Google launched a blog search service. Exciting stuff! It’s sparse and quick and it works decently enough. I like to keep tabs on who’s linking to me, so I’ve subscribed to the search results for my site alongside my Technorati and IceRocket results. Google returns 80 results, Technorati returns “218 links from 157 sites” and IceRocket returns 106 results. I haven’t done any research into the additional 26 links that IceRocket returns, but the way it displays its results is still my favorite, with the entries grouped by day.

Wordpress WYSIWYG editor preview - a demo of the post editor coming to Wordpress 1.6. Resizable, WYSIWYG, very slick. I hope it uploads images nicely.

Cringely Podcasting and Blogging - interesting column by Cringely about the market demand for (video) podcasting and blogging and how it’s changing his gig.

So until Scoble posted about a boycott I had no idea that the issue of excerpts versus full text in feeds was so huge. I’ve been using RSS aggregators for a couple of years now and have always preferred headings and decent excerpts. I’ve unsubscribed from more feeds for having too much text than I have too little.

I don’t really want to switch my main feeds for that reason, but I’ve made a full text feed here for the people who want it:

http://www.bradsucks.net/rss2/fulltext/

I have no plans to add RSS ads because I think they’re dumb and gross.

Also for any Wordpress hackers out there looking to do this on their own blogs, I’ve described what I did to make this work here.

While reading up on Hawaii for a vacation, I stumbled across HawaiiUP, subtitled “Podcasting in Paradise”. Hawaiian podcasters? That’s pretty awesome. Turns out there’s a whole Hawaii Association of Podcasters and here’s a list of them.

Preventing comment spam - looks like all the major search engines are implementing a way to hopefully curb blog comment spam. I started getting a few hundred a day recently so this is great news.

Hostbaby Wizard - Derek at CDBaby launches the HostBaby Wizard, an easy way for musicians to set up websites:

It’s the perfect tool for musicians who want to focus on their music, and not have to master HTML, spend a fortune, wait months, or be at the mercy of webmaster friends doing you favors.

It’s free to sign up, free to try out for a month, and only $20/month if you decide to stay.

Cool service from a cool guy.

Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make is very good, though a bit nerd-centric.

I obviously agree with just about everything written there and have been doing it for years. But I also know that most of the music buying public doesn’t care about deep linking, RSS, or ID3 tags and they still think a cool looking Flash site is pretty cool looking.

That being said, I think the tips are essential for any indie record label and great for any musician who’s thinking about relying on the Internet as a major source of promotion.

Update: Great Metafilter discussion here.

WP iTunes - a plugin that allows you to display your currently playing iTunes song on your WordPress blog.

So I was complaining about how annoying setting up multiple Podcast / RSS enclosure feeds was last night. I want to Podcast all the remixes people do of my songs but I really don’t want to make blog posts for all of them or maintain a whole other blog just for that.

We came up with an idea and my pal Ryan whipped up a PHP script called dirCaster. Basically you drop this script into a web directory full of mp3s and it makes a Podcast feed of them sorted by file date, with data extracted from the ID3 tags. As you add new files to the directory, the feed will be updated dynamically. Quick, dirty and easy. My remix feed using it is here.

It has some pretty obvious limitations but seems to get the job done with minimum fuss. It should work for the usual talk radio-ish use of Podcasting, but I also like the potential of using it to share small feeds among friends. Like I can set up a directory of my current favorite songs I want to force my friends to listen to and they subscribe in iPodder or jPodder or what have you. Then they’ll automatically download any new songs I throw in that directory. Pretty neat.