The since Xmas it's just been busier and busier. With the launch of two sites that i've been working on Westloh.com and the much anticipated arrival of the new Entrepreneurs Journey , which has only just been released to the public.

What to expect from the coming year? More meetups, more sites, more blogs. Keep and eye out. 

For the time being i'll keep it brief and leave on a high note. There will be plenty more coming, so watch this space! 

Although Howard has been procrastinating on announcing an election date, Google has been quick to create a world first election web page which makes use of a few of Google's technologies to keep track of the election and provide information about the parties and news surrounding the election buzz.

Since this is the second federal election i've been able to vote in, it's really interesting to see a large company like Google using it's technologies to put together something that's sure to be useful to any voter that wants to stay up to date with the pre-election news, all the election hype during the event and also post election updates once the *hopefully* new leader is chosen.

The second Brisbane Blogger Meetup has taken place and with a last minute cut of numbers we still managed to have a great night and discuss many interesting blogging and web related topics.

It was great to catch up with a few of the guys that attended the first meetup, Pete, Duncan & Tim . It was also great to welcome Rob & West to the group, who i had the pleasure of working with on Blog Mastermind.

I'm looking forward to future meetups and watching the group grow. Thanks to everyone that came, everyone else that was meant to be there, you'd better be at the next one, or else. :P 

It was a good start to what will become a regular event for Brisbane bloggers to meet and share ideas. Next time though more cameras and notepads will be taken so that we can write down everyone's email addresses and get some more happy snaps.

So now that the first meetup has happened and the second one coming up in about a months time, what can we expect? Well there's already been requests for cheaper beer and better seating. These are very valid requests and will indeed be taken into consideration for the next meet.

Some extra planning as to how the night is structured will also be given some thought and should allow for new members to fit in comfortably at each event.

I'll be in touch with all of you that came to the first meetup and i'll start planning the next night in the coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone that came. I hope you enjoyed yourselves and i look forward to seeing you again the next time we meet. 

Written by Yaro Starak and released prior to the launch of Blog Mastermind, the Blueprint is a must for any blogger who is looking to further themselves in the world of blogging and would like to monetize there blog successfully.

I've enjoyed working with Yaro and the rest of the guys involved in the project. There has been a lot of time and work put in from a variety of highly skilled individuals to bring this project together.

So be sure to download the Blog Profits Blueprint before everyone else does!

If it ain't broke don't fix it

What was wrong with the Technorati that worked before anyway? Are they intentionally breaking features so that they have to be fixed? Every time i look at the site lately there is either something added, something removed, something a different colour or different design. Are they running the live site off their development server or what?

One big dorky looking feature that has been added is that massive ad at the top. What happened to the tag ticker they had a couple of days ago? Can't they keep the tag ticker throughout the site?

Make your choice and stick with it

There must be a lot of heated discussion inside the Technorati offices, for things to be changing so much and so drastically in some cases there is a serious case of indecision going on.

It's as bad as bad as women shopping. Try on 10 different things, a couple of items look good, they buy them, get home, don't like them, return them and try on another 10 items.

Hopefully they just settle on something soon so that the site can be used without things breaking, having to learn where something is again or being greeted with a new design on each visit. 

There are plenty of exchanges going on around the place (technorati, alexa, stumble upon, blogroll, etc.). But i would just like to share some straight up link love.

So here's a list of a few bloggers who i think are great people and there personalities will allow them to go far.

• Untwisted Vortex
• Coach
• Goldcoaster
• Dipping into the Blogpond
• The Wrong Advices

Thanks guys. Keep one blogging.

She still has her fans of course and they're behind her signing petitions to get her the pardon.

Well there's another kind of petition going around that's gaining quite a bit of momentum. That's the petition to lock her up.

She is a human being living on this earth with the rest of us after all. If she does the crime, she should certainly do the time. So get signing and sending to you friends so she can get the punishment she deserves. It's only 45 days anyway, no matter how scared she is of the inmates.

Particls is currently under an invite only stage, so i decided to sign up and see what happens. Not long after i received an invite and proceeded to download the program and give it a shot.

It's quite easy to use, as advertised on the website and there are quite a few options for aggregating news and stories about anything you want.

It's great because you can either enter a feed as usual or you can enter keywords and it will go find articles for you. You can have a ticker on your screen that will scroll news from your keywords. You can also set it to give you alerts when new items are found.

What's also cool is that you can pull an article off the ticker and it will sit on your desktop and i think will update when more articles come from that source.

There were a couple of things that i found when using this, if you are entering keywords for it to find news for you, you will need at least 6 keywords for it to work properly. Apparently it will also learn what you like and tailor the articles displayed according to your taste.

Also with the ticker you can click an article and a few options will pop up for bookmarking. One thing that was disappointing was that feedburner feeds didn't seem to work. It kept trying to load them through Page2RSS and then the articles didn't seem to display.

It is in the early stages so i guess any issues will be dealt with, but it's definitely an interesting way to get your news delivered to your desktop. 

After many chats about it, we finally got the dates sorted out and a meetup page going. I've never been to a meetup let alone organize one, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out. It will be great to meet other bloggers from around Brisbane and see what they're up to.

So if you're a keen blogger in Brisbane and would like to meet others passionate about blogging and web development in general, head over to the meetup page and sign up for what will be a great night.