Sunday Chatter – 3/7

What is PubSubHubbub?

PubSubHubbub. Try saying that three times fast. It’s a new plugin for WordPress that allows for push notifications to RSS feeds and search engines. How it works is whenever you publish something new to your blog, Google and RSS readers are notified instantly. The old fashioned way would be to wait for them to come looking for your new content to crawl. That could sometimes take hours, or days. With PubSubHubbub, you simply activate a small plugin and that’s it. No configuration to worry about — just install and activate. It’s available for WordPress.org (as a plugin) and WordPress.com users automatically. I installed it on all five of my sites and have noticed quite the difference in how fast my content gets picked up. Download it here.

YouTube Introduces Video Captioning

To make things easier for some users, YouTube rolled out closed captioning for videos this week. What it does is take any English-language video and puts subtitles at the bottom of the screen when you click the little “CC” button. It’s still in its beta stages, which became clearly obvious when I tried it out and found some weirdly formed sentences get churned out. It definitely needs some work, but for the hearing impaired, this is an excellent addition. It also supports foreign languages and can translate them to English text, but that option is only available on a select number of videos so far.

The Moment Apple Fans Have Been Waiting For

Apple finally announced the launch date of the iPad — April 3 in the U.S. and late April in Canada and other international countries. “Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G,” Apple said. With April 3 being a Saturday, you bet on long lines outside malls everywhere. While I certainly see the potential and use for the product, I won’t be in those lineups.

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