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I started uploading my photos into Picasa because it’s run by Google, just like Blogger is. And now I think I’m stuck. I certainly don’t want to move everything I’ve got in Picasa over to Flickr, and I don’t want to just start putting the new stuff on Flickr because the idea of scattering my photos across two hosting sites just bothers me.

There are too many people to follow, and it just got sort of overwhelming. I had a hard time following conversations between people, and before long I was spending huge chunks of my workday just trying to catch up on friends’ Tweets. On top of all that, I also had a hard time coming up with things to say in my own Tweets. Frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would find the daily minutiae of my life to be worth reading, and the 140-character limit on each Tweet seemed to prevent discussion of anything more deep.

All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone moved over to Plurk. This was about the time I took my little summer vaca from SL, and so I haven’t even given a serious look to Plurk, but my superficial examination has left me thoroughly confused. I guess it’s like Twitter on steroids, with all the pressure to microblog and keep up with other folks’ microblogs, but with the added pressure of a reputation rating called “karma”! No thanks.

Obasanjo writes, "Google is tipping it's search results to favor Knol. Or at least that is the conclusion of several search engine optimization (SEO) experts and also jibes with my experiences." He Danny Sullivan, who writes, "I was surprised to see a post covering how Knol's How to Backpack was already hitting the number three spot on Google. Really? I mean, how many links could this page have gotten already?" Also, Aaron Wall notes that "if Google notices duplicate content then it favors the content on Knol over a site that has existed for years and has decent PageRank."

The launch of Picnik a couple of days ago brought us yet another online photo editing tool. Like Fauxto, Picnik uses Flash, whereas most of the earlier editing tools all use Ajax for in-browser editing. Since all computers come with basic software that rotates, resizes and crops photos, there needs to be a compelling reason to use an online service. Uploading a photo to such a service, editing it and then downloading it back to your hard drive too high of a cost. To compensate for this, most services allow you to transfer the edited photos directly to Flickr, Webshots or other online photo services, saving users the trouble of making round trips uploading and downloading. Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones, along with our most recent testing notes:

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore. To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.