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This is my first blog entry produced using Jott. That is a service that allows you to speak into your phone, and have your words converted into text and then post it to another service. In this case, I have dictated this blog entry to Jottfrom my phone and I’m having Jott post to this blog. listen

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Here’s a nice feature implemented by the Examiner.com news websites: When a website refers an online user to an Examiner.com story, Examiner.com inserts a text line under its masthead crediting the referring site.

Here’s an example. Below is a link (from this blog, obviously) to an Examiner.com article:

Frontier posts revenue increase on routes against Southwest

Note that when you click through to that story you see a link that says “go back to www.steveouting.com”. It sticks throughout the site, not just on the page you arrive at.

Cool!

This is from a new study called Never Ending Friending, sponsored in part by MySpace. … It’s yet another example of how today’s young media consumers are more and more about interacting (two-way, new media) than being passive (one-way, old media). … As usual, consumers are leading the way — and most media and marketers are a step behind, just starting to figure that out.

Is anyone else experiencing this? After the usual holiday-week lull, my e-mail inbox is exploding — and I don’t mean just with spam. (I’ve got pretty good spam filtering.) It’s like everyone has returned to work with a vengeance and they are hammering my inbox with stuff that needs to be dealt with. Arrrgh!

I’ve been checking out MyChingo.com, which has a nifty concept even if not yet great execution. The site allows you to add a “voicemail” inbox to your website or blog. Your readers can leave you a voice message, which you can listen to privately or toggle to be public — so anyone can listen to your voicemail.

I can think of some interesting uses for this, and I’ve been toying with using it my company’s adventure-sports websites. Let’s hope the developers get a bit further along, though, and soon. The interface is bare bones; you can’t customize the voicemail box that goes on your site to my satisfaction; and a couple features in the admin interface (Notify and Chat Admin) are “Currently in development.”

Also, the $45 a year pricetag gets you a single voicemail box. How about an account that offers multiple boxes for a set fee, instead of $45 a pop? The service has promise, but at this point in it’s development I’m not sure if I’ll keep using it after the 3-day free trial.