today in brief Tweet

1. By Lewis Wickes Hine, via Shorpy--the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back. In the photo taken February 1, 1917, Vincenzo Messina, 15 y.o., and brother Angelo, 11 y.o., baking bread for their father at 174 Salem Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vincenzo is working nights now. Angelo helps a great deal, tends store and helps bake, too.

2. At Toolbox: Online Communication two days ago, Catalin [RO] launched Ze Mirror, a very cool top of keywords used on Romanian blogs, either overall in the past 24 hours [RO], or by category in the past seven days--see business [RO]. The blogs taken into account are those enlisted in the Ze List [RO] top they launched previously. Catalin is also to be blamed for NoPrimeTime, a distribution system for ads integrated into online video contents, while his company, Tree Works produces websites like ILoveNYTheater and DCgroove.

3. Twitter is updating its GUI and functionalities, listing buddies function of when they subscribed (chronologically) instead of nickname (A-Z), including random tips in twitters that are shorter than 140 characters and allowing you to track chosen keywords on phone and IM--no web yet--, a service like Google Alerts. It's a tracking world, baby!

4. LinkedIn profiles now include photos, go and update yours.

5. MyBlogLog became a Yahoo! service, just like Flickr, and recently integrating its accounts with Yahoo accounts, just like Flickr did weeks ago. What's the user benefit?

6. Speaking of Yahoo, what do you use for events announcements? I'm happy with Upcoming, which is the third good service I get from Yahoo this year. I applaud them for taking me (even if via acquisitions) from an email account (read spam) only to so much more; I didn't think they can compete with Google anymore, and I'm happy I was wrong.

Update, October 31st, 2007: Speaking of Ze Mirror, mentioned at (2) above, I was thinking I haven't seen something similar yet, internationally. Today I learned that the creators of Twitbin are about to launch a beta version of such a service, StartPR. I'll report back in case I get to try it soon.