With much talk on the interwebs about how to stay atop the mountain of messages clogging our inboxes — Inbox zero, email bankruptcy, etc — it’s good to see Google taking some proactive steps towards making that most arduous of tasks a bit more manageable. Enter Gmail Priority Inbox:

I’ve been using a system somewhat similar to this using the Google Labs feature Multiple Inboxes and having a second inbox configured to display starred messages, but Google’s solution sounds simpler and more effective.  I’ve not had and opportunity to try out this functionality yet, but I’m eager to see if it makes a noticeable difference in my email productivity.

This video of Steve Jobs having a conversation with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D8 Conference is well worth watching.  He touches on a lot of issues, and while if you’re an avid tech blog reader or tech podcast listener a lot of this may not be news, its still worth blocking out some time and dedicating an hour and a half to watching.

This just in Soundcloud, the music streaming and distribution service, is no longer our little secret.  They announced in a recent blog post that they’ve reached the milestone of 1,000,000 users. What makes Soundcloud so special is the decentralized nature of its service offering.  It allows you to host your music for discovery via their site (streaming or download), which includes all the social media tropes that we’ve come to know and expect such as friend list, etc. However what really makes the service shine is the ability to integrate Soundcloud into your existing social graph, by allowing you to embed songs or sets(groups of songs) into Facebook, Myspace, WordPress, Twitter and any other conceivable platform with customizable player options and display parameters.  This decentralized mindset is it’s saving grace and makes it a useful tool for independent musicians and music lovers everywhere, and quite feasibly makes the service future proof.

(figure out how to add image to entry)

As someone who has frequently championed, but has had difficulty convincing others that WordPress is a viable CMS option for smaller websites, I’m glad to see the platform taking a further step towards credibility in the Content Management space.

I was very excited last week to learn that WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.
As Hiro Nakamura said when he first bent time and space to land in Times Square: “Yatta!”

In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!
Source: wordpress.org

With the recent decision by Google to discontinue development of Google Notebook, I decided to attempt to find a replacement solution. After a week or so of testing I’m leaning more towards Evernote(learn more) over Zoho as a replacement. I will really miss Google notebook from a look and feel standpoint. I love(d) the interface.

Evernote’s feature set is pretty hard to top, however. The penetration of the product is pretty impressive with a desktop app available for both PC and Mac, mobile and iPhone apps, and a web based version.

I am starting to feel a bit of cloud computing over exposure (CCOE?) coming over me though. There couldn’t be a better time for widespread acceptance of Open ID.