Google Reader just got a lot more interesting for those people who share a lot of stories.
In an interesting move by Google, users of their Google Reader product that share stories with other people can now hold conversations about those stories via built-in commenting. Up until now, only the person sharing the story could make a comment, but with this new additional feature, anyone who is in your sharing circle can join in on the conversation. All one needs to do to participate is look for the “Add Comment” link at the bottom of each share story. The discussion will then appear below the story for others to see.
According to the Official Google Reader Blog, you will also be able to use this new feature from your iPhone so you can even comment on the go.
While it is an interesting idea, I have to agree with Adam Ostrow of Mashable and Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr when they express concerns of how this may steal comments and click-thrus away from blogs. Mr. Ostrow worries about the fact you can not currently import these comments into your blog, so it is like lost conversations. Mr. Riley also has a valid point in that if something impassioned you enough to make a comment about it, why should you bother clicking through to the site now to make it when you can get just as much satisfaction from doing it right there in Reader? There is going to have to be some way for comments to move and back and forth between your blog and Reader, or else you will see a lot of full text feeds being cut down to snippets to get people encouraged to visit the blogs again.
This is an interesting idea, but I’m just not sure if it was completely thought through on how it might impact the bloggers who create the content that is the life’s blood of Reader.
BurnURL is a new URL shortening service that brings a very exciting and new aspect to the field int he form of easy social sharing.
There has been a glut of URL shortening services in the market for some time, but the vast majority of them just did the following where they turned something like this:
While it still may not roll off of your tongue, it’s still a lot simpler to share with someone else. The problem is that these services have all been a dime a dozen, doing the exact same thing, and adding nothing new to the space.
Well, last week BurnURL launched and it brings several new features with it that are welcome additions that add greatly to the utility of such a service. The first change you’ll notice is the addition of handy coding for pasting the new URL into both HTML coded pages and forums that use BBcode.
Once a person clicks on the link you make for them, not only will they be taken to the page you linked, they will also be presented with a toolbar at the top of the page that provides them with social sharing tools.
With this tool bar in place, you can share the page you are reading on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, FriendFeed, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious or StumbleUpon as well as rating with the BurnUrl site. The bar will also tell you how many pepople have liked the page, how many people have clicked on the link and also what the actual URL of the page is.
Go aheadand give one a try by visiting http://burnurl.com/JZ24lZ that will take you back to this very site.
(Disclosure: BurnURL is partially owned by Adam Ostrow with whom I work with at Mashable. This post however was in no way influenced by our working relationship, it’s just a great service)
This is not recent news, but it is relevant now as I came across information about Comcast getting ready to launch 50 Mbps high-speed Internet access in the Bay Area. Sure this is exciting news, but the speed is going to be 50 Mbps download, and only 10 Mbps upload, and this will cost you a staggering $139.95 a month. Considering we here at StarterTech are currently paying $63 a month for 8 Mbps down/ 500 Kbps up, it’s still better deal than what I pay, but still outragous compared to the rest of the world.
I first discovered this story over at BlogD today, where Luis, an American living in Tokyo, Japan, mentions he roughly pays between $40 and $50 a month for 100 Mbps fiber optic service. While Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr mentioned that Melbourne, Australia is getting 100 Mbps service, he lamented that the price would probably run between $66 and $100 a month USD. Considering what we pay in the United States for service that doesn’t come close to that speed, I would say he will still be getting a deal.
The state of Internet access in the USA is a disgrace, and it is getting to a point where it is going to start costing us jobs and possible business deals as countries and corporations are begging to route the Internet traffic around the USA. While there are certainly a great amount of problems in this country at the moment, if we do not start coming up with some form of plan to bring higher speeds to a greater portion of the country, at a price people can afford, we may not even be a shadow in people’s rear view mirrors as the rest of the Internet speeds past us to superiority.
The time has come for us to start speaking out to our elected officials and tell them enough is enough, we need higher capacity broadband at affordable pricer sooner rather than later.
Do you have a spare $25,000 laying around, collecting dust? Want to build a supercomputer that has 6TBs of memory with write speeds of 2GBs a second? Now you can thanks to Solid State Drives (SSDs).
A good computer these days writes data at approximately 60MBs a second, but when staging a marketing event to promote Samsung’s SSds, they were able to get the write speed up to 2GBs a second, or 34 times faster than the current average. Course, it took over $25K to do this, but it is still impressive. You can see just how impressive this would be in the video below, and even more impressive since they chose to run Windows Vista!
At long last, it seems Microsoft is finally going to acknowledge that users don’t want all of their pre-installed software that comes with an operating system.
For as long as Windows has been around, it has always come with a slew of Microsoft products that you may not actually have any use for. The problem was that you couldn’t uninstall any of them because they were always seemingly connected to something else in the system. According to the Windows 7 development blog, this issue is finally being addressed in the next iteration of the well-known operating system.
You will be able to go into the “Windows Features” control panel and simply uncheck the boxes for the programs you do not want to run. This does not uninstall the software, it simple prevents it from loading, and will render the software unusable by anyone using the computer. If you should later change your mind, you can go back into the same control panel and reactivate the software. The programs you will be to control in this way include:
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Center
Windows DVD Maker
Internet Explorer 8
Windows Search
Handwriting Recognition (through the Tablet PC Components option)
Windows Gadget Platform
Fax and Scan
XPS Viewer and Services (including the Virtual Print Driver)
Considering the sordid security history of Internet Explorer, this is a welcome inclusion into the system. Quite often you could get a virus through another means that would use Internet Explorer to carry out its tasks. If the program is turned off, then it shouldn’t be able to do anything and will lay dormant in your system. I am sure, however, that given enough time, virus authors will figure out how to reactivate it without you knowing.
Security concerns aside, this is a welcome inclusion in Windows 7, and something Microsoft has needed to do for a long time. Kudos to them.
While we normally do this on the first of the month, there was just too much news this month, So, better late than never, here are the top posts on StarterTech for February 2009.
Gmail Now Lets You Choose Your Own Colors – Google continues to add new features to their popular Gmail product, and apparently people are really excited about picking their own color scheme now.
Google Talk Under Phishing Attack – Phishing attacks are never a good thing, and the fact that Google Talk came under attack just proves that it can happen anywhere on the Web. Remember to always be mindful of how you handle your online information, folks.
Facebook Being Invaded By Parents – Is there anything more frightening then your parents finding you online? Probably not, and it is happening in greater numbers of late on Facebook.
Ahead of their original schedule, all of the final Circuit City stores will close this coming Sunday, March 8th. Originally they were scheduled to close at the end of March, and that was then moved up to March 15th, but due to the success of their liquidation sales, that has been moved up again by a week.
As we originally posted, the Circuit City liquidation sale was brought on by the weakened economy, and they simply so no other solution but to close all of their stores after 60 years in business. While they had always had a mixed reputation with consumers due to pricing, policies and practices, it is never a pleasant thing to see a company go out of business.
Proving once more that Amazon wants to be your “go to” store for everything, they are now accepting trade-ins on used video games.
In an unexpected turn of events, Amazon has opened up a video game trade-in store where you can trade in your used games for Amazon gift cards. You simply tell them what games you have to trade-in, they tell you a total value, give you a pre-paid mailing label for you to send them in, and once they receive them you will get an Amazon gift card that you may use on any products you want.
What they will do with the games is a mystery as Adam Ostrow of Mashable accurately pointed out, Amazon does not currently have a used video game store. Perhaps they will be opening one, or are they selling them to other retailers? It is anyone’s guess at this point.
Currently you can trade-in games for the following systems.
Microsoft Xbox
Microsoft Xbox 360
Nintendo DS
Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Nintendo GameCube
Sony Playstation 2
Sony Playstation 3
Sony PSP
Nintendo Wii
While you might get more money selling them on your own through eBay or Amazon’s used option, this removes a lot of work and headaches for you. Certainly this is a new option for a lot of people with growing video game collections.
Amazon has announced that they are bringing the ability to read Kindle formatted ebooks to the iPhone and iPod Touch.
If you’ve been envious of all the ebooks that are available for the Amazon Kindle, but haven’t wanted to pay $359 for the actual reader, there is now an option for iPhone and iPod Touch owners. Amazon has released Kindle for iPhone (iTunes link) that will allow you to buy the books and read them on the device of your choice. If you also own a Kindle, you can have the books on both devices, and thanks to Amazon’s Whispersync technology, you can start reading a book on one device, and wherever you leave off will be synced with the other device so you can go back and forth between them to continue reading your book.
While reading on the Kindle may seem a bit cumbersome, I can’t imagine reading an entire book on a screen the size of an iPod Touch. It seems like an exercise in eye torture to those of us here at StarterTech.
For those that want to give it a go, the actual app is free, and the books will cost you.
AudioMicro, a popular source for royalty free music, has announced that they will be adding 170 original compositions by the composer for Family Guy, Ron Jones.
With the recent news that YouTube has muted the audio on certain videos due to copyright problems with the rights holders, stock music is becoming a growing option for people who create videos, podcasts, presentations and more. Now it seems that composers are liking this option as well, as evidenced by someone like Ron Jones, the Emmy-nominated composer of the television series Family Guy, placing 170 of his original compositions on a site such as AudioMicro.
For those unfamiliar with the AudioMicro style of company, you pay as little as a $1 a minute for audio clips that can be anything from audio cues and bumpers up to full compositions lasting several minutes. This gives content creators the freedom to create whatever they want with appropriate background music, and they don’t have to worry about someone coming in and saying they violated their copyright. Mr. Jones also feels that this is a good thing for the composers as he said, “With this service the composer can bypass the middleman and go directly to the end-user. That is a huge leap forward for composers. You can decide what you want to create and get it out there today. That is freedom. This is a revolution.”
With the addition of these 170 new tracks, the AudioMicro library now surpasses 50,000 available pieces of music and sound effects covering a wide-range of musical styles.
Google Reader just got a lot more interesting for those people who share a lot of stories.
The United States of America, the country that drove the invention of the Internet,
At long last, it seems Microsoft is finally going to acknowledge that users don’t want all of their pre-installed software that comes with an operating system.
While we normally do this on the first of the month, there was just too much news this month, So, better late than never, here are the top posts on 
Proving once more that 
Amazon has announced that they are bringing the ability to read 
