DISQUS

Sid: wow, really appreciate you working so thoroughly and giving such a careful round of feedback on the current crop of Big in Japan tools. We say they are in Alpha, and we're serious. We really are gathering feedback, working on the core functionality and dramatically improving the workflow.

PodServe has seemed to catch a few eyes, mostly because audio is tougher than it needs to be. We didn't really set out to do creation tools, but have ended up working on exactly that. We'll be adding a feature where you can give PodServe a phone number, and it will call you to record a 'cast. Also will have some browser-based tools. But, our primary focus is on making it simple to create a podcast feed, give it a hosted home, and let you merchandise that feed.

elfURL is a just a little flourish on the great idea that is tinyURL. With elfURL, you can tag your small URL's, get stats associated with that URL, and subscribe to a feed of those stats.

FrankenFeed is getting a full rewrite to fit with the overall toolbox. (We had done a quick version to prototype it for ourselves, and all we've done so far is reskin it to match the others. We know it has issues, but this is a really useful tool for us, internally.)

As is InstantFeed. Also lots of work to do there, but we find it helpful. We'll be tidying these up, finishing the initial round of SocialMail, MailFeed, FeedVault, the stats tool and one new one in the next few months. Then we'll be working on making all these tools as mashable and mixable as possible.

We'd appreciate your feedback as we progress. Very valuable.

Thanks for the heads up on this, David. Looks like it will be a really good blog.

Jake: let's get together & chat some time. Were you at Barcamp?