• People are giving out their passwords to use third-party tools.
• Phising attacks are trying to get people to click on links that take them to websites that try and steal their Twitter passwords.
• Twitter was hacked and 33 major Twitter accounts were made to post fake tweets.

For a year or two now, I've been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I've also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it's a very simple problem, there's a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I'd see this "PollDaddy" thing pop up.

Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren't the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.

So what does Automattic need the money for? After all, from what I know of the business, Automattic has been bubbling around the break-even point for a while now. Matt explains that they are going to roll out newer, hosted services such as BBPress (forums), and will expand their other product offerings, such as Gravatar and the spam-protection service Akismet. The money will be spent to hire more engineers and build out a more robust infrastructure.

That would be a start. Anne Zelenka made an impassioned case for using WordPress to build a social network, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some social features start to creep into WordPress.com as well. They just boosted their storage capacity to three gigabytes, which indicates that they are serious about allowing bloggers to add video and other multimedia content to their blogs.

An amateur video of an amazing animal confrontation on the African savannah is fast becoming one of the biggest hits on video-sharing website YouTube.

The footage first shows how several lions attack a group of buffalo, snatching a buffalo calf.

As the lions wrestle with a calf by a watering hole, a crocodile joins in the battle, pouncing on the buffalo.

The lions win the tug-of-war, but then the buffalo herd returns, chasing away the lions and freeing the calf.

The "Project Starrlight" blog is on the Zap2it entertainment Web site produced by Tribune Media Services, which also syndicates "Brenda Starr." The comic, created by the late Dale Messick, is now done by Mary Schmich and June Brigman.

Mattison's credits include writing, producing, and starring in the independent films "Fish Without a Bicycle" and "The Third Wish." She has also appeared on "Party of Five," "Beverly Hills 90210," "Married With Children," and other TV shows.

And while we will gladly look at the pictures, coo like idiots, and then link to places where they can be found, we just can't post them. We can and will stand on our fair-use high horse all we want about a thumbnail pic of the Hello! cover (which, per our original offer to Time Inc. counsel Nick Jollypants, we have now changed to the People cover), but we really can't use the same justification for the fuzzy, cloying photos floating around from Hello!. Sorry - but this time, turns out that posting the pics actually is illegal. Or so we're told. Our lawyer could just be drunk and not wanting to deal. Whatever. We're still working through the first round of legal woes from 2 days ago, and we can’t even keep track of what we are and aren't allowed to do anymore.

This at&t billboard from their new campaign has been floating around Flickr for some time now. It, of course, alludes to the SBC acquisition of at&t (guess their doing the lower case thing now) and how that somehow delivers blogging. We suppose it just means they own more of the world's bandwidth so they have the right to say they deliver whatever they want.

Blogs will also play a role in jazzing up the AT&T brand. One advertisement will include a view of Earth from space with pictures of individuals communicating, and feature the words "Blogging, delivered."

With 328 members in and around the city, this group (blog.meetup.com/1) eclipses its counterparts in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, London and Tokyo. It's bigger than the group in New York City.

It just goes to show that however much they like putting their thoughts online, Seattle bloggers also crave face-to-face contact with like-minded people.

"The meetings are a good way of telling yourself that you are not nuts and there are other people that are obsessed with creating and sharing content online," said Metcalf, who's been blogging 8bitjoystick.com since May 2002.

While some sites get just a handful of loyal followers, Metcalf reports that more than 9,000 comments have streamed in for the more than 1,500 articles he's penned. Video-game companies have been known to keep an eye on his game reviews. "Birds of a feather get together to rant about RSS I guess."

Back in the 1990s Drudge was a believer in the empowering potential of the internet. In a speech he said, "We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be." Now he sounds disillusioned and says that the "din" is growing into a cacophony: "There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention." He is no fan of the blogging phenomenon (weblogs linking sites): "I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don't exist."