There is all kinds of Silverlight news going around right now because of Microsoft’s 3–day MIX Conference. It started with the announcement with Microsoft giving away 4GB of hosting space for developers to store their media, and then came one of the much awaited demonstrations…

Last week we mentioned the Firefox Companion for eBay that had just been announced, and at the time it wasn’t yet open for the alpha test program. Recently we were able to download the extension and give it a try.

YouTube has just launched a service called Active Sharing as a way to get even more video views. If you decide to opt-in for the service YouTube will track which videos you have watched in the last 30–minutes and share that with other users.

It never ceases to amaze me what people will do for money. Really, it’s appalling sometimes. I’ve seen some interesting eBay auctions before like people selling the free toiletries from hotels, but this is the first time I’ve seen people selling software that’s free from the developers on eBay.

Object Desktop is a nice little suite of applications that can really change the way your Windows computer looks and feels. The $50 suite includes programs to replace icons, modify the right-click menu, skin Windows, and much much more. There are so many different programs that you can install with Object Desktop that we had a hard time covering them all in our detailed review.

Lately it seems as though bloggers are suffering from a mentality of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,” in order to peek their way into the Top Favorited Blogs on Technorati. In other words, I’ll favorite your blog if you favorite mine.

In Ashley’s article this morning, she mentioned one of my favorite programs for Vista called Switcher. It makes use of Vista’s advanced graphical capabilities, particularly the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) to provide features that can’t be found in Windows XP. So why is it that they can’t be found in XP?

Windows Live Writer has become one of the most popular blogging tools for Windows-based PC users.  It’s free, and a quick download which makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog.  And on top of it, Live Writer works with WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, and others.

The Desktop Window Manager introduced with Windows Vista has opened the doors for developers to create a lot of great applications for those running Vista with Aero enabled. One of the best applications that I’ve come across so far that takes complete advantage of DWM is called Switcher.

Google is big on providing their services in multiple languages, but in order for that to happen they have to first get some translators. One translator in particular felt like sharing some of his recent findings.

Here is your week in review with Sunday's Summary! If you missed something, check it out.

You might receive mixed results with the program below, but I thought this new application was definitely worth a mention if only for the idea that it presents. It is called Vystal (Download Mirror) and its goal is to add an Aero-like glass effect that you would experience in Vista…except now you can have it in Windows XP.

I’m sure there are a few chess fans hanging around CyberNet.  I can’t say that I really enjoy chess, but that’s more because I’ve only played it a handful of times and most of the time, I lost miserably.

Mozilla just posted Firefox 3 Alpha 4 (code name Gran Paradiso) for everyone to download. Before you go jumping around with excitement, I’ll be the first to say that this release doesn’t have anything that great in it: 

There is finally a decent BitTorrent client for the Firefox browser and it goes by the name of FoxTorrent. When I originally saw this Firefox extension make its way out in March I got pretty excited.

Pretty big news was just released by MacRumors.com which mentions a recent notice that Apple sent out to all iTunes partners who sell music on the iTunes store. The message said:

There were a lot of unhappy Google Personalized Home Page users yesterday who were ready to throw the towel in after a glitch caused some of the home pages to go back to an older version, and revert back to default settings.

Pingdom is big on monitoring websites for downtime and is truly an amazing service. You can pay a monthly fee to have Pingdom monitor your own site, but they also have a service called Pingdom GIGRIB that currently monitors 2,000 websites across the Web.

Yesterday we wrote about the new Beta 3 release of Windows Server Longhorn which is now available for public consumption. That’s right, if you don’t mind playing with pre-release software, Microsoft will give you a working serial number that will work until April 7, 2008.

We’ve given away several invites to Joost now (thanks to several or our readers for giving their invites away), so for anybody who’s gotten to give it a try, what do you think of it?