Last week, literally out of the blue, I got an email from Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb. He said that the blog had an opening for a news blogger, and would I be interested? Say no more, I replied. I am just a bit more than slightly interested.

In fact, I was thrilled.

So, after setting some timetables and learning the ropes, I can finally announce that I am RWW’s newest daily news blogger! I will be providing the tech and new media communities updates every weekday afternoon. In fact, I’ve already begun, you can already check out my very first RWW post here. We slipped it in Sunday night as a sort of test.

That’s not all the good news, however.

Apparently, though a series of what I can only believe to be fortuitous coincidences, I managed to score a press pass to South by Southwest Interactive this year! Oh my yes, I’ll be there representing RWW!

It took me a while to pick my jaw off the floor when the team revealed this news to me, as you may imagine.

Now before you start wondering if I somehow deposed a more capable, seasoned writer.. as far as I know, I didn’t. It happened to be the case where due to prior commitments (and perhaps the fact that I live near Austin) it was available. But I’m not looking this gift horse in the mouth! I’m just going to try my hardest to prove that their gamble with me pays off for everyone concerned.

So that’s my news. I honestly don’t know how it is going to affect my posting frequency here and other blogs that I write for, such as Louis Gray’s site yet. Time will tell. But please do follow me over on RWW as often as you can, and know that I am certainly open to post ideas, suggestions and recommendations.

Last week, Toluu rolled out some big features.  Today, we are seeing a couple of more subtle but no less welcome improvements to our favorite feed subscription-matching service.

First up, Caleb reports via the Toluu Blog, that the feed-matching page has undergone some refinement, adding three selectable filters.  The new filters let you choose a time window for best matches, adding this month and this week to the matching algorithm.

Finally, in-line contact management as been implemented pretty much everywhere.  What this means is wherever you see another user, whether it be on your contacts list, matches, or a feed’s subscribers, you can now add or remove them from your contact list right there.  No more needing to go to a special page!

These tweaks will improve an already unique and useful (and free) service even further.  As always, you can ask for a Toluu invite here in a comment, in an email to me (phil@scribkin.com) or from Caleb at Toluu (.com .. get it?)

That is probably the punniest headline I’ve written to date.  Sorry for the groan.

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Recently, I wrote about an update to RSSmeme where the developer, Benjamin Golub, had added FriendFeed as a source to track shared stores.  Just tapping in to this API gave his app an instant crawl speed increase, recognition of shares would start to appear within minutes instead of hours.

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A few days ago (May 30th) I got my usual twice-monthly  Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter.  Usually I just skim and toss, not finding that much of interest.  But in this one I found not one, but three interesting links!  It sort of jolted me, in a way.. I really didn’t think Microsoft was doing anything really breakthrough in the social media space, I mean Live Spaces has been covered to death, and let’s not even bring up MSN.

Social Bookmarks

The big social app news from them is a social bookmarking service cleverly called TechNet Social Bookmarks.  Currently a preview (beta?), and confusingly referred to in the FAQ as MSDN Social Bookmarks, it seems to be very similar to del.icio.us.  Although they only support Internet Explorer explicitly, they say that other browsers will work if they support javascript.

They support bookmarking in the form of a javascript bookmarklet.  They have specific support for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has been my experience that most bookmarklets written for Firefox also work in Safari.

I am guessing that this is one of Microsoft’s first pushes to open MSDN to a wider social networking community.  How do I know?  They happen to have published an introductory video as well, linked below.

In the video, Microsoft Evangelist John Barton gives some details about this new direction and also gives two links to the Social Bookmarks application:

• technetbookmarks.com
• msdnbookmarks.com

Except for the color of the banner and the default homepage link, I’m not seeing a huge difference in these two URLs, and in fact my login works in both and my avatar appears the same.  So, I’m guessing that your private bookmarks will work in either and it’s mostly differentiated by what public bookmarks appear.

Updated Useful Microsoft Apps

Also in the newsletter were links to a couple of updated applications:

• Process Monitor 1.33 – this is a great utility for any Windows-savvy user to have in their toolkit.  It allows in-depth examination of any running processes, with a number of different sort and search options.
• Autoruns 9.2 – This has been a key tool of mine for many years.  Similar to msconfig, this will examine the registry and other places for any programs set to run on startup.  It is extremely thorough and allows you to directly disable or remove anything you might think is suspicious or useless from starting up when you log in to your PC.
  • A similar utility (but much smaller) is Mike Lin‘s Startup Control Panel.  This is a real gem and I definitely recommend it.

To be honest, the first time I found Autoruns, it was not from a Microsoft site.  So I was a little surprised to see that it came out of the MSDN labs.  In my eyes, that just gives it a big dose of legitimacy and trustworthiness that I hadn’t afforded it before!

And in fact, with a little more research, I learned that Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006!  How did I miss that!

As I was catching up in Google Reader this morning, I noticed this item in my RSSmeme FriendFeed feed.  I highlighted the new change — it now appends all Google Reader shared item notes!

I’m not sure when this was added, but I think it is very .. err, noteworthy!  No pun intended. 

Another bullet point on the long list called reasons why RSSmeme is awesome.

If you want to get your own custom RSSmeme FriendFeed feed, simply go here and put in your FriendFeed nickname.  Then, subscribe to the resulting RSS feed.