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Amazon's New PayPhrase: Will you or won't you?

Amazon's new PayPhrase technology promises to speed up the buying process on Amazon. But it isn't only for Amazon. It also works for Amazon partner sites DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, and J&R Electronics. I already had One-Click buying enabled on Amazon, and using PayPhrase on Amazon isn't much different. Instead of buying with the One-Click button, you buy with the PayPhrase button, and then enter a PIN to go with the PayPhrase.

Variety Pack: More Blogs, Less Searching

This week at Web Worker Daily, Aliza Sherman wrote Mine Twitter’s Wealth in 15 Minutes a Day. She offers a 3 step, 15 minute program that will help you keep your Twitter time under control and make the most of it. According to Aliza, this is the way to compress your Twitter time into 15 minutes a day (with heavy snipping on my part–so read the original):

BlogHer of the Week: Not Calm (dot com)

Here on BlogHer we have lots of discussions of the pressures women are under. Some of it from the the outside, and a lot of it from the inside. It's amazing the hoops we ask ourselves to jump through, leaving aside the pressures from our families, our employers, media messages, and the infamous "they". As in "they say".

WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal: can open source lead to open government?

The news had Twitter abuzz yesterday. The official White House site has migrated from a proprietary software to open source Drupal. "We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips told The Associated Press hours before the new site went live on Saturday. "This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it....

Dewey's Fall 2009 24 Hour Read-A-Thon

I should be reading right now. No really. I'm supposed to be reading right now. Yes, it's time once again Dewey's 24 hour read-a-thon challenge.

Twitter as an RSS Reader? Publish Your Newest Post Links to Your Twitter Account

For the last six or eight months, a friend of mine has told me that she uses Twitter as her RSS feed. She follows everyone she's interested in and follows the links they provide via Twitter (whether to personal or news blogs). She doesn't use any other aggregator. Her experience made me stop and think: do all bloggers think to link their blogs to their Twitter account? Depending on where you are in your social media journey, this may be a new idea for you. You may not be aware of the tools available to help you link your accounts so readers, no matter where they are, can find you.

Managing Your Social Media Afterlife

You never go far without access to your Twitter stream. Facebook is like a second religion to you. Your blog is essentially your baby. Whether you're online for business building, furthering your career, or personal endeavors, social media is a core activity in your daily life. For many it's even more entwined with their days than showering or brushing their teeth. So... what happens to your online life when you die?

Where the Entertainers Are Older and High Tech

What's an actress to do when the part of Laurie in Oklahoma! or the chance to disrobe while weightless in space have gone to a younger woman? If you are Florence Henderson or Jane Fonda, the answer is to keep shining with as bright a light as ever.

Answering hate with sparkly ponies

I hate to start a post with hate. Sometimes it's got to be done because it's the background we work against, but here's some hope beyond the hate. Many women who work on open source software have been the target of hateful threatening emails and comments by a guy calling himself MikeeUSA over the past five years. Last week his software code was thrown off a large open source code archive, Sourceforge. He cried censorship and said his creative work had been destroyed.

BlogHer of the Week: Minor Catastrophes

Let's talk about sex, parent-style. I mean your parents having sex. And you having sex if you're a parent. Don't cringe: Laugh instead. In Business Time, Megan Ault Regnerus takes on doing the wild thing after kids -- both as a child and as a mother. Her taboo-skewering story made both consenting adults in my household laugh so hard we wept. First she invokes her own childhood:

Will Your School-Agers Still Need Book Covers in Five Years?

E-books, man. They're infiltrating schools. Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Conn., got rid of the 20,000 books in its school library, trading up to flatscreens, Kindles and computers only. And now that Google has paired with On Demand Books (the company that invented a book vending machine), schools could potentially serve up printed e-books in the public domain like cotton candy.

Previewing Google Wave and Twitter Lists

One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often." Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience. This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week. Get on my Wave!