By now you’ve heard about Google’snew social search featurecalled +1.The idea is that you’ll end up getting better results when your friends share good results with you. So, by clicking a +1 next to a Google result, you’ll be sharing your preferences as well. Thanks to Google’s notoriously slow rollout of new features, there’s really no telling as to when you’ll get the +1 feature for yourself. Fortunately, Google is providing an opt-in to at least speed up the process somewhat, via itsGoogle Experiments page....

On any given day, I wake up to 100+ emails. It’s the lifeblood of my business (and likely yours, as well) but it’s also the bane of my daily life. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I saw my inbox at zero and I was pretty sure that I never would again. Then I sawthese 7 stepsfrom my friendTim Milesthat I thought you’d find interesting. There’s a video at the end, where Tim shows you exactly how it all works, but the 7 steps are a massive leap toward achieving our mutual goal....

Every time I hear that a writer has been sucked into working for a content farm likeDemand Media,eHowor most recently “The AOL Way,” a little piece of my writer’s heart dies. Unfortunately, as dictated by our current system of content search, we live in an era where SEO and page views dictate what is monetizable and what isn’t worth spending time creating. It’s depressing, yes. But will it change for the better?...

In the days of “social currency,” measuring a person’s online worth has become meaningful for some, while still seen as shallow and skewed for others. If you’re one of the former and the idea of seeing someone’s PeerIndex score next to their profile stats on Twitter excites you, now you can. With a newKynetxapplication, thePeerIndexvalue will show up along side the stats for Tweets, Followers and Listed. The extension was built byEd Orcutt, a self-described pragmatic coder....

Have you ever heard of Star Wars? Yeah, neither have we but apparently it’s a pretty popular TV program from the 70s. One very talented fan, Bradley W. Lewis, an Austin, TX local currently works atBioWareas a senior visual effects artist on Star Wars: The Old Republic. But at night he is a “robopirate builder” and has a hobby of making awesome-looking Star Wars light sabers. To be specific, Lewis made a “A Return Of The Jedi Luke Saber, with crystal chamber, thin neck, and detachable blade,” in just under two months, documenting his progress on his website,Slothfurnace....