Blogging and Social-Media

When Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook back in October 2007, it paid 240 million dollars for the preferred stock, which meant that the company was valued at roughly 15 billion dollars.

Google has been on fire lately, releasing new features almost daily. The latest is a new Gmail Labs option which lets you add your location to the signature.

From the creators of TwitterCounter - the popular chiclet that displays your Twitter follower count (see our sidebar) - comes TwitterRemote, a very simple widget that functions much like MyBlogLog, except it shows you recent visitors to your site that are also Twitter users.

Mashable has partnered with Twestival to promote the world's largest Twitter fundraising drive. Here, New York Twestival co-organizer Paull Young promotes a call to action on the eve of the event.

The battle over your website's community wages on. Not to be outdone by Facebook Connect and its many great implementations, Google Friend Connect, which previously tacked on Twitter integration, is now getting a bit more social.

Social media allows for an immediate way to interact and engage with people and companies online. There are the obvious sites that allow for social networking, but social media done right can aspire to be so much more. We thought we'd highlight three notable Twiistup showoffs who are doing big things with social media.

Diego Maradona milked the adulation of the home fans beforehand but it was Lionel Messi who stole the show, capping a virtuoso performance with a goal as Argentina beat France 2-0 at Marseille's Stade Velodrome on Wednesday

An ex-girlfriend of Roberto Alomar filed an explosive lawsuit alleging the former baseball star insisted on unprotected sex for four years despite having AIDS.

Brett Favre swears this is the real deal - no more last-minute comebacks.The 39-year-old quarterback retired again Wednesday and insisted he won't look back. Well, at least for now."I have no reason to wonder why you would be so skeptical," Favre said Wednesday

Spain handed England a sharp reminder of the limits of the progress they have made under Fabio Capello by strolling to a 2-0 friendly victory here on Wednesday.

Remember when you were young and you were tasked with the role of wagon leader and solely responsible for the fate of your fellow pioneers as you traversed the dangerous trail connecting Independence, Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley? If you're anything like me, you failed miserably at your duties, with settlers dying off faster than you could hunt and catch food. But very soon, you'll be able to redeem yourself.

Google search can be found integrated on tons of sites across the Web, including this one. Now, Google is extending that functionality to the mobile Web, where publishers can now integrate Google search and earn money on the revenue generated from clicks on mobile ads.

DEMO, the twice annual "launchpad for emerging technologies" that debuted massively successful technology products and services including TiVo, E*TRADE, Salesforce.com, VMware, Six Apart, OddPost, IronPort, GrandCentral and Glam Media, returns on March 1-3 with a new crop of web startups and products.

This is nice, in a slightly creepy, and yet delightfully geeky kind of way: a fellow named Ed Morita decided to tattoo a WordPress logo on his forearm. It's not just a plain, boring logo type of tattoo, there's all sorts of things happening here: skin is peeled off, wires and circuits are shown, and there's a nice big "W" as the centerpiece.

Appliance manufacturer Electrolux is heating things up this Valentine's Day - in a virtual oven that is. The brand is using their Facebook application to create a little buzz and do some good in return.

Facebook seems to get more similar to FriendFeed every day. The latest, the addition of an "I like this" link on News Feed items, is one of the more significant challenges to the lifestreaming service yet, as it essentially duplicates a major component of what makes FriendFeed tick - a simple, one-click display of indicating your liking of a specific item in a stream of activities and a view of all of the other people that have also liked it.

If you're a small business or a one man/woman show, how are you promoting your business online? On the flip side, if you're looking for a consultant, photographer, or a web design company, where do you start your search?That's where Qapacity jumps in; they're hoping to be the middle-man for professionals and service seekers, adding a few unique touches to make the process painless on both sides.

The Dalai Lama joined Twitter this weekend, or so it seemed. At least, the Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama was apparently making use of the messaging service under the username @ohhdl. Or was it?The account was promoting the official Dalai Lama website, and responding respectfully to inquiries. The story spread rapidly on blogs and - of course - on Twitter. At its peak, the account surpassed 16,000 followers.

It's an addictive little habit, that Twitter. But what if there were ways for you to still keep your ugly tweeting habit while staying productive at the same time? Since I can't fully support the total indulgence in the tool that has the tech-world (and beyond) glued to their favorite Twitter client, I thought I would share a few very useful ways to make the service much more productive while you're living inside of it.

No matter how good a service is it can always use a few tweaks, and Flickr is no different.The 15 add-ons we've gathered below for Firefox will help with everything from navigation to uploading, accessing Flickr in countries that block the service, and much more. Take a look and you're bound to find an extension to enhance your Flickr experience.