Here’s a quick brief on what I’ve been up to.

Bunch of stories published over at Web Worker Daily, for one:

* Say Hello to Blellow, Microblogging Web Workers
* Can Microblogging Platforms Help Reduce The Email Glut?
* Bootstrapping Web Workers Get A Roadmap At SXSW 2009
* Technorati Attention Index Ranks Authority of “Non-Blog” Sources
* WebWorkerDaily Guide to SXSW Interactive 2009
* Twimailer Makes Twitter Email Alerts More Friendly, Useful

And I attended South by Southwest last week, which was phenomenal, exhausting, and supremely recommended for anyone seriously interested in the present and future of the webs.

One of the coolest things that came out of it was a “live FriendFeed” thread that I kicked off during a session called Beyond Aggregation, which included a panel of people such as my pal Louis Gray, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, Melanie Baker of AideRSS, and Micah Baldwin from Lijit. Not only was it one of the best panels that I attended, but it was super cool how people such as Robert Scoble, Matt Cutts from Google, my old friend Aaman Lamba, Hutch Carpenter, and a bunch of others hopped into the thread, both enhancing the coverage of the session and adding commentary along the way.

I’ve heard a lot of stuff about “crowdsourced” content and collaborative journalism and so forth over the years, but this was the closest I’ve ever felt to the real thing. Here’s the thread if you want to check it out.

Here’s a glimpse of my first several posts over there:

Tracking Twitter by Topic: What’s the Best Solution?

Web working increasingly means having to read up-to-the-nanosecond trending topics and conversations across the social web, and on Twitter in particular. With the huge and growing number of Twitter apps and related services that are now available, it can be confusing to figure out the best way to quickly and easily extract those keyword-based threads that you need.

Searchles’ Related Content Widget Wants To Make Your Web Site Stickier

If the “Web 2.0 era” marks the time when widgets became a household term (in web workers’ homes, at least!), 2009 is looking like a year when widgets are evolving and maturing to add real value for web site publishers and their visitors.

Whether you’re running a corporate blog, commercial web site, or any online media product or service, the name of the game is to engage users and get them to achieve the goal that you’ve set out. That goal might be to encourage multiple page views and return visits, to sign up for a service, to buy a product, and so on. And while “related stories” have long been a feature on online news sites and blogs, “contextually relevant” content widgets have become the latest trend in empowering web site publishers to quickly and easily install tools that will help them to reach their goals.

ReadBurner’s BurnURL Fires Up Social Web Sharing

It’s easy to understand why URL-shortening tools such as TinyURL and bit.ly are popular on the social web. For web workers, the ability to quickly absorb, organize, package, and redistribute information is a critical and demanding task. BurnURL, a new service produced by ReadBurner (first mentioned here, and currently awaiting relaunch), seeks to add value to this process by making it easy to allow people you’re sharing with to do additional sharing.

It’s a matter of reducing the steps to the bare minimum in order to allow a piece of content to “go viral.” BurnURL does its part by with something called the “ShareBar.”