the heck is TinEye? Is it that decorating show, you know, the one with the people? Hardly.

If you assume that the Tin Man has eidetic memory and a talent for finding pictures that look like each other, you’d be getting close to what TinEye does.

In a nutshell, TinEye leverages some proprietary tech that Idée has been working on for creating digital fingerprints of images. This technology is mated with a high-speed matching engine and a database of hundreds of millions of public domain pictures to give you fast image matching based on a source picture.

You know what, I’ll just link in Scoble’s little QIK interview with Paul Bloore, the CTO of Idée, and you can see a little demo of the product in action as well.

After using the product for a while, I have to say I’m impressed. Currently, with its sub-set of all the pictures out there on the internet, it can’t find a lot of pictures uploaded to, say, Flickr. But if you do a Google image search and then drop the URL of the image you are interested in, it will find that picture wherever it resides on the internet.

For example, I searched for a picture of George W. Bush and dropped the URL in TinEye. Here is the result (click image for larger size):

It found the image in 272 different locations on the internet! It also gives the size of the image, and lists separate links to the same source image by domain. I do wish they would give you the option to re-sort the results by different criteria, such as image size, file size or bit depth.

So, if you want to know if a particular picture appears somewhere else on the image (say for copyright reasons), this is a great tool to have.

I’m really happening this comes out of closed beta soon, however, if you are clever you may already have noticed that the FriendFeed link at the beginning of the article has a special URL you can use.