By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I am sure when the founders of HotPads came up with their website business, the idea was to tap into the red-hot housing market. Sadly, things have changed and now the word “hot” has a whole new meaning.

Hotpads is a free service that lets you compare rentals and homes for sale in many top US cities. Even more interesting is the site’s heatmap feature. As shown here, foreclosures in the San Francisco Bay Area are indeed heating up.

We Say: Why not throw in a gasoline price tracker heat map and we an all just drown ourselves right now.

Alice Adds: If you truly want to depress yourself, check out Gas Buddy. San Francisco has hit $4.11 a gallon. sigh…

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

While Google seems way ahead in some things, it’s not the case when it comes to its Blogger service. But they’ve finally added something they should have added long ago: scheduled posts.

Until now, when you post something, no matter what time you set for the post, it went live immediately. With the new feature, you can schedule a post to go live at a certain time, a feature other services such WordPress have offered for quite some time.

Just to be clear, however, this only applies if you use Blogger in Draft, meaning if you login to draft.blogger.com. Use the main Blogger page and posts will go live immediately.

Now, what if you want your posts to go live right away, but postdate them so you can pin a post to the top of the page? You can still do that, according to Google. As they say in the announcement of the new feature:

We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top.

Nice to see there’s still some things that Google has to play catch-up on, but also nice to see that they are doing so.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Not to be outdone by Yahoo!, Google has announced the ability to use your Blogger URLs as an OpenID URL at any site that allows OpenID 1.1 authentication.

Yahoo announced on Thursday the ability (at the end of January) to use Yahoo! user IDs for OpenID logins, so this doesn’t go quite so far, as it doesn’t allow the use of the much larger pool of Gmail user IDs.

So how do you enable this? You edit your profile from the beta version of Blogger, draft.blogger.com (if you edit from www.blogger.com you won’t see the checkbox) and check the box that says “Enable OpenID for blogs” (see below).

Caveats? No support for blogs that aren’t hosted on BlogSpot or are on a custom domain. There’s a workaround that may work for some (help page). Also,“Yes, Always” to trust an OpenID site forever, you cannot now delete that trust. We will add this feature soon.

Hopefully the fact that Google has opted to support OpenID 1.1 won’t be an issue going forward; Yahoo! has opted for OpenID 2.0 support.

Although you can already login to comment at Blogger using OpenID, this still means that at least as far as actual services go, Blogger and Yahoo! are still both providers, not consumers of OpenID. It would really serve to validate OpenID if they would start allow users to login to their services with OpenID.

The one hint that this may happen, at least for Yahoo!, comes from Jeremy Zawodny (”Yahoo!’s MySQL guru”) at his blog, which says:

Oh, and before anyone jumps on me about this not being “full” (meaning bi-directional) OpenID support, I’m quite aware of that. Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can’t happen overnight. Give it some time. I’m optimistic that we’ll get there.

The assumption being if Yahoo! is moving in this direction, so will Google, leads one to hope.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Yes, it’s been called a smiley face, but it’s the first emoticon. We’re not talking about the funky smiley images I can produce here by doing this BTW, but the original ASCII smiley face.

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize. Source: MSNBC

We Say: What can I say, but “:-)”?

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

The things you find online. Today, Amazon unveiled a brand new look, and while I was poking around I found this interesting offer. You can buy the complete Penguin Classics - that’s 1,000 volumes, and get free shipping. I wonder if Amazon did the math on that. Here’s what an actual buyer reported:

“They arrived in 25 boxes shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, over 750 lbs. of books. It took about twelve hours to unpack them, check them off the packing list (one for each box), and then check them off the list we downloaded from Amazon.com. They take up about 77 linear feet.”

We Say: Doesn’t this scream out for a digital solution? Anyone else find this ironic? Source: Amazon.com

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Rumors have been flying about Netscape pulling the plug on its social networking type news site, and it looks like they are true, although according to Netscape, they will open a new social networking site at the same time.

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.

The decision to redirect the current Netscape.com site is based on that feedback and our desire to better serve our community. Source: Netscape Blog

We Say: What they really mean is that they weren’t making any money, and they have to fold up shop.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

It took the New York Times to do it, but the face behind the mask of “Fake Steve” has been revealed. For 14 months, he’s been anonymously lampooning the real Steve Jobs at his blog.

The acerbic postings of “Fake Steve,” as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership — both the real Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com). At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley’s gossips to discover his real identity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention. Source: The New York Times

We Say: Well, you can’t keep something like this quiet forever. Interestingly, he was given away by an upcoming satirical novel, written by Fake Steve, as well as the book’s agent. The book, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.” Last year the agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine … when the NYT compared this data, as well as the writing style of Lyons at his own blog, Floating Point, the jig was up.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

I feel a bit safer now. Just kidding. This is just the first step; it’s not even the full House, just a panel. And of course, getting it past Bush, who has voiced opposition to the shield, is most likely a lost cause.

In response to concerns raised by the Bush administration and other politicians, the revised bill attempts to exclude the “casual blogger” from reaping those benefits by stipulating the protections apply only to those who derive “financial gain or livelihood” from the journalistic activity, Boucher said Wednesday. That broad rule could, however, include part-time writers who receive even a trickle of revenue from Google Ads or Blogads.com. Source: News.com

We Say: A lot of the opposition stems from opinions like that of Rep. Adam Schiff … what he said was anyone “could start a blog and request advertising on that blog, and whether they get it or not, would be considered a journalist under this bill.” While that is a point, the main idea of such a bill, IMHO, is to prevents repetitions of incidents like what happened to Josh Wolf. Personally I would say that he, or even myself, qualify as journalists and should be shielded, but this would put more weight behind such arguments.