There are a few new features on Pownce. I don’t use Pownce much but I do read what people post on it. I generally don’t see any compelling reason to use these micro-blogging services. People use them for short messaging a wide amount of people but that is not something I have any reason to do, let alone have anything to say, therefore these services are somewhat useless to me.

One of the new features on Pownce is the showing of upcoming events on the right side of the page. First off, generally the event don’t have anything to do with me or are of interest. I don’t care about an event happening in America or Canada or any other international country. I don’t live anywhere near there and wouldn’t travel to those countries anytime soon so this new feature is irrelevant to me.

Another new feature was the automatic embedding of Videos and Pictures. In my opinion, this is what services like Tumblr and Soup do. This feature is more for blogging and mini-blogging services and not for the micro-blogging ones. They are moving into a field half way between mini and micro blogging by taking the best of both worlds and merging them together but not focusing greatly on these features to make it a hybrid type service.

The last new feature was linking of other web services. This is somewhat useful because now people can see links to the services I actually use, for example Digg, Flickr and Last.FM. You can also put your IM addresses and links to other websites, for example your personal blog. But this feature is not really original, just taking something that another service uses and taking a different angle.

I would only use these features if I had a way to connect to these site away from my computer. Some services offer this but they generally cost money, money I am not willing to spend on them. I still keep my eyes on the sites, reading what people are up to and interesting things they post. I read what my Pownce contacts have to say on the website and I also still read what people have to say on Twitter via the RSS feed. Am I still a user of these sites, even though I don’t contribute?

Pownce - http://pownce.com/yum9me
Twitter - http://twitter.com/yum9me

Yesterday evening I had planned to watch the lunar eclipse. The 4 days building up to Tuesday were perfect, no clouds and warm weather. On the day of the event, the weather changes, rain and clouds! 30 minutes before the event I went outside to look for the moon. Lucky for me, I could see the glowing ball in the sky. I got the camera set up and took a few pre-eclipse photos of the moon.

Just before the time it was going to start, the clouds came in I couldn’t see the moon! About 20 minutes later the clouds cleared and i saw the moon, being slightly shadowed. I was hopeful of seeing the spectacular event. But no, thing couldn’t turn out right, the clouds came back. Why do the might gods smite me?

As time went by, the clouds didn’t clear. I though I was going to miss out. Just before I was going to call it a day and hit the sack, I looked out the window to see a faint red glow in the sky. It was the moon. As I watched, I could see the clouds around it clear and could see a clear sky, full of stars. I tried to get a picture but I couldn’t hold the camera steady. I needed a tripod. I didn’t get the picture I was looking forward to taking but I guess there is always next time, in 10 years or so.

Here are three pictures I took. Better luck next time.

• Pre-Eclipse
• Shadowed Moon
• Blurry Red Lunar Eclipse

For other people’s pictures of this amazing event, go to the Lunar Eclipse Flickr Group

• Lunar Eclipse - Aug 28th 2007 (Pool)