With the proliferation of information sources and ways to read them, it seems counter-intuitive that one of the hotter topics in the blogosphere is still aggregation, discovery and syndication. Yet here we are, yet another day, yet another Twitter story, yet another FriendFeed story, and yet another Digg story.

Don't get me wrong - I too have a obsessive fascination with the nuanced myriad of way we can move our 1's and 0's around. That's why when I got a ping from Ari Newman, founder and president of company making an AI-powered news filtration service, my ears perked up.

I had a chance to bring him on the Mashable Conversations podcast so I could learn a bit about it. It's that's suitable for news junkies and professional bloggers like myself, but it's primarily targeted to marketing and public relations professionals, as it has a wide variety of graphing and search functions that serve to aggregate keyword searched news from just about every source out there.

It is capable of pulling in any RSS source, any Google alert, and is able to search across a wide variety of sources, from New Media and Old. 

What seems to be clincher on this is the review system, which attempts to learn with at "three dimensional rating system" exactly the style of news you're interested in.  After you're done setting up your complex filtering requirements, you can begin to subtly refine the filters to find the topics you're tracking by rating the source types.  For instance, if you're more interested in finding out user comments, you can place an emphasis on feeds coming out of FriendFeed or Twitter.  If you're focused on New Media response, or a specific response, you can highly rate certain blogs or a certain genre of blogs, and the system will pick up on those relationships.

It sounds like a very advanced system, and it only launched this Monday, so I haven't begun to explore the whole depth of it yet, but what I've been played with so far has kept me intrigued.

Is there anything more frustrating than working on your homework late at night, you get stuck on a problem and there is no one you can get a hold of for assistance? This is where Cramster, a site to help you with your homework, comes into play. If your homework is in the fields such as math, science, engineering and so on, this is the perfect site for when you get stuck in those late night cram sessions. You go on the site, pose your question, and instead of just getting an answer, users are encouraged to explain the steps they took to arrive at their answer so that you can actually learn from them. Some of the problems I took a peek at, even with explanations, made me scratch my head, but the people who needed the answers seemed thrilled. The company currently enjoys being the top educational app on Facebook in addition to their popular website, and as time goes on, they will be adding more of their functionality into the app to make it even more usable. As for the future plans for the original site, you can expect to see the addition of more professors answering questions, and a whole slew of new practice questions both licensed from text book publishers, as well as created by users. I had the chance to speak with both Robert Angarita and Aaron Hawkey about the site, and the future plans for it.

Lots of people have been letting others know on Twitter what they're listening to as they work through their day, but what if you could also include the actual MP3 for people to join in and listen along?

This is the idea behind Blip, a new service from Fuzz. that allows you to microblog ala Twitter, but with the added feature of using an MP3 search to embed the song you are currently listening to into the post so that others can check it out. Unlike SeeqPod, which has run afoul of legal questions, Blip is "Obviously it is legal and it's covered by the DMCA," according to Fuzz CEO, Jeff Yasuda.

One of the most amazing things about Blip is they have done something that everyone has cried out for Twitter to do: a self-refreshing feed page! What a novel concept!  It's true, the page updates itself without hitting refresh... it's obviously demonic magic.

We sat down with Gavin Hayes, lead singer of Dredg, to get his thoughts on what Blip brings to the music industry, as well as what he, as a musician, would like to see change in the dynamics of the industry. I have to say I was quite intrigued by his thoughts on pre-sales of albums, and how that might be a way to bring the artist and fans closer together.

What do you do if you have a chunk of time slotted to hang out and talk with the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic? You do what everyone else does in the Web 2.0 world - you talk about Twitter!

This Friday past, Matt took some time out to hang out on Mashable Conversations to chat with me and you guys, not because he had anything to pitch me, but because he's a genuinely nice guy who when he says offhandedly at a WordCamp that he wouldn't mind coming on your podcast at some point, gladly obliges.

Given that we had no particular agenda of topics to talk about, we chatted briefly about what's in store for the next version of WordPress (here's a hint - WordPress is going to be tackling video in their next version, and from the sounds of it will be an ambitious undertaking), and then I went down the laundry list of hot topics in the blogosphere at the moment.

I didn't bring up Twitter just for the sake of talking about it - a while back, Matt announced the release of a special theme for WordPress called Prolouge, which we covered here at Mashable. The idea behind the release was to provide small to mid-sized teams a way to have Twitter functionality without putting the company business out there for the world to see.  It's a great idea that they not only gave to the world, but use themselves internally at Automattic.

In the release blog, though, Matt had made an interesting statement about the theme:

Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to.

I tried to pin down with him what he thought the feasibility of this plan was, and the likelyhood of it coming about given the chronic downtime Twitter has been experiencing lately.

The biggest problem that Twitter has experienced, with regard to it being down all the time, is generally regarded as it's scalability problem.  This is an area that Matt could speak to with some authority, as WordPress has climbed the various Mt. Everests in terms of high usage situations, and generally weathered all the adventure without a hitch.

Aside from the Twitter topic, we also talked about the future of blog content, RSS, comment fragmentation, and how much he loves his Kindle (in which I took the opportunity to shamelessly appeal to Jeff Bezos, Mashable Conversations Listener, to send me a review unit).

It's definitely a riveting conversation top to bottom. Whether you're a WordPress user or just a user of the Web, the conversation is definitely interesting.

Twitter is down. I say that and it sounds like I'm playing word association games (I say Twitter, you say... down, that's right). It's unfortunate, given the inordinate amount of time people like us spend on the service that it's become so downright unavailable recently. There has been much more communication from the Twitterpeople with regards to what parts are up and down, and we're definitely glad that they're doing something about fixing it. On the other hand, contrary to the best predictions of Robert Scoble this on our weekend podcast, people just aren't happy to know why the service is down - they want it back up. A Tale of Romance Gone Awry Frederic Lardinois, regular panelist on the Elite Tech News podcast as well as blogger at LastPodcast, has filed for divorce today. Divorce from Twitter, that is. While the official reasons behind the breakup are listed as irreconcilable differences, he's told the readers of his blog a much more personalized account, citing that Twitter has made herself unavailable to him, there's been (*ahem*) performance issues, and at one point Twitter even locked out Frederic completely from accessing her with his Snitter:

It’s great that the folks at Twitter are starting to communicate with us, but I find it harder and harder to get myself to use Twitter anymore.

As it seems to be the case more and more these days, the truth comes out as Frederic admits he's had a thing for FriendFeed for quite some time, and finds that talking with FriendFeed is often more interesting that the same old same old with Twitter. Will I Stick Around? I'm not sure. I think that I've been using Twitter less and less myself prior to the outages, but for me my Twitter usage is pretty cyclical. I'll start using it heavily, then I'll get preoccupied with FriendFeed, or sometimes I'll just stop using both altogether and actually get some work done. Luckily, I haven't really felt the effects of the screwball outages this time around, because it happened mostly during a cycle of non-use for me. I'm starting to see my Twitter usage diminish to mostly passive. I check my @ replies a couple times a day, and I'm starting to add more automated methods of posting (such as the recent addition of my XboX status messages to the service). Most of my Twitter interaction happens these days on FriendFeed (but for the occasional political blowout - I'd link an example, but guess what? That archive feature is horked.). Most likely for me, I'll maintain an active presence on it and occasionally actively pop in from time to time. As for an actual heavy communications tool for me, I think those days may be behind me as well.

In 2006, rap artist Chamillionaire’s track “Ridin” became iconic in American pop culture, being infamously parodied by Weird Al Yankovic ("White and Nerdy"), becoming the most downloaded ringtone of all-time, and ultimately winning a Grammy for Best Rap Song. However, none of that was coincidence or pure luck.

At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles, Pete got an opportunity to talk with the artist about how he uses social media to better connect with his fans and ultimately sell more music. Chamillionaire also talks about how the music industry needs new metrics to determine what’s popular, since album sales are meaningless in the world of a la carte purchases via iTunes.

It’s a must listen for anyone in the music industry and social media marketers that aspire to work with top artists.

I had a chance to talk to John McCrea today regarding the acquisition of his company by Comcast, and while a lot of the raw information is probably found elsewhere or in other analysis, the way he laid it all out to me showed me exactly how much sense the joining of these two organizations really made. This is a return visit for him, and he and I always have fun when he's on the show.

Given that Comcast isn't a huge shareholder in the Web 2.0 property market, a lot of questions were going around as to what this could possibly integrate with, how much integration Plaxo would make within the Comcast organization.

As it turns out, this buyout came as a result of a long relationship that they've had since the Plaxo tools were integrated into the suite of tools given out to Comcast broadband subscribers. Since then, they've continually discussed what an expansion of that partnership would look like.

When he was describing the future of all this, a conversation from an episode of Elite Tech News sprang to mind from a few weeks ago. The topic was whether or not Twitter and FriendFeed would ever see mainstream adoption, or if would forever remain the loved utility of us blogosphere folks.

The argument against it becoming widespread was that it just isn't accessible.  For it to be useful, the users really need to be on a wide variety of services like Digg, Google Reader, and Twitter already. This is in contrast to the future that McCrea sees with Plaxo Pulse, where your TV and movie viewing habits will tracked through the Pulse system, and integrated into the set-top box experience.

Yes, the TV becomes the platform, but just as important, the barrier to entry will no longer be existent.  My 92 year old gramma knows how to use the TV.  Explaining FriendFeed to her would be about as useful as explaining underwater basketweaving to her in Latin.

This is a potentially groundbreaking partnership in a number of ways, and McCrea definitely puts an interesting new spin on the whole partnership I hadn't heard yet.

I had a chance last week to chat with Sarah Lane, a host of the variety show on Revision 3's network called PopSiren.  It's essentially a collection of women that talk about things ranging from the "DIY world, to science with a dash of random cool stuff," as Sarah put it. The weekly show is 10 episodes in, and is all about attempting to bring a fresh perspective to Internet TV.

One of the tricks Rev3 uses to keep budgets under control? Hat sharing.  It's less unhygenic than it sounds.  For instance, Sarah Lane is not only the host of PopSiren, but the director of production at Revision 3. The VP of Sales, for instance, will occasionally jump in on an edit. David Prager, the host of Tekzilla, does a lot of other business development and event organization.

A recurring theme from the conversation was how refreshing and liberating it is to do a show on a barebones budget. Despite that, there is a concerted effort there at Rev3 to put stuff together as though those responsible know what they're doing, and it tends to show.

Another interesting topic we delved into was the struggle for growing for-profit New Media organizations to create content that generates money versus content that represents the core focus of the group.  It's a struggle that affects almost all professional content producers, regardless of the medium.  Sarah has a lot of interesting things to say about it and how Revision 3 is handling these challenges.

Twing is a relatively new forum search tool that launched back in mid-March.  Kristen recently reviewed them, and came to a lot of the same conclusions I did this week, as I sat down with Scott Germaise on an episode of Mashable Conversations this week and gave it a good once over:

I was happy to see a rather extensive filtering sidebar that's present for narrowing down all of your search results. Modify existing searches by category, forum name, exact phrase inclusion or exclusion, and more. This is helpful in the sense that it lets you sift through the forums without having to read through all of them. I hate sifting through forums in order to find one measly answer, even with Google caching and Firefox's "Find" function.

As I said at the beginning of our conversation, too, I'm not typically excited or enthralled with vertical search offerings in general, but just sitting down and playing with some ego searches and some brand searches for Mashable, I was able to find a wealth of conversation that previously had been undiscovered by any of my present brand-management feeds I have set up.

Interestingly enough, through their category selection process and the natural self-policing nature of forums, they've also a remarkably spam free set of results.

Scott explained a bit of why that is, and gave me an in-depth tour of the features and history of the website