We’re tweeting with joy - you can now get the latest updates from GizBuzz, along with the other two Oratos blogs (YouMakeMedia and FOSSwire) on Twitter, the new nano-blogging tool taking the tech world by storm (see our review).

Even if you’ve decided Twitter isn’t something you want to get involved with in the orthodox sense, our Twitter feed is still valuable for you - you can get GizBuzz content, as soon as it is written, delivered to your Google Talk account or by SMS text.

The Oratos Twitter page is here. 

A big shout out to Peter for putting this together. As I understand it, he’s created a plugin for our blog software (WordPress) which pings a script. This script then checks the blog’s RSS feed for new items, and adds any items it finds to Twitter, via its API. This means that there doesn’t need to be a cron script, which would add load to the server by checking the feed every 2 minutes even if there wasn’t a new post. It also means that you get our posts instantly, rather than when such a script decides to check for them.

Add us! 

In case you haven’t already realised, it is the 1st of April again - and of course, that means it’s time for some silly news stories to appear in my RSS reader. I’ve selected three of my favourites that I’ve seen around the web.

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If you want a quicker way to search the Gizbuzz blog archives, and you’re using Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7, you’re in luck! I’ve just added an OpenSearch setup, so you can search Gizbuzz really quickly and easily from the built-in search box.

To add us, just go to any Gizbuzz page and click the down arrow on the search box and choose to add Gizbuzz.

You can remove it again by going to Manage Search Engines (in Firefox) on that same menu.

Enjoy!

Today is the first birthday of Gizbuzz (as you may have guessed from the celebration picture on the site), and we’ve come a long way from that first post.

Here are some of the highlights:

Peter joining us. I went on holiday for a week, and asked around a forum to see if anyone would deputise for me. Peter agreed, and was so good that he stayed. He’s now been joined by Chris and most recently Sam.

Switching from Google’s Blogger (the old blog is here) to Wordpress. WP even allowed us to import all posts and comments. For the first few months of this arrangement Gizbuzz was hosted on a dedicated server, which happened to be an old laptop of mine running Ubuntu.

Getting to the front page of Digg. This brought a traffic spike of about 10,000 in the first day, and a great deal more over the coming week. It also ensured that the change of address for Gizbuzz didn’t result in a loss of Google juice by getting us serious linkage. Unsuprisingly, however, my laptop crashed, which meant that the spike wasn’t as high as it could have been. I have sinced moved over to Dreamhost.

The launch of the Gizbuzz podcast. The first episode of the podcast was with Raju Vegesna of Zoho, and after a break of a couple of months we have interviewed some fantastic people. Our most popular episode was with Sam Schillace and Jen Mazzon from the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team.

The new Gizbuzz design. Gizbuzz isn’t running on just another Wordpress theme any more, but on a custom design by Chris. Note the adaption to celebrate the birthday! Our redesign went somewhat better than TechCrunch’s rather green effort last year.

The founding of Oratos. Peter, Chris and I, as well as Jacob (who doesn’t write here but does on other network sites) founded Oratos Media, a tech blog network. If you look on the sidebar of Gizbuzz you will see a widget showing the latest headlines from our four blogs.

So, what for the future. We’ve got some exciting things to announce:

The launch of Gizbuzz Consulting for Web 2.0 companies. I have already conducted consulting for Web 2.0 companies who have contacted me through Gizbuzz, but have not advertised this service before. I think now is the time to start doing this, as we now have some great experience under our belts. You can find out about this here.

The development of Megaphone. Peter, a PHP genius, has been working on a new web application to support Oratos. We have said from the very beginning that Oratos will not be just another association of blogs, and Megaphone is a key part of that. Initially, Megaphone will allow users to submit ideas for posts (and submit their companies) and these will be accessible to all writers. They will also be able to upload segments for our podcasts. After the initial release, hopefully in this quarter (it’s well under way), we are looking to get even further into user generated content, possibly with you even writing some posts for us, and then deciding which ones get published. That should make our lives easier!

So thank you to both readers and writers for a great year. January’s going to be a busy month for us, and by the looks of things 2007 will be a big year as well. Here’s to another year of Gizbuzz!

The Macworld San Francisco 2007 Expo is drawing close. The bit of it everyone is waiting for - Steve Jobs’ Keynote - is on Tuesday 9th January at 9 am (or 5 pm in London - find for your timezone). The rumours are running wild as to just what will be announced. But a few things seem quite definite. It is expected that more details will be provided about the upcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard release and more on Apple’s “iTV” device that pulls music, photos and movies from your PC or Mac and puts them on your TV. Also quite firm predictions are the release of iLife 07, and an upgrade to the iWork software package (including a Spreadsheets program). Maybe there will be the true video iPod, and maybe there will be an iPhone. But probably in all honesty not.

So where can you find out exactly what is going on? Well all the Apple rumour sites are offering full coverage of the event. Here is just a pick of three ways to get the news.

World of Apple Live hope to offer a full audio stream live from the keynote. If this works and is not overloaded, then it will almost certainly be the best way to hear what happens.

MacRumors are offering two different ways to get the updates. Either you can watch their live site where there will be a constantly updated text commentary of events, or you can just bookmark this one post which will be updated with a link to the QuickTime video of the event which Apple post a few hours after the keynote has finished. The latter page promises not to have any spoilers on it - so you can watch the presentation (albeit a few hours late) still unaware of what has been announced.

Gizbuzz is not doing live commentary - however there will be summary posts of all the announcements as well as more in depth analysis about what they mean for the future. So watch out this Tuesday - whatever happens there will be plenty of news.

Update: Gizbuzz is building a series of posts on the announcement, and has also just recorded a podcast with some more in depth discussion. You can see all of these posts in our Apple category.

You may have noticed that the excellent post on the Microsoft-Novell deal wasn’t written by Peter or me. It was written by Chris Van Patten, a new blogger at Gizbuzz (you may recognise the name - Chris designed Gizbuzz). We are also pleased to welcome Jacob Peddicord to the Gizbuzz fold. Both are experienced bloggers, and they are a welcome addition to the team.

This is all part of the big news; Gizbuzz is a founding blog of a new blog network, Oratos Media. It has a strong tech focus, with three blogs and two podcasts at the moment:

• YouMakeMedia - learn how to take part in the media revolution, led by Chris.
• FOSSwire - a blog about free and open source software for all abilities. Check out Peter’s tutorial introducing you to Linux, or for the more advanced, look out for the in-depth analysis of the Microsoft-Novell deal.
• PodDev - web development podcast, with interviews from leaders in the industry. Our latest guest was Josh Jones, CEO of hosting giant Dreamhost.
• Gizbuzz - you know about this one!

We have all sorts of exciting ideas for the network in the future. This will not be just another b5media or 9rules; they do what they do very well, and there are plenty of people trying to emulate them. As we gain a bigger audience, adding more blogs, expect to see new ideas in terms of community and user generated content.

This is a great opportunity for Gizbuzz, and marks our transition to the next level. Check out our new sister blogs, and keep reading and contributing!

This is a first for Gizbuzz: we have a podcast. However, the real news is the content. As regular readers will know one of the big areas that Gizbuzz covers is Web 2.0, and one of the most exciting Web 2.0 companies around at the moment is Zoho, who are currently in the process of building an online productivity suite, rivalling that being built by Google and ultimately Microsoft Office.

Peter and I did an interview with the Chief Architect of Zoho, Raju Vegesna, who was kind enough to talk to us for about 45 minutes on the subject of Rich Web Applications, why we want them and where they will go in the future.

Download the Podcast

Subscribe to the podcast [this will let you add it automatically to iTunes as well]

If you still need some convincing, some of the things we covered were:

• Who would want to use Rich Web Applications, and how they are being used at the moment .
• How Zoho will gain users’ trust (remember, with rich web applications the application provider holds the data, not you. See Scoble)
• Nuts and bolts of how rich web apps will be developed in the future - is Ajax enough or will XUL or Flash be leveraged? Is a totally new standard needed?
• The future of web applications. Will we be using them instead of a desktop suite in five years time? Will they have spread outside the ‘geek world’?
• The upcoming launch of Zoho Drive in the next few weeks, a product which certainly sounds extremely disruptive and very exciting. Listen for an explanation!

I’ve managed to get my hands on a copy of Office 2007 Beta 2, so here are some preliminary screenshots:

This is the new blog, at Gizbuzz.co.uk. If you’re reading this in our RSS feed, don’t worry, it’s automatically been transfered over to the new URL.

I think this is a change for the better, and I hope you like the design (Blix Wordpress theme, I made the banner).

Happy reading!