USWeb has been enabling Blog-to-email for over a year now for our clients. It’s great to see this becoming a mainstream thing now. One of my favorite blogs just did a story about their experience with Feedburner’s new service offering.

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve included a ‘Subscribe to TechCrunch by Email’ widget on the right sidebar of TechCrunch for the last few days.

ReadWriteWeb and I have been quietly testing a superb new FeedBurner blog-to-email product that addresses every feature I requested on No. 2 of this list. This new (free) Email Subscriptions product launches officially this morning and can be found under the ‘publicize’ link at Feedburner.

Key features:

• Free
• Daily emails
• Blog Branding - Feedburner plugs are all at the bottom and minimized
• Very good HTML/CSS rendering - posts look just right in the email (see screen shot below)
• Blogger owns the email list and can export it at any time

Feedburner has existing partnerships with Feedblitz and Squeet for their competing products - those partnerships remain in place and bloggers will have a choice as to which of the three services to use.

My recommendation to bloggers: consider using this product. There are a lot of people out there who have not made the jump to RSS readers yet. You want to get your content in front of them, and this is another way to do it. Based on some stats that Fred Wilson (an investor in FeedBurner) published last year, we can expect about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers.

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

You can register for the TechCrunch daily email in the widget above or in the right sidebar.

Tags: feedblitz, squeet, email, techcrunch, rss, web2.0, web_2.0

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(Via TechCrunch.)

Can AOL re-claim the market that was once theirs? One thing is for certain, they have a long way to go, but a lot of resources.

AOL may be preparing to launch a Myspace-type social network called ‘Head On’ sometime in the next few weeks, says Dave Winer.

This went from rumor to ‘confirmed likely’ in posts and comments by Jason Calacanis and Jordan Running (also here) (both now at AOL). A comment in the last link suggests that the new service will be open to non AOL members.

This market is red hot. Mature players like Facebook and Fox-owned Myspace basically own their respective categories, and better-featured (and funded to the hilt) newcomers like Tagworld and Tagged gunning for the big guys. Even aging Friendster, mostly written off as living dead, has made a recent (if quiet) comeback based on Alexa stats. Fickle teenagers and young adults are quick to jump ship to the hot new thing, but these existing players will certainly not lie down for AOL.

We’ll have more on this as it develops.

Tags: myspace, tagged, tagworld, friendster, jasoncalacanis, socialnetworks, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

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(Via TechCrunch.)

When I first heard about this two weeks ago I thought maybe it was an April fools joke that had spread around the internet but it appears to be True. France has declared War… on Google. You can read the story at business week. [more…]

Google Sitempas blog today posted some info about using the lastmod attribute.

With our recent infrastructure changes, we’ve made some minor changes in how we process the lastmod attribute. If you omit the time portion, it defaults to midnight UTC (00:00:00Z). If you specify a time, but omit the timezone, you’ll get an invalid date error. You’ll also get an invalid date error if you specify an invalid date or time (like February 80th) or the date isn’t in the correct format. You’ll no longer see errors associated with future dates.

Dates must use W3C Datetime encoding, although you can omit the time portion. For instance, the following are both valid:

• 2005-02-21
• 2005-02-21T18:00:15+00:00

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(Via Inside Google Sitemaps.)

Every now and then I come across a really stupid idea. And this one was too good to not share. Millionare24.com wants to sell Web based email for the record price of $399. I did not make an error with my decimal point, they really want to charge nearly $400 for an email account. [more…]

I found this posting on AJAX magazine. I tried the app out, but it didn’t seem to work properly.

This is a great example of a useful Web app in AJAX. I’ll check this again later and see if it starts working. [more…]

Wendy Davis has written a great article, Documents Detail Direct Revenue Strategies, where she looks into the actual business relationships, and their breakdown. [more…]

If you’re not familiar with the Google Sitemaps blog, you should be. We get many calls from people asking why all their pages are not being indexed. The reason often can be found on this blog. [more…]

Google launched their calendar today, and it looks a lot like iCal. Judge for yourself with the image above. [more…]

Despite various efforts, blog spam continues. Joris Evers of Cnet posted a great article today on the issues of dealing with blog spam.

Mark Frauenfelder, founder of Boing Boing, compares it to pollution. “It reminds me of visible smog, because it obscures what you want to be looking at. You have to wast brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out.” [more…]