The successful IPO of Facebook, the flak surrounding Twitter’s decision to censor some tweets, and Google’s weaker-than-expected 4th-quarter earnings all point to one of the big events of our times: The crazy, chaotic, idealistic days of the Internet are ending. Once, the Prairies were open and shared by everyone. Then the farmers arrived and fenced them in. The same is happening to the Internet: Apple, Amazon and Facebook are putting up fences — and Google is increasingly being left outside.

The old Internet on which Google has thrived is still there, of course, but like the wilderness it is shrinking. Often these days, we sign up for Facebook or Amazon’s private version of the Internet. At other times, we use a smartphone and download an App instead of using Google search.

Investors are already placing their bets on who the winners of the new Internet will be: Over the past five years Amazon’s shares, despite their recent fall, have risen 370%. Apple’s are up 438%. Google’s, meanwhile, have merely risen by 17% in all that time.  It is still the early days of this long-term trend, but my hunch is that this gap in performance will widen over the coming year — and that Google’s long slow decline has already begun.

What makes Google’s predicament so serious is that it has little to do with technology and everything to do with business models. You can buy or copy technology, but changing a business model is about the hardest thing any company can do. Google’s business model, and nearly all its revenue and profits, depend on the Internet remaining open. When we search, Google pockets billions from advertising. If the old Internet is changing, Google’s original way of doing business loses value.

When Google reported its results two weeks ago, the first headlines focused on the 25% increase in fourth quarter revenues compared to last year. Investors, however, focused on the drop in the cost per click that Google is able to charge advertisers. The main reasons for the decline in this all-important metric is increased competition from Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

Start with Facebook, which has erected a cyber fence around its 800 million-plus users and refuses to share some important data with Google. This means that Google’s searches are not quite as valuable to advertisers as they used to be when the Internet was open and when Facebook was much smaller than it is today.

Amazon is increasingly playing a similar trick — but with a twist. Amazon has taken Google’s freely available Android operating system and adapted it for its new Fire tablet. Amazon gets to free ride upon Google’s software, in other words, while the search giant gets nothing back in return. No data, and no advertising revenue.

Apple’s land grab, meanwhile, may be the most definitive. The Apple universe is like a cable TV network that owns content or aggregates it. It’s phones, computers and tablets are like the set-top boxes your cable company gives you. The content you consume might be a film that you download, a song, a book, an application or something you buy on line, like a pair of shoes. And none of the data Apple’s customers generate is available to Google. (Amazon basically has the same arrangement going with its Kindle and Fire. The only thing it doesn’t own is the network, but it doesn’t matter: Once you log into Amazon with a password, you’ve left Google’s open Internet.)

The danger to Google, in other words, is that as social networking, smartphones and tablets increasingly come to dominate the Internet, Google’s chance to earn advertising revenues from searching will shrink along with its influence.

Yes, Google has the Android and Google+, but these may not be enough to fight the shift to the closed Internet. Google+, of course, has just a tiny fraction of Facebook’s scale and there’s currently little reason to think it can catch up. The Android operating system, also an attempt by Google to build its own internet eco-system, is a more conspicuous success. Most commentators focus on the rapid growth of Android and the fact that it has greater market share than the iPhone.

But this analysis misses the point: The Android may have market share, but more than half of mobile searches come from iPhone users. Google may have developed Android but, unlike Apple’s iPhone, it does not really control it. Licensees like Samsung and HTC are able to adapt Android software to their own ends. And smart companies like Amazon are getting a free ride on Android while sharing little of the spoils with Google.

Don’t get me wrong: Google is still a force, just as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are. But they are no longer at the epicentre of the zeitgeist. Like Microsoft before it, Google can fight the good fight on many different fronts. Whether it can ever find an engine of growth capable of supplanting its core business is another question.

About the Author

Keith Woolcock has been covering technology as an analyst and journalist since the mid 1980s. He has worked for Nomura, Merrill Lynch, the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday; appears regularly on CNBC in London; and in 2010 founded 5thcolumnideas, which provides global thematic research and spots important investment trends — especially in technology – for institutional investors.

amazon, android

Memory Effect in Lithium-based batteries

First of all it’s necessary to unfold a myth that persists in many people’s head.
The battery memory effect.

In lithium-based batteries this is in fact a myth, it only applies to older Nickle-based batteries. So fully discharging and charging the battery is completely useless and even harmful as we will see below.

The modern lithium battery can be charged regardless of its current percentage, given that it has absolutely no negative effect in its performance.

Should I remove the laptop battery when A/C is plugged in?

Many laptop users have this question and we will answer it right now:
The answer is: YES and NO, it depends on the situation.

Having a battery fully charged and the laptop plugged in is not harmful, because as soon as the charge level reaches 100% the battery stops receiving charging energy and this energy is bypassed directly to the power supply system of the laptop.

However there’s a disadvantage in keeping the battery in its socket when the laptop is plugged in, but only if it’s currently suffering from excessive heating caused by the laptop hardware.

So:

- In a normal usage, if the laptop doesn’t get too hot (CPU and Hard Disk around 40ºC to 50ºC) the battery should remain in the laptop socket;

- In an intensive usage which leads to a large amount of heat produced (i.e. Games, temperatures above 60ºC) the battery should be removed from the socket in order to prevent unwanted heating.

The heat, among the fact that it has 100% of charge, is the great enemy of the lithium battery and not the plug, as many might think so.

Laptop battery discharges

Full battery discharges (until laptop power shutdown, 0%) should be avoided, because this stresses the battery a lot and can even damage it. It’s recommended to perform partial discharges to capacity levels of 20~30% and frequent charges, instead of performing a full discharging followed by a full charging.

Laptop batteries contain a capacity gauge that allows us to know the exact amount of energy stored. However, due to the charging/discharging cycles, this sensor tends to be inaccurate overtime.

Some laptops include in their BIOS, tools to recalibrate this battery gauge, which is nothing more than a full discharge followed by a full charge.
So to calibrate the gauge, it should be performed, in every 30 discharge cycles, a full discharge non-stop , followed by a also, non-stop, full charge.

An inaccurate gauge can lead to the fact that the the battery capacity values are are wrong. The battery may report that it still has 10% of capacity when in fact it has a much lower value, and this causes the computer to shutdown unexpectedly.

Discharge (or charge) cycles consist of using all that battery charge (100%) but not necessarily all at once.
For example, you can use the laptop for some minutes in a day, using half its capacity e then fully charge it. If you did the same thing in the next day, it would be counted a discharge cycle and not two, so it may take several days until a full discharge cycle is completed.

How to perform a calibration (full discharge) of a laptop battery?

The most adequate method to do a full discharge (100% to a minimum of 3%) consists of the following procedure:

1. Fully charge the battery to its maximum capacity (100%);
2. Let the battery “rest” fully charged for 2 hours or more in order to cool down from the charging process. You may use the computer normally within this period;
3. Unplug the power cord and set the computer to hibernate automatically at the minimum percentage possible as described by the image sequence below;
        
4. Leave the computer discharging, non-stop, until it hibernates itself. You may use the computer normally within this period;
5. When the computer shuts down completely, let it stay in the hibernation state for 5 hours or even more;
6. Plug the computer to the A/C power to perform a full charge non-stop until its maximum capacity (100%). You may use the computer normally within this period.

After the calibration process, the reported wear level is usually higher than before. This is natural, since it now reports the true current capacity that the battery has to hold charge. Lithium Ion batteries have a limit amount of discharge cycles (generally 200 to 300 cycles) and they will retain less capacity over time.

Many people tend to think “If calibrating gives higher wear level, then it’s a bad thing”. This is wrong, because like said, the calibration is meant to have your battery report the true capacity it can hold, and it’s meant to avoid surprises like, for example, being in the middle of a presentation and suddenly the computer shuts down at 30% of charge.

Prolonged laptop battery storage

To store a battery for long periods of time, its charge capacity should be around 40% and it should be stored in a place as fresh and dry as possible. A fridge can be used (0ºC  – 10ºC), but only if the battery stays isolated from any humidity.
One must say again that the battery’s worst enemy is the heat, so leaving the laptop in the car in a hot summer day is half way to kill the battery.

Purchasing a replacement laptop battery

If you intend to purchase another battery, it’s recommended that you do it only when the current battery is very degraded. If it’s not the case, the non usage of a battery leads to its degradation.

If a spare battery is purchased and won’t be used for a long time, the above storage method should be used.
Besides that, when purchasing a battery you must pay attention to the manufacturing date.

 

 

[Via: BatteryCare]

Battery Care, Laptop Battery, Tips

Britain is facing a shortage of workers with programming skills, fuelled by poor-quality training courses in universities and colleges, which has left firms in fields ranging from advertising to Formula 1 struggling to recruit.

Leading companies interviewed for a new series say they require staff at a senior level to be computer literate, combining digital skills with the ability to lead a team. But they face delays in hiring the right staff, or have to give new employees extensive training because many computer science courses are nothing more than “sausage factories”.

Ian Wright, the chief engineer for vehicle dynamics with the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team, said: “There’s definitely a shortage of the right people. What we’ve found is that somebody spot on in terms of the maths can’t do the software; if they’re spot on in terms of the software, they can’t do the maths.

“It’s a question of time – how long it takes to find people. That can mean months down the road. This is a fast-moving business. Every two weeks in the racing season you’re out there, everyone seeing how well you do.”

The government is poised to overhaul the teaching of computer science in schools, and Michael Gove, the education secretary, is due to outline the coalition’s approach to digital skills on Wednesday.

Gove is keen to see a greater emphasis placed on training children to be technologically adept, and believes that in the past schools have focused too much on acquiring expensive kit that has rapidly become obsolete.

The paper has spoken to firms involved in games design, outsourced IT support and visual effects that are critical of the scarcity of properly trained recruits. In a series of articles, the writers will explore the state of computer science teaching in schools, look at the use of technology in teaching, and see how other countries are faring in comparison to Britain.

In higher education, although universities such as Bournemouth are praised by employers for working closely with industry, other universities and colleges have been criticised by businesses for running a significant number of “dead-end” courses in computer science, with poor prospects of employment for those enrolled.

Figures for the graduate class of 2010 show computer science graduates have the highest unemployment rate of any undergraduate degree, at 14.7%.

There is particular criticism of specialised video games and effects courses. In 2009, just 12% of graduates from video games courses found jobs in the sector within six months of graduating. Employers in the games industry say graduates of these courses lack expertise with the relevant gaming platforms, have poor technical skills in areas such as maths and programming, and lack management skills.

Ian Vickers, the managing director of Managed Enterprise Technologies, an IT support firm that works with businesses including food manufacturers and insurance companies, said: “A lot of training agencies have been focused on making money, [and are] not interested in providing young people to be fit for work. It’s like a sausage factory.

“They’re not interested in how successful they are, being fit for purpose for employment. All of the training organisations are guilty of getting young people on to the courses so they can get the funding from government.”

In a highly critical report last month, school inspectors warned that too many information and communication technology (ICT) teachers had limited knowledge of key skills such as computer programming. In half of all secondary schools, the level many school leavers reach in ICT is so low they would not be able to go on to advanced study, Ofsted said.

High-flying students are often not stretched while many pupils spend computing lessons repeating tasks asked of them a year ago.

There has been a dramatic fall in the number of pupils taking a GCSE in ICT over the past four years. In 2011, 31,800 pupils took the GCSE, compared to 81,100 in 2007.

Labour’s shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg, said in a speech last week that schools must embrace technology as a “vital tool of learning”.

Wright, of Mercedes AMG Petronas, said the lack of good candidates meant his firm had to make compromises, devoting time to training people up in maths or software skills.

A growing demand for computer skills has not been matched by a supply of skilled recruits, firms say. The transformation of businesses by the internet has increased the need for senior staff to be skilled at using new technology.

Jason Goodman, founder and chief executive of advertising agency Albion, said: “The sort of business we are in 2011, and when we started nine years ago, is radically different … When we started, we had a much bigger design team; now we have a much bigger technology team.”

Trialling ideas through social media has taken the place of carrying out research, Goodman said, giving the example of a pilot which had 70,000 “likes” on Facebook: “Then it became clear that was it, we were going to develop an offline campaign.”

He said: “You’ve got to have a very tech-savvy team, who understand how an idea is executable, rather than having to ask anybody about that.”

Fierce competition for scarce talent has led to long delays in recruitment, Goodman said.

“We spent two years looking for a tech director, looking in the UK, Europe, in the States. The US has got a much bigger English-speaking pool of talent. We’re doing a lot of this work for 12 months longer than we have to.”

The problem is magnified for smaller firms competing against household names. Companies such as Microsoft, which has around 3,000 candidates chasing 40 graduate places annually, say the problem for them is more one of sifting applicants, but a smaller business will often have to reach a compromise on conditions with a promising applicant – agreeing to flexible working packages, or signing over intellectual property rights.

Kim Blake, the events and education co-ordinator for Blitz Games Studios, said: “We do really struggle to recruit in some areas; the problem is often not the number of people applying, which can be quite high, but the quality of their work.

“We accept that it might take a while to find a really good Android programmer or motion graphics artist, as these are specialist roles which have emerged relatively recently – but this year it took us several months to recruit a front-end web developer. Surely those sorts of skills have been around for nearly a decade now?

“Programmers of sufficient quality remain hard to find in all their varieties, whether it’s tools specialists, game-play programmers, audio programmers, network programmers.”

While her firm was prepared to invest in training young people, there were often fundamental flaws in new employees’ school education, Blake said.

“There is still a basic level of maths and physics skills, in particular, which are alarmingly absent in all too many candidates.”

While recruitment delays have never led to them turning work down, “projects have certainly been delayed or progressed more slowly than we thought,” Blake said.

Alex Hope, who co-authored a review of digital skills for the video games and visual effects industries, emphasised the value of a combination of relevant skills and a strong track record of academic achievement.

Hope, managing director of the visual effects firm Double Negative, said: “In Harry Potter [and the Half Blood Prince], the opening sequence has Death Eaters flying across the river Thames, destroying the [Millennium] bridge between St Paul’s and the Tate Modern.

“The way you create that is people who understand computational fluid dynamics, they know how water moves. They take the physics that’s used in modelling rivers and the flow of water and apply that in our world. People doing it need an artistic sensibility as well. An understanding of maths and science is fundamental to many of the disciplines in our industry.”

Wright supported the need for better maths and science education. “We use maths and physics all the time,” he said. “You need to understand them to do the kind of things we do. We’re looking at very small gains all the time, [so] your accuracy of simulation has got to be very high. Otherwise you can’t make a judgment as to what you’re doing. If we put a device on the car, then we need to know what performance advantage it will give us and need to know this very early in the design process. This is measured in fractions of a second. It’s measured in less than tenths of seconds.”

Digital Skills

Last year, Intel began talking about a new category of super-thin notebook computers called the ultrabook. Here at the International Consumer Electronics Show, the company, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips, made it clear it plans to pour a lot of money and effort into turning ultrabooks into the next big computing phenomenon.

Ultrabooks are essentially an effort to bring to notebooks based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system the lightweight, thin design of Apple’s MacBook Air, a machine with the thickness of a short stack of papers. Intel knows a lot about the MacBook Air because it supplies the chips that run Apple’s product, but the company wants the much larger market of Windows-based notebooks to embrace the style of the Apple device too.

At a news conference on Monday here at the show, Intel said 75 new ultrabook designs are expected to be released in 2012. Intel executives demonstrated a few of the machines, all of which were very thin, often with eye-catching metallic cases like the MacBook Air’s. One design theme Intel pitched was the idea of a hybrid ultrabook-tablet, which has a traditional keyboard for intensive data entry and a touch screen for zooming in on photos and manipulating other software.

One of the wackier-looking designs Intel showed was a concept ultrabook it calls Nikishki. Below its keyboard, the device has a huge touchpad that runs the entire width of the machine, allowing users to switch easily to touch gestures from typing.

The touchpad is transparent so that when Nikishki is closed, you  can see through the underside of the laptop. Through that window, you can view a portion of the computer’s display, which will allow you to glance at e-mails, news and calendar appointments the way many people do with their smartphones today.

Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC client group, said touch will no longer be confined to tablets and smartphones. But he said the presence of a keyboard will give ultrabooks greater versatility than those devices. “Ultrabooks with touch will be the ultimate solution,” he said.

Intel also said it was trying to create new ways of interacting with computers besides touch. The company cut a deal with Nuance to add voice recognition technology made by that company to ultrabooks.

Touch screens have been tried by Windows notebook makers in the past though, without much success. No one yet has proved that there is a meaningful market of people who want a hybrid notebook and tablet, although there are plenty of people who buy those as separate products.

Intel and its partners could have one advantage over Apple if they can bring the prices of ultrabooks down to mass market levels. Right now, most ultrabooks hover around the $999 starting price of the MacBook Air. “You will see pricing going down and down,” Mr. Eden said. “You will see ultrabooks going into mainstream price points.”

Intel is using its own cash to help accelerate the decline in ultrabook prices. Last year, it announced a $300 million ultrabook fund to subsidize the development of thinner components like displays and batteries that make ultrabooks possible.

Kevin Sellers, vice president for advertising and digital marketing at Intel, said the company would also pour an undisclosed amount of money into marketing the ultrabook category to create more consumer awareness of the devices. He said an ultrabook advertising campaign will start later this year, representing one of Intel’s most significant ever.

“It’s going to be very epic, very cinematic,” he said.

 

[Via Gadgetwise]

Apple, Intel, Ultrabooks

Here’s how a typical press interview with Steve Jobs used to go in the early 2000s. You wouldn’t be immediately ushered into his presence; you would be passed from PR person to PR person, corridor to corridor, waiting at each step, until you reached the inner sanctum.

You would often pass a fellow journalist on his way out, looking white as a sheet and shaking his head like he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. You would mentally prepare your questions about the latest Apple product, knowing that Steve would bat them away like flies and say what he wanted to say.

And then there you were, with the man himself: black turtleneck, jeans, white trainers, spiky salt-and-pepper stubble, and those no-nonsense eyes that could look straight into your soul. You’d sputter out a question while he sipped from a bottle of Odwalla. Perhaps he would deign to answer politely, or perhaps he would interrupt: “that’s a stupid question. That’s not what we should be talking about.”

If you could survive twenty minutes of this without cracking, his demeanor would soften. If you were lucky, then just for a moment the mask would slip, and Steve would break into a broad smile. It was a grin that acknowledged the silliness of this interview game — and that you both loved playing your roles in it.

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Always Passionate

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As a technology writer for Time magazine in the 1990s and 2000s, I went through this routine a dozen times. It’s easy to forget, but back then an Apple product launch was not a huge deal. The company was seen as struggling, a distant second to Microsoft, even years after Jobs had retaken the helm. I had to fight for a single page on the launch of the iPod in 2001, for instance, at a time when the headlines were all about war and terror.

But Jobs was always compelling. He was the news. His enormous passion for a product was unrivaled in any industry, before or since. As long as I could convey him on the page, Steve as he really was, Apple stories were an easy sell for my editors.

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The Urgency of the Future

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The more stories I did, the friendlier Steve got. He started calling me at home with story ideas and off-the-record information. He asked me to interview him on a video that would be broadcast at a Warner Music conference; this was when he was still trying to persuade the record labels to let him sell songs within iTunes.

I figured this meant we should start with a few softball questions about music in general, but Steve interrupted and got straight to the pitch: 99-cent MP3s would save the music industry. Of course, he was absolutely right, and of course, he got his way.

Here was a man who knew precisely what the future looked like, and had no patience for anyone or anything who got in the way. Not a second was to be wasted. The vision was too important. This is what he meant in that famous Stanford commencement speech: “your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

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Making Airplanes In the Sun

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But there was a whimsical side to him, too. Once Steve tried to pitch me a story on the architecture of Pixar’s headquarters. It wasn’t new; he was just eager to show it off, and hounded me until I agreed to take a tour with him. We must have sat down in every room in the building, Steve grinning like a proud parent the whole time. I patiently explained why it probably wasn’t going to be in the magazine (this was before modern Web journalism and its infinite capacity for stories).

It didn’t faze him one bit. In his mind, it was a worthy story, and that was all that mattered. For Steve Jobs, every day was like Christmas morning, and nothing could shake that feeling.

My most enduring memory of him speaks to that fact too. It was a Saturday afternoon in Palo Alto, and I was having lunch with a friend in an Italian restaurant. Suddenly, Steve came in and ordered takeout. He was wearing a T-shirt and cut-off jeans, just another happy suburban dad.

He took his food and left, and as he walked down that beautiful leafy street, he stretched out his arms like an airplane — like he was flying into the sunshine.

For all the times I’ve seen him at the height of his powers on stage, and for all the sweat-inducing interviews, that is how I will remember Steve Jobs — completely confident and carefree, being just who he wanted to be, flying straight into the future.

 

Steve Jobs

Nintendo has confirmed it will launch a successor to its popular Wii gaming console in 2012.

As of March, Nintendo has sold 86.01 million Wiis since 2006 when the console was launched. However, in 2010 the company sold only 15.1 million Wiis globally — a 25% drop from 2009 when it sold 20.1 million units.

The company also revealed its yearly financial results for 2010, marking a big drop in net profit — $825 million — 66 percent less than in 2009.

The declining Wii sales paired with the shoddy financial results make this a perfect moment for Nintendo to announce the next version of Wii. A “2012 launch” is as vague as launch dates come, but Nintendo promised to have a playable unit, as well as more details and specifications of the upcoming Wii model, at the E3 Expo, which is June 7-9 in Los Angeles.

Nintendo, Wii

Every now and then, we all get stumped when looking for a good online read.

Whether your feeds need a refresh, you’re delving into a new topic, or you’re just new to this whole “blog reading” thing, we’ve got you covered. There are dozens of services on the web dedicated to helping you get the most out of the universe of regularly updated blogs, and many of them are focused on helping you find the most high quality content as well as the content most relevant to you.

As an added bonus for the aesthetes out there, some of them are also an absolute pleasure to consume from a design perspective.

Here are ten tools we like to use to get out of a blog reading rut. In the comments, do share your tips and tricks with us and other Mashable readers.

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Blog Directories

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First, take a look at these encyclopedic catalogs of blogs. You’ll be able to browse or search by topic, so you’ll find the content and bloggers you’re looking for.

1. Alltop

Alltop is the granddaddy of all blog discovery tools. The site, which was cofounded in 2008 by Silicon Valley person of interest Guy Kawasaki, is known for its tight, topic-based groupings of the creme de la creme of blogs and a handful of other informative sites.

Best of all, you can customize the service with features collectively known as MyAlltop. These features allow you to save blogs (or feeds) you like to a home dashboard, effectively making Alltop a great discovery engineand a functional and well-organized feed reader for low-volume feeds.

2. Technorati

This site is one of the older and larger blog directories on the web. What we like about Technorati’s blog directory is that you can search by keyword for specific posts on a topic or by entire blogs devoted to that topic, which makes the site a great tool for both discovering experts and drilling down on specifics.

3. Blog Catalog

This visually appealing catalog o’ blogs is a modern take on the concept of discovery and curation. The site itself is gorgeous, and it regularly features truly fascinating and esoteric blogs you might never have looked at otherwise. The onsite search leaves something to be desired, but try browsing blogs by topic or plugging into the active BC community instead.

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Topic-Based Browsing

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If you’d like to get automatically generated feeds from blogs (and the occasional news site) around the web, we’ve got a few recommendations for you. These tools will give you a chance to pick your favorite topics then lean back for a hands-off, enjoyable discovery experience.

4. Guzzle.it

Guzzle.it allows you to create and customize a personal dashboard based on topics you care about. You’ll get some news from mainstream websites, but the service also culls posts from thought-provoking and highly relevant blogs. You can choose to display topics visually, textually, or both — and convenient tooltips allow you to get the gist of a post quickly.

5. YourVersion

YourVersion allows you to see great blog posts (and other content, such as tweets and videos) on your own interests — you can also choose to see blog-only content. The company that makes the web app has also rolled out a nice suite of mobile apps, including offerings for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The app also comes with a nifty browser extension that makes saving (and organizing) bookmarks as simple as a single click.

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Social Discovery

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Sometimes our friends (some of whom have the same interests and reading habits as we do) will stumble upon a great new blog before we do ourselves. For those cases, it’s good to have a way to stay abreast of the things our friends are reading and sharing online. Twitter and Facebook are great but noisy. Here are a few tools to help you get the best blogs and posts shared by all your friends in a few quick clicks. (If you’re an iPad user, we also highly recommend checking out Flipboard.)

6. Paper.li

Paper.li makes a web-based newspaper from the most popular links shared across your network of Twitter and Facebook friends. If your friends are sharing blog links, they’ll pop up here, allowing you to discover fresh voices and new feeds. Paper.li also breaks down shared blog posts by topic, such as technology and the arts.

7. PostPost

PostPost is a Facebook-specific aggregator that delivers all the interesting blog posts and other content that your friends have liked or that the Pages you like have posted. It’s billed as “what your friends think you should read,” and it has a highly enjoyable interface, to boot. To see links only (as opposed to videos and images), just click the “Links” tab at the top of the page.

8. Utopic

This app connects with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to get a smattering of content from around the web. It focuses on the most popular topics from your network of friends. In all likelihood, the links will include quite a few blog posts. You can see trending posts by day, week, month or even the most popular posts from the past 12 hours.

Topics are fairly customizable, and the site’s visual design is busy and gives the user a lot to see and explore.

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Blog Search

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Finally, there’s good, old-fashioned blog search. Using tools like the ones below might yield topic-specific posts rather than feeds centering around your topic of choice. Nevertheless, blog search isn’t a bad place to start (or finish) your quest to find new reading material and new resources.

9. Best of the Web Blog Search

Best of the Web is a fairly old-school outfit (established in 1994), but it delivers a no-nonsense roster of sites and blogs on a wide variety of topics. Blogs that pop up in search results are designated by a green bullseye logo and green text, so you’ll know when you’re looking at a fresh feed versus a static site. Plus, you won’t get individual posts here — just blogs on the topic you’re searching for.

10. Google Blogs Search

There is little doubt that Google holds something of a monopoly in web search. Its blog search is vast and can be quite useful. Posts are also almost guaranteed to be fresh, and you can see when each post was published before clicking through.

However, some mainstream news sites are also being indexed as “blogs” at the moment. For this and other reasons, Google Advanced Blog Search might be best for deeper dives into highly specific and esoteric post topics.

[Via Mashable]