Matt Mullenweg announced the early release of WordPress 2.6 on the WordPress blog one month ahead of schedule. Here is a video that runs us through the most noteable new features and improvements.

After a long break from blogging because of project and client commitments (I was Twittering and Facebooking and Friendfeeding and posting to del.icio.us all the time; does that count…?), I have now decided to get a name domain and do a bit of the personal branding type stuff that everyone is talking about

The first step of course was to register my own name as a top level domain (TLD). This starts your journey on the way to projecting a serious, professional image to prospective clients and business partners or just friends on the internet who now can see you’re not just goofing around on the internet the whole time, but that it can actually be used for more serious business and professional networking purposes

So this is the start of my attempt to bring all my different blogs and profiles together under one roof and namespace. The obvious benefit is that it will go a long way towards focusing my attention on only the one major repository of stuff that is scattered all over the web at the moment.

All the different blogs hosted elsewhere and all the different profiles on the different social networks are becoming a bit unwieldy and the trend is nowadays towards aggregated lifestreaming and building your personal brand online.

Doing that will be much easier if there is one place to rule them all, one place to consolidate them, one place to aggregate them all and in lifestreamlining bind them. (Apologies to JRR Tolkien). Hey, did I just make up a new word: lifestreamlining…? Hmmm… So, what exactly is it that I do online that it now deserves a dedicated namespace and aggregation effort…? Web development, mainly on the WordPress content management system platform and everything related to that: registering domain names, hosting those accounts on CentOS Linux servers, setting up and configuring the WordPress CMS, maintaining it and augmenting it with the multitude of plugins and themes available. Of course it’s never that simple, and I shall dedicate a future post to a detailed outline of what all goes into setting up and maintaining blogs for clients. Especially with the advent of Social Media and the myriad services out there, it has become a regular cottage industry. Consultant services to marketing and PR professionals who want to enter the Social Media phenomenon but who do not necessarily have access to a geeky nephew or brother who can set it up and maintain it for them.

Also with the creation of new roles of Social Media Strategists, more and more businesses and big corporations are committing budget to individual who can set up, configure and maintain social media profiles and services for them in the new media landscape where they have to necessarily go where the conversation is happening and the cool kids hang out, otherwise they will just become irrelevant and fall out of everyone’s attention sphere and lose clients and thus business and profit. So, without rambling on too much, that is what I do all the time, getting paid to goof off on the internet all day and put up Facebook and del.icio.us and Friendfeed accounts and profiles for paying clients. Geez, I’ve done it for myself and I’m having a fabulous time, if someone else also want in on the action, they can bloody well pay me for my time and trouble, can’t they…?

Some bright sparks (software engineers) who worked at Google before, came up with a brilliant new lifestream aggregating service called Friendfeed. I am testing the brand spanking new WordPress Friendfeed widget in the sidebar of my blog. What it does is integrate into one service all the disparate profiles and accounts and pull them together, and now with the WordPress widget you can plug it in to your blog sidebar. People who are interested in seeing what you’re up to need only go to one place to see where you’ve done what. For example if you’ve watched videos over at YouTube and marked it as a favourite, if you’ve posted a new blog post at another domain, uploaded Flickr photos, shared Google Reader items from your RSS collection of feeds, listened to favourite last.fm tracks, scheduled an event at upcoming.org or updated your Twitter status with a Tweet or ten, whether you dugg stories on digg or saved del.icio.us bookmarks, it will all show up in one place: your Friendfeed profile.

The main Friendfeed site and web interface also has the ability to let you like things and comment on your stream of events and those of friends whom you have subscribed to. This has led to Friendfeed becoming the destination of choice for many of the more prominent Twitter personalities when Twitter experiences one of it’s notorious hiccups, which is frequent and unexpected and many times it’s a case of guess which functional aspect is gonna be crippled this week while they (hopefully) are hard at work in the background getting things up and running smoothly.