If you are a WordPress.com blogger, then you have many reasons to rejoice this festive season, and the feeds on WordPress.com have received a major upgrade. And Ofcourse that latest addition from Automattic is Enhanced Feeds that has for long been associated with Feedburner. Read on to find out what these Enhanced Feeds really are,

Up until now your feed has been fairly basic. All you got in most aggregators was the post title and the content. Simple to navigate and read, but it left you with so many questions. How do I add this post to del.icio.us? How do I Digg it and has it been Dugg already? I wonder how many comments have been left?

Wonder no longer. Today, your WordPress.com feed can be supercharged with the following fine feed widgets:

1. Comment Count
2. Categories
3. Tags
4. “Add to Del.icio.us” link
5. “Digg it!” link
6. “Stumble it!” link

Comment Count is turned on by default but you can switch all the features on or off as you please.

This is a great addition to WordPress.com for sure, as there are loads of Bloggers on WordPress who’ll benefit from this addition. Hopefully this new feature will increase the interaction with the feeds on WordPress… Have a look at the WordPress.com blog for more details.

 Digg is about to Launch the most awaited Images Section later tonight. In conjunction with the release of the image section, Kevin Rose also decided to bump a few things up, and add a couple of new features here and there. Most of the new stuff is related to Images Anyways :

Well here is what Kevin Rose has to say about the new stuff on Digg :

• New Universal Taxonomy
  Now you can submit news, images, or videos to any category on Digg! Categories will be consistent across the board, which means you can view all media types in a given topic, or view one media type at a time (e.g., only images under the “sports” category). We’re also excited to support the launch with new categories. “Offbeat” will be its own category, with new topics, and we’re adding a whole new “Lifestyle” category with topics like Autos, Food & Drink, and Travel. As always, if you don’t want to see a particular topic or media type on Digg, you can click the customize button in the navigation to filter your view.

• New Images Crawler
  Submitting images to Digg is basically the same as submitting news and videos, with a few notable differences. When you submit a link to a web page containing multiple images, Digg will crawl the page and present up to ten image thumbnails from that page for you to choose the one you want. We’ve also added this technology to news submissions.
• Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
  We’ve added a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we’ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

Along with these new features, a new Comments system is also expected to make its debut today. I am subscribing to the Images Popular feed right away. I’m sure its the best way to kill time.

Via Digg Blog

The addition of Drag Drop will be greatly helpful to all those feed junkies out there, because from now, you don’t have to use all those menu’s to arrange your feeds in folders. The other new feature is Recommendations, which suggests feeds that you must read, on the basis of your Feed reading history and your Web Search History. The Feeds that Google Reader suggested for me, were not the kind of stuff I read regularly, so I guess the algorithms need some tweaking.

Google has also rolled out one significant update to Blogger today, and that is, you can now leave comments on blogs using OpenID. Until now you needed a Blogger or Google account if you didn’t want to leave an anonymous comment.

Currently this feature is experimental but I am hoping that it makes it to the final release of Firefox. The new Tab Switcher is an ideal replacement for the existing Ctrl-Tab feature, as it is easier to switch to a Tab you need to go to. When you press Ctrl-Tab in Firefox 3 an overlay with thumbnails of all the Tabs that are open. All you need to do is Click and boom! you’re into the Tab you wished to go to.

Well all this eyecandy comes at a cost, and that is increased CPU usage when using the Tab Switcher. CPU usage spiked from 2-3% to 45-50% during high speed tab switching (that is, I kept Ctrl + Tab pressed for a while), but immediately went back to previous cool 2-3% usage. So you can expect a few things here and there to become unresponsive while switching Tabs.

What do you think of this new and redefined Tab Switcher for Firefox ?

and yeah if you wish to try out Tab Switcher on your existing copy of Firefox install this addon.

Via Tech-Buzz and Mozilla Links

Well some of the new features that we will see in Google Analytics include : 

• Tracking of site search – ‘find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead’
• Event Tracking capability – reports ‘designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.’
• Outbound Link Tracking – ‘report on links visitors clicked on your site that direct them to another site’

Well currently Site Search tracking is available to all Google Analytics user while the other two are in closed beta. Google has also released a new script that will now host the new features of Google Analytics. Google says that site owners need to update their pages’ tracking script from urchin.js to ga.js in order to use the new features that is Event Tracking and Outbound Link Tracking.

While the upgrade looks pretty good, it would be nice if Google Releases a free version of Urchin that is less powerful than the commercial version that we can install on our own webserver if we want to have simple but rich stats for our website.

So I have made another screencast where things are definitely cleaner and are easily visible unlike the previous demo.

Trying out the new Languages on Orkut is really simple and here are the instructions for it :

• 1. Click the settings button under your profile photo (or click the blue settings link at the top of any page).
• 2. On the general tab, choose your preferred display language from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
• 3. Click save changes.

And here is the updated screencast :

More Details Over at the Orkut Blog

Orkut finally is moving in the right direction in the social network scene. Right now Orkut has traction only in India and Brazil but things are likely to change in the future. Only last week orkut redesigned its interface, which has received a lot of positive feedback from its users.

The latest entry to Orkut is similar to what Facebook already provides. Orkut now displays notification from your friends when they make changes to their profile, adds photos to the album, videos, testimonials etc…

While this feature is being slowly rolled out, ala typical google fashion and you can expect to see it within the next week. You can see if Notifications is enabled for you by going over to this page. If you see something like the screenshot below then you have it enabled, otherwise you got to wait for Orkut to enable this feature for you.

Google is finally taking Orkut seriously and I would like to see something Facebook apps in orkut so that I can show my Flickr Photos etc.. Also giving Users to choose differant layouts for their profiles will be a nice idea.

Via Google System

But don’t worry, it won’t be like that anymore because starting from Firefox 3 the Password manager becomes more smarter than it was before. It asks if you want to save the password after you have logged in. This is quite handy feature that will make it Firefox 3. Here is how the new Password Manager will look like :

This will make it to today’s Nightly Build. If you can’t wait to test it then go and download the nightly build today. The New password manager is not smart enough to detect if the logon was successful but it will certainly help to less cluttered and inefficient credential lists.

Good job Mozilla Team. Keep up the Good work.

Via Mozilla Links

Here is a brief rundown into what the Orkut Team posted on their blog :

In our quest to make orkut universally accessible, we’re now available in 5 new languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Indians have always been a vibrant part of the orkut community, and we continue to see more Indians joining orkut every day. It’s our goal to make orkut the ultimate tool for self-expression and communication, and we know that if we’re not translated into your native language, this becomes harder. So we worked closely with Googlers in our Indian offices to help develop the initial release of these languages.

Trying out the new Languages on Orkut is really simple and here are the instructions for it :

• 1. Click the settings button under your profile photo (or click the blue settings link at the top of any page).
• 2. On the general tab, choose your preferred display language from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
• 3. Click save changes.

I am also attaching a screencast showing you how to do it. RSS Readers you need to click here to watch the video.

More Details Over at the Orkut Blog

I have uploaded a much better demo of over here

Unfortunately Microsoft has locked the thread and deleted all the contents of it. But I somehow managed to read the contents of it and here are the features that are expected to make it into the upcoming Windows and Internet Explorer. Reading the blueprints gives you an Idea what Microsoft really is thinking about its competition. Microsoft is well aware of the challenge it faces from Linux and Firefox and they plan to incorporate features from the two families into the upcoming versions of IE8 and Windows Vienna..

Here is the leaked features list :

• For IE : Undo Close Tab (like Firefox)
• For IE : Saving and Restoring sessions (like Firefox)
• Windows Vienna : Virtual Desktops (like Linux)
• Windows Vienna : The Ability to Rearrange items on the task bar

Also included in the post at forums says that Windows Vienna’s theming will be completely customizable and will forever change the way People look at Windows. The most interesting thing about the new version of Windows would be virtualization that will be prominent for “legacy apps”, i.e. all applications not specifically written for Window Vienna or in .NET will be run in a separate virtual machine. This is comparable to how Mac OS X handled Mac OS 9. Windows Vienna will also feature “Windows Core”, the ability to separate GUI and console from each other as in Windows Server 2008.

Expect to see “Windows Vienna” on store shelves some time in 2009. The final name, however, has not been revealed in the forum post.

Here are the links to the leaked threads….

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=323949
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=323988