I’m all about trying out new social services, applications and tools. I love learning about a new product and getting around inside it to figure out its capabilities and features.

Perhaps recognizing that fact, Mike from Chat Ventures contacted me recently and offered to let me beta-test a new WordPress plugin they were developing called Qwidget.

What is Qwidget? It’s simple. Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness. On the surface, you will see a simple question, to which you can (without registration and hardly any thought) answer yes or no. Your answer is recorded.

Next, Qwidget offers you the chance to register (in the widget, it’s free and quick, you don’t even leave the site) and provide more details about why you chose your answer. Also, you will see other comments from other folks on the same question.

Notice that I did not say anything about the other folks having answered the question on this blog! In fact, Qwidget keeps a keyboard-based library of questions available for all Qwidget-enabled blogs to choose from. This means that blogs with the same sort of content (and resultingly, the same sort of questions) will be able to pool their discussions and answers via Qwidget.

Although still in beta, I think Qwidget has a ton of potential and I’m proud to be one of the early beta-testers of the service.

So, I will put my first poll question at the end of this post and I invite you to at least click yes, no, or maybe. If you are reading this article in your news reader, hop on over. My site doesn’t have ads so you don’t have to worry about making me 1/100th of a cent.

If you really like the way Qwidget works, and you run your own self-hosted WordPress blog, feel free to contact me at the information provided in my sidebar or visit the Qwidget ‘get this’ link and fill out the form expressing your interest in the beta.

Good Morning scribkin readership!

If you operate a blog, and that blog supports sending a trackback, I have a simple request for you.  I have adjusted the trackback URL on this article to point to (what I think) the Disqus service will use.

Next time you post, please include a link to this article (no need to link to anything other than the standard article URL) and we will see if the Disqus trackback feature works as advertised.

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Yesterday afternoon, I sat down with the goal of creating my first FeedBurner FeedFlare.  I wasn’t sure just how hard it would be, so I was ready for a grind.  As it turns out, creating a working FeedFlare was not that difficult.

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I’ve never done a stats update, and I haven’t refined my tools at all, so this post will be a little rough. First, let’s start with the good news: For the first time, scribkin has over 100 feed readers!

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A rare weekend post today, on a topic that most people probably will not find interesting and some people will find extremely awesome. I am speaking, of course, of the dozens of plugins, mods, and other bells & whistles that I have added to this blog over time.

Feel free to skip right over this post unless you love this sort of stuff.

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I’ve only been working on this site full-time for a few weeks now. But already, in that time, I’ve found that my things I consider important have changed, and habits I have had for years have also started to change.

First, I’ve been using twitter a lot. I really didn’t much use for it but now I find it a great source for discussion, ideas and links. Second, and more importantly, I now pay a lot more attention to names. I have always been an information junkie, but previously when I would surf through my unread articles in Google Reader I’d scan the headlines and content exclusively.

Now, I am paying more attention to the article writers’ names. I’m doing this for several reasons — first, as I think about who I want to follow in Twitter and FriendFeed, it definitely helps to know what they have written. Second, networking is important. I hate to say it, but I’m pretty much a typical introverted geek-type. It was only when I went to SXSW earlier this year that my eyes were really opened to the world of networking and social media. I’ll give you an example — I’ve had a login to Digg since early 2006 but I have only “dugg” 24 articles (most of them in the past month) and commented on 5.

That’s really the point I wanted to make.. I just noticed it tonight as I was in Google Reader.. I was looking at the names and wondering if I had seen them on Twitter.

That actually brings up another thought: Why doesn’t Google Reader let you re-sort your subscriptions by author? Pretty much every RSS feed includes the author name, wouldn’t it be cool to just tell your feed reader, “show me all the articles written by so-and-so.” I guess Techmeme does that in a way already?