You know, it’s not every day that a celebrity comes out and creates a new online service. But today, Damon Wayans bucked that tradition by announcing his new startup, WayOutTV.

Now, I am just waiting to get access to the beta and I’ll post on it when I do.

Brian Solis over at bub.licio.us had this to say, “The way I described it … was, it’s like Will Ferril’s Funny or Die, but funny.” Here’s the link to his original post on the service.

I just read a great post over at Google Blogoscoped on the currently experimental “Offline” feature that is currently being tested with Google Docs. I was hoping this type of functionality and in a previous post mentioned that through Google Gears, they were setting the stage for this.

The downside, though, is that I don’t have access to the page that where he found the option to go offline. He mentioned that it’s not an option that will be available soon. If anyone does notice the feature, let me know.

Among many things that I do, I also try to make time to test out some of the new online services that are made available. Pownce is a service that has been in beta for some time and just recently opened their doors to the public. It’s an online service that allows you to send stuff to your friends online.

What can you send, you might ask?

Just about anything. Music, links, photos, messages, events to your friends and even to the general public.

It’s a software that seemlessly integrates into your existing social networks (it offers support for Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and Flickr, and also allows you to search your email contacts to find others who might already be utilizing Pownce).

The application of this is great if you’re wanting to send various things to a lot of people but don’t have the time to keep up with the different email addresses of your friends.

For those that have been following the service, it was rumored that it was headed for its end shortly before their public launch. You can read more about it on Techcrunch here and here

Also, note that Leah Culver is the lead developer on the project who is also in my blogroll.

So, following up on my RSS post, I wanted to give you guys access to the blogs and websites that I follow on a regular basis. So I decided the other day that I would make my blogroll available in the sidebar for everyone to see. Most of these websites offer daily updates on new technology and monitor the tech world (with the exception of my wife… plug).

Oh, and if anyone comes across a website that you think I should check out and possibly add to that list, add a comment and I’ll check it out.

This has to take some time and dedication, but is very cool…

Last night Techcrunch held their annual Crunchies awards. The recap is here (they should have video live soon). Below are the websites that I use that were awarded last night. Congrats to all of them:

Best Overall: Facebook

– I said not too long ago that social networking would be huge in 2008. I believe that not only will Facebook lead the way, they’ll top Myspace in 2008 (just my opinion).

Best Video Startup: Hulu

– I agree completely with this one. They had a slow and rough start, but the service is very cool.

Best International Startup: Netvibes

– This has got to be one of the best sites for organizing external content feeds.

Best Mobile Startup: Twitter

– This service I rarely use (mainly because of time constraints), but the concept behind it is great.

Best Consumer Startup: Meebo

– I love this service, mainly because it allows for the use of multiple chat platforms using an online webtop.

Best Enterprise Startup: Zoho

– Zoho made the list of websites that I use quite frequently. Their Zoho Creator service is extremely useful for creating custom applications and can now even be used as the backbone database for existing emterprise applications.

Most Likely to Succeed: Automattic (Wordpress)

– In case you’re wondering… this is a Wordpress blog and a lot of professional bloggers use Wordpress as the backbone of their blogging system.

Again, congratulations to everyone that received an award last night.

Get in touch with your inner geek… I will.

I discovered these this afternoon and had a blast going through them. All of these images are courtesy of thinkgeek.com. If you click on the images, you can get more information. Here are some of my favorites:

Ha!

Creative… it’s a caffeine molecule

For the spouses…

I believe you have my stapler

A little over-used, but still one of my favorites.

My absolute favorite. It’s a real wifi detector!

I know… I’m a…

Over the past several days, I have seen more and more websites posting their 2007 reviews on tech news and startups. No doubt 2007 has brought a lot of turmoil to the tech world. My most viewed reviews comes from TechCrunch where they showcase their most popular headlines of 2007.

So, how will 2008 go? I think there will be two topics that will prevail amongst any other topics out there: mobile development and social development.

2007 was a very big year for mobile development with the release of the Apple iPhone. Google is in development of a new open-source mobile platform that will no doubt extend their reach further into the mobile arena (I think allowing them to then enable search marketing to those using the platform). New startups are beginning to focus their attention, also, to the mobile arena, developing their platforms to function with smaller devices. Facebook has already created an interface specific to the iPhone. Many services like Jaiku and Twitter also allow you to make mini posts (sort of like status updates) from your mobile devices. And technology is increasingly allowing users to do more with their smaller devices.

Social development has been a very big topic in 2007 with the news centering around Facebook and their controversial new ad-network. Facebook made the announcement in 2007 that they will allow targeted advertising. I had a chance to try out this targeted platform and while it didn’t do much for me, it was a breath of fresh air for online advertisers. (Honestly, though, it is a big leap forward. With the amount of social data that Facebook manages it seems fitting for them to create an ad network that would harness the information they store). Facebook also released an interesting ad network called Beacon. The release of Beacon, although controversial for it’s lack of opt-out support, allowed external websites to post in a users updates feed when they performed a particular task on their website. For instance, Blockbuster might post in my update feed that I added “24 - Season 6″ to my movies queue. The power of the service allows for the creative marketing of actions that occur outside of social networks. While there was some initial backlash on the service from the consumer standpoint, the idea is novel and powerful. I expect this to be a big player in ‘08.

Google has also been a big news maker in the social arena. Earlier this year, they released the OpenSocial platform creating a new medium with which to aggregate social network applications across a variety of various social networks. The launch of the service inclued an impressive number of social networks participating with the API including hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn. A few days later, MySpace made the announcement that they will participate bringing pressure to the table for Facebook which uses it’s own fbml programming language to create applications for it’s users. The software was unimpressive at first being hacked withing 45 minutes. Improvements have been made with the software with their 0.6 release. This software is very much still in beta and will be a very big power-player in 2008.

Ning has also been a big playing the social arena in 2007. They reached a milestone by adding their 100,000th social network and have just recently announced that an major update to their service will make social networks more centric based allowing for news and information to be displayed from individual social networks rather than all social network news to be generated from the entire community at large. There is big popularity having the ability to create your own social network and as the web grows into more a platform, this ability will be key to generating impressive numbers of social data for small to medium businesses.

All this is in addition to the continued growth of social mediums like Youtube will make 2008 a very big year for social marketing.

It’s a known fact that web developers often work from multiple computers. Whether it’s a Vista PC at home or a Mac at the office, it can be tedious to keep up with your documents and finding the most current version. Using a flash drive is convenient, but can easily fall out of your pocket or get lost. So earlier this year, I started using Google Docs, Google’s new online Office competitor.

Google got an early hold on this market when they bought Writely, one of the first services to take word processing online. Since then, they’ve integrated it into their system as Google Docs and Spreadsheets. All users who have a Google account can access the service for free.

The one thing I love about Google Docs, (besides the fact that I can access my docs online from any PC) is the sharing feature. My wife and I share documents back and forth and it makes it very simple to coordinate on projects. In fact, I can include a group of collaborators in on the same doc making coordination of projects very simple. You can even publish it to let the public at large view a doc.

Another feature that I love that really made me finally switch from working offline is the revisions feature. I can go back to every saved revision of a document and either restore it or copy and paste from it to the current working revision. I know many would like this in Word, and granted there are programs out there that can track versions of programs on you’re desktop. Many who are working with the new Mac OS have discovered this same type of feature, but it’s a long process and the revisions aren’t integrated into the software you’re working with. Google Docs integrates it and with one click you can see the various revisions of your docs online.

In fact, with Google’s current technology in development (I’m referring to Google Gears - I’ll talk about it in a later post), Google is setting the stage for both online and offline functionality with Google Docs (although not yet available).

Google Docs can also handle all of your current documents and allows you to upload from a myriad of different word processing programs whether it be text files, rtf, doc, or odt as well as spreadsheet docs. And it can also export to a myriad of doc formats, including PDF (very helpful to those people like me who need to save a doc as pdf and don’t want to install pdf995 or use a third party program).

Is it a perfect solution, not entirely. With Google Docs, you have to get used to the formatting of documents and it can be a challenge to use initially, but the benefits far outweigh anything else. If you have a Google account or use Gmail like me, you can access Google Docs by simply clicking on the Documents link at the very top left of your screen when you’re logged in.

I just got my private invitation to Hulu tonight. Hulu is a service in private beta that offers videos and clips from your Favorite NBC and Fox shows like Heroes and 24.

The feature I love the most is the embed feature. See, I can take an entire episode and embed it on my blog, or I can add custom sized clips like the one below.

Love it!

[flash http://www.hulu.com/embed/aYYJeUSy90x283gEyIJ-lb3re3K3xDm9 w=480 h=272 flashvars=st=144&et=233]