TechCrunch, a well known and popular tech blog has got into trouble when one of its blogger Leena Rao made a post about a new high position recruitment of chief development officer in Skype. The culprit being – the  ‘Comments‘ of the post, as hundred of post, especially the negative and filthy comments from anonymous people about the blogged person – Madhu Yarlagadda, who has been appointed as chief development officer in Skype, earlier he was into Yahoo as key position for over decade.

Surprisingly, Madhu Yarlagadda has left the Skype too because of these negative and inappropriate comments flowing in for him on TechCrunch. Its been just one month when he joined the key position at Skype. This is one of unique case on web where a high profile and key position holding employee leave the company because of comments he read on a blog. However as per a company spokesman from Skype, Madhu Yarlagadda has left the company for personal reasons.

More Surprisingly, TechCrunch made it more worse by posting another post and this time posted by founder of the TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, quoting that one commentator also said, (although I couldn’t able to find this particular comment in all the comments thread of controversial post) -

Like many others, I received an email from Madhu yesterday pleading for me to write a positive testimony of his work on this website. I never liked him and am surprised he didn’t pick that up in our interactions. Maybe he just emailed everyone he still knows at Yahoo! I can’t say we had many negative interactions together but his reputation as a politicker was well known and so I stayed far away from him.

As per CrunchBase, TechCrunch’s own sibling website profiling people and start-ups – “Madhu served as founder, president and CEO of MyQuest, Inc., a real-time messaging company acquired by Yahoo in 1999, then started his career at Yahoo! in 1999 as the GM for Yahoo! Mobile (1999 to 2003). He was responsible for developing operations and management of Yahoo! Mobile strategy to extend Yahoo beyond the desktop. Under his lead Yahoo! mobile grew to being the most popular mobile designation across 18 countries.”

Michael Arrington, founder of the TechCrunch has been listed in world’s 100 most influential people of year 2008 by Time magazine, however rather than making the situation evenly poised he has pointed out comment that again glimpsing something negative about Madhu Yarlagadda as if Michael is in support of negative comments and he is making sure to rotten down an individual reputation. Seems the first post of Leena Rao to Michael Arrington’s was more on side of cheap journalism and irresponsible behavior.

Its being said that Madhu Yarlagadda’s wife is planning to file a law suit against TechCrunch. Michael Arrington on this whole situation and one of a unique controversy on web said -

I’m not very pleased that any of this happened. We spend a lot of time moderating comments and generally try to remove random negative stuff about individuals. But in this case the outpouring of negativity was detailed and overwhelming. And the threat of legal action ensured that we weren’t going to do anything very quickly about it. It’s just a bad situation all around.

What Michael is saying through his post from above excerpt and what he is projecting is different from each other. I would personally suggest him to be more responsible and think twice when it comes to an individual reputation and try to make situation evenly poised rather than being so defensive that you downgrade and mishandle one’s reputation.

The pace at which blogging and website owners are rising the demand and need for tools and resources also increasing in terms of varied features they provide that could boost and ramp up your website with new colors, productivity or few tweaks in terms of UI, functionality, web promotion or other services. Below are such tools for webmasters and bloggers ;

Mloovi RSS Translator – Mloovi is new tool which translate RSS feeds into 24 languages including Hindi using Google Translator. In short period the tool has gain appreciation among its users.

SlidehShare Ribbon – A Powerpoint Plug-in from Slideshare that lets you search SlideShare, download powerpoint presentations and upload your own presentation without opening a web browser.

ReadSpeaker WebReader – ReadSpeaker is a widget service that one can add to web page or blogs posts and let the visitors listen to it. It is a kinda button that when clicked will read the entire page or a pre-defined part of the content chosen by website/ blogs owners.

Dropbox – Its a file syncing tool and acts like a online network drive. Its ergonomic ability to drop files into a folder and have that same folder show up on every other computer you own. Just add a folder to your desktop and copy files. You can also share complete folders so that anyone with access to the folder sees and is able to use the shared, synced files.

Carbonite – Its an online back-up utility that sits in system tray and watches important files/ folders and automatically archive them to a secure website as you work. There is no storage space limit, but on a per day basis (in GBs).

Glync – Glync is a Firefox extension which adds historical graphs to the External Links page in Google Webmaster Tools. This means that you can track your link growth over time. The professional version also tracks your Yahoo Site Explorer links, the links for all of your sub-pages, and the PageRank of all your sub-pages and links pointing to those sub-pages. (See Demo Video)

Notipal – This essential tool that not only notifies you of broken links and error pages on your website but also give the option to your visitors to enter their email address to be notified when your site is fixed.

Just for Bloggers

Tynt Copy-Paste Leveraging – Tynt provide a way as – whenever anyone copies the content from your blog/site it automatically place your link in addition to your copied content when its being pasted on other site. This brings traffic and morover Tynt also provides the monitoring/ analytics of copied content from your website/blog.

ShowYourself Widget/ Links – For bloggers who love to flaunt their online Identities on multiple platofrms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked, MySpace, Yahoo Upcoming and many more its a perfect tool to create pretty huge links of same in a widgetised manner.

Anonymous Linking – At times when you do not want through your links to reveal your website information on other analytics software, use this tool. This tool stop referrer information from going through your links.

WikiPad – Its an open source Wiki-like notebook for bloggers/ writers for storing thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts, or anything else you can think of to write down. Its different to other editors as you can cross-link your information within it and it also named as “IDE for your thoughts”.

Images & Pictures

ResizR – Its is a free nifty and useful tools that allows to resize an image and optionally rotate as well from your local computer or the web.

ScrnShots – A nice set of tools to Search, Upload and take screen shots of anything on web or even your desktop.

PicMarkr – PicMarkr free tool that lets you to add custom watermark (image or text) to your images on your website or blog.  It is useful when you want to protect your copyrights of images and pictures published on your website or blog.

Browsershots – Check & Test your website in almost all different web browsers present these days right from chrome to firefox, flock or IE (all version) in different OS (Linux, Windows, Mac OS and BSD).

BrowserSize – A nifty online tool for setting your browser size while doing Web design and find out your browser’s current size plus more.

kissa.be – This tool is comes handy though its URL shortner but here you can shorten URL along with email, text and Image as well.

Coded Preview

IE7 JS Script – IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Mikogo Skype Plugin – It’s as a Skpe Extra (i.e. plug-ins for Skype) where users can have free screen sharing and phone calls together for no cost. With Mikogo Skype Extra one can invite up to 10 participants to any Mikogo screen sharing session directly from your Skype installed in your systems.

Test Everything – Test everything of your website from CSS/ HTML validations, SEO tools to Social services, Web proxies, Network tools, Text tools, Image tools and more.

Web Analytics & Traffic Monitoring

AreMySitesUp Via SMS – It is a simple service to help you keep an eye on your sites and warn you if they go down, moreover it send notifications via email or SMS text message to your cell phone. Site checks are performed 25 times per day and for up to 20 sites for a free account and 60 sites for paid ones.

SWIX – SWIX is like Google Analytics for social media it tracks where your traffic comes from like blogs, twitter feeds, facebook, YouTube Channel etc. As its free during its beta life you can try it without any cost.

Piwik – Its an open source web analytics with as flexible as any developer can make it. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages and more.

Scrutinizer – Its a pack full of 283 website monitoring and other useful tools at one place.

WBOSS – WBOSS (Web Based Open Source Spell Checker) is designed to work with any text input form on any web page and its script allows users to paste text into the website and find any spelling errors so they can be fixed before publishing it. Via – Joshua Cantara.

Webmaster/ Developer Resource – A huge list in itself and all-in-one page linking to resource, tools, utilities, reference materials and all that stuff that have something to do with webmasters and website builders.

User behavior & User Experience

Loop¹¹ – Loop11 is a web-based user-experience testing tool, allowing companies to conduct online, unmoderated user testing on any kind of digital interface. Loop11 is not a survey or web analytics tool, but a user experience tool… helping you to understand user behaviour.

Clixspy – Clixpy tracks everything your site’s users do such as mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, form inputs. You can watch and examine videos showing your users’ actions.

Clickdensity – Clickdensity allows to analyze the user experience and identify usability and information architecture issues and generate reports and heat map showing the relative popularity of components on web pages.

Colorblind web-page filter – Its a a testing tool to analyze how a web page will look like to people having colorblindness and generate similar web pages with those colors only.

HTML, CSS & Forms

WordPress Theme Generator – This unique tool is for WordPress self-hosted blog owners. It generates and creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme be it 2column, 3-column along with all AJAX features with YUI and that too without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge.

Wufoo – HTML form builder to create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code.

PHP Form Generator – Create your own running PHP form and download the HTML in just three simple steps no programming required.

ColT (Link to HTML) – Its a Firefox extension that adds two menu items to the browser’s context menu when you right click a hyperlink, it shows options as – “Copy Link Text and Location As” to the menu enabling users to copy the text and its link in either HTML, plain text, BB Code, FuseTalk, or Wikipedia formats.

FireScope – Its a quite handy Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug and provide HTML and CSS reference information with Firefox browser.

India’s very own neighbor country Pakistan witnessed its First Blogging Awards & New media Unconference on Friday May 28th at Karachi, the award ceremony is backed by Google Pakistan and CIO Pakistan along with other sponsors such as Nokia, Dell, Cannon etc. The ceremony was lavishing, big and red carpeted with more than 300 bloggers and corporates honored in Karachi to recognize and encourage blogging as “New Media” and “Citizen Journalism” rising in Pakistan.

The awards are distributed among winners out of a total of 41 blogs in different categories such as celebrity, fashion, gossips, politics, humor, current affairs and technology.

Neighboring developing countries should take lesson from Pakistan where blogging, new media, citizen journalism is not just limited to newspaper columns or talk shows but also being recognized, appreciated and honored with awards as ceremonies and unconferencing events and thats too with lavishing format which not only show countries appreciation towards the home-grown journalism but also flaunt that how important they are to the country they are blogging for.

The ceremonies, award event indeed is a good practice to set the level high, bring out the sense of recognition, competition and thus encourage the new media entities for iterate the standards of their respective media be it bloggers, citizen journalists, freelance authors/ content editors etc.

Pakistan is 3rd among its neighboring countries (India & China) with  18 million internet users in Pakistan comparing to India’s 51 million internet users and 111 million users in China moreover despite of lagging to India & China only Pakistan witnesses the efforts to encourage the new media type for its growing user base.

The New media is rising and blogs has already surpassed the newspaper in terms of readers. The effort has to be made to organize the news form of media raise the level much higher than its present one by encouraging people directly involved in it.

If you are visiting any city in India and you are a blogger, you can now find accommodation for free to stay and the place would be another blogger’s home. This is a sort of barter exchange being propagated by Indian website – ExtaBed.in.

At ExtraBed.in, bloggers are being asked to participate in this Blogger exchange program where bloggers offer extra bed to a fellow blogger or who visits blogger’s city. And in return, when you travel to his/her city, you have a place to stay.

This seems to be out of track and at the same time a way to bind and create a blogger’s network ‘offline’. If you want to host a blogger you can go to ExtraBed.in select the city you live in and add your contact details and If you are planning for a trip out of your city than find the the state name, click on it and find out the city and get in touch with bloggers who welcome other bloggers as their guests.

Also going ahead in this offline blogging network, the website ask bloggers to treat fellow bloggers visiting their city with pleasant hospitality along with a ‘Gift’ and a photo snap of both host and guest bloggers posted on blogs.

As of now the idea is propagating for bloogers in India, middle east, some part of US for this type of barter exchange.

Posterous is a new service through which users can post just anything by sending email, its a kind of twitter like microblogging, but unlike microblog here one can put any content using smart auto embedding services of Posterous. The service lets post content from email and content could be audio, video, image, pdf, doc or mp3 and you would get 1GB of space for all this.

One can use any email service such as GMail, Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo or any other to do blogging via email and for that you just have to send an email to post @ posterous.com unlike to other blogging services with WYSIWYG editors or so.

The interesting and USP part in this is Posterous intelligently embed the files in different user interfaces like when you post a YouTube video link via email, it automatically embed the video player as such and when you post any audio files it will put a nice Posterous interface for that (see image below) and audio player when you post an mp3 file.

Apart from this, when you send URLs, it will automatically create a link and when an image is send as an attachment it resize it to web friendly size, moreover good part is when you attach more than one image it will create a stunning Ajax image gallery (screenshot below) automatically, which is otherwise not feasible for less tech savvy bloggers.

The service do take care of email spoofing when you send your post via email and send you an email for confirmation when there is doubt that if email is sent by you only. Right now the service is free for all and have plans to add premium services later in future.

The service seems to be a bright start in line what Picnic has done when it comes to grabbing users moreover I don’t see any such similar service presently. The kind of blogging that Posterous brought to online users is really appreciative though one has too see if users could divert themselves to traditional blogging pattern to such services, when they get used to brands like Blogger (with similar email posting option), WordPress or Tumblr (microblogging service).