So when something like Twittorati arrives to aid my quest I get quite excited. Well, first I get freaked out that maybe Big Brother really does exist in the world of the web and can see how much surfing and Tweet watching I do in an attempt to do as little work as possible. But then I get over myself. (It takes an awful lot to feed laziness.)

So what is this Twittorati lark? According to their site, “Twittorati tracks the tweets from the highest authority bloggers, starting with the entire Technorati Top 100 and soon including many more of the web’s most influential voices.” Launched by media search engine Technorati, Twittorati pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking (its equivalent to Google Page Rank).

Although not fully real time – you have to refresh the page constantly to get real-time results (you can use Page Reboot – to do this remember) – the Tweets still make for pretty interesting, often valid, and always varied reading. They cover a random selection of subjects including technology, politics, entertainment and a bunch of other stuff, which you can then filter by Technorati Tags or top trending Twitter hashtags. You can also organise Tweets by Authority Ranking or by latest Tweet.

Of course, by limiting themselves to Technorati’s Top 100 list, Twittorati misses out on Tweets from random individuals and prolific bloggers that may be the most entertaining thing you’ve ever read. This is apparently something they plan to fix later on. In the meantime though, it still makes for awesome reading. The type of reading that means I’m going to stop writing now…

Microsoft launches Bing to challenge Google in the search engine department. Google launches Chrome OS to challenge Microsoft’s about to be launched Windows 7. It sounds suspiciously like war to us.

Google’s new Chrome OS will initially be aimed at small, low-cost netbooks – ready for sale by the middle of 2010 – but the aim is for it to eventually be usable on PCs as well. The official party line is that “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS.”

“We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you on to the web in a few seconds,” reckon Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice-president of product management, and Google’s engineering director Linus Upson. It’s also being designed as a dig at Microsoft, with both Sundar and Linus stressing that Chrome OS is Google’s attempt “to rethink what operating systems should be”, given that “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Like I said, it’s war, people!

All the war-mongering and not so subtle digs aside, Chrome OS aims to be an operating system that focuses entirely on the web, driven by the browser. As one clever techie type explains: “The software architecture is simple - Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.” What that means is: the browser is the platform. Basically the Internet is everything… which everyone already knows anyway so this makes perfect sense in our increasingly web-driven world.

Of course no war would be complete without minor players wading into the trenches, guns blazing. Enter Jolicloud www.jolicloud.com, a startup hailing from Paris, France, who proclaimed their hopes to give the big players a run for their money when it comes to powering the netbooks of this world on the very same day that Google announced Chrome OS.

In their own words, “Jolicloud is an Internet operating system that combines the two driving forces of the modern computing industry: the open source and the open web. Jolicloud transforms your netbook into a sophisticated web device that taps into the cloud to expand your computing possibilities. The web already hosts a significant part of our lives: mails, photos, videos, and friends are already somewhere online. Jolicloud was built to make the computer and web part of the same experience.”

And that, folks, is what they call a brave little soldier.

PS. Speaking of war, did you see the news this weekend that dozens of US government and South Korean sites were hit by a huge cyber attack over the weekend? Government sites, banks and shopping sites were targeted, potentially affecting the world economy and making it easy to believe that cyber warfare doesn’t only happen in the movies. Apparently. Or it could just be some hacker’s wet dream.

Vimeo is full of amazing work from the realms of animation, film making, artistic commentary, and captures of beautiful moments from everyday life. Mashable have created an awesome feature of 12 amazing videos for design inspiration that are a must see for creatives and non-creatives alike.

That said, I’m also one of those annoying people who absolutely hates to be left out of or miss out on anything. And I do mean anything – the above example included even though I moaned about it. I just need to know things. As and when they’re happening. God forbid I should be the second one to know, let alone the last. This is why I’m loving the new Twitter for Busy People interface.

Created by the team at Bluejava (and thanks to the good people at Mashable for bringing it to my attention), Twitter for Busy People allows you to speed read your way through all your friends’ arbitrary, but nevertheless riveting, musings. With just one click you can see what  500 of your closest friends (apparently some people really do have 500 friends) are up to at a glance.

Meanwhile, given how busy & NB I am, and given my absolute burning need to know everything as and when it happens, Page Reboot is also right up there on my list of things I love this week.

Page Reboot has been in the news a lot lately thanks to it being used as a pawn for a bunch of political shenanigans in Iran. As Ryan, the site’s clever creator, explains: “Initially the site was being used by protestors in Iran against their government and their unjust practice in the recent elections.” Ryan took the site offline briefly, but then decided to reinstate it as a vehicle for free speech and freedom against an unjust state. And that’s when the real hijinks started, with the Iranian government “using it to attack the websites of the protestors.” Ryan then took it offline again for a while, but it is now back up and running thanks to the addition of some new features to the site to prevent it from being used against Pro Iranian Freedom websites.

So what exactly is all the fuss about? Page Reboot is actually nothing too fancy: it’s just a really useful tool that allows you to refresh any website of your choice every 30 seconds. It’s not rocket science, it’s not brain surgery, but it’s definitely something I’ve bookmarked… (go to www.pagereboot.com and click on the bookmarklet, any webpage you are on will be transferred to pagereboot.com automatically so that it gets refreshed willy nilly… I just really wanted to say willy nilly in this post.)

Don your sequinned glove and relive thriller – did someone say moonwalk?

For some reason – probably copyright issues – I can’t embed so you just have to click

NEW YORK, NY – June 25, 2009 – Michael Jackson, one of the most widely beloved entertainers and profoundly influential artists of all-time, leaves an indelible imprint on popular music and culture.

Update – You gotta love the web paying tribute – 1500 in mates do thriller

Enter JokeyPhone –  (Thanks to Mashable who found it for me, by the way.)

Jokeyphone is basically “The YouTube of Jokes”, a video site that “allows users to tell jokes, pass them along, re-tell them using the webcam and teleprompter, and create their own joke channels.” The moment you land on the page, you are greeted by a random joke to watch and then the real fun begins.

For a laugh a minute, turn on ‘Auto Play’, which allows you to watch joke after joke without interruption. Each new joke starts five seconds after the last one, giving you enough time to save or replay a joke. You can also find the best joke content by jumping to the most viewed or highest rated sections, or start your own joke channel. Meanwhile, Jokeyphone have promised to push out Facebook, iPhone and Blackberry apps in the near future so you’ll be able to waste time outside the office as well. As we do.

Finally, if you think the joke tellers you’re seeing suck – don’t you hate it when someone totally stuffs up the punchline? – you can retell it yourself by using the ‘U-Tell Joke’ feature. Just try not stuff it up yourself. I did… and ended up leaving Jokeyphone with my tail between my legs as the biggest joke of the whole site.

Speaking of YouTube, I came across a post the other day heralding ‘The Top YouTube Videos of All Time’. Go check them out at ReadWriteWeb. Just for fun.

Originally spotted by Chris where you can read more about the production and background.

So this post is for those of you who haven’t actually heard of Facebook Vanity URLs or aren’t too sure what they are.

A Facebook Vanity URL is basically your own personal URL minus all the costs and back end admin of setting up an actual website, using the Facebook domain as a space to show off your individual take on how websites should be named. So, for example, until now your Facebook profile will have looked something like this: www.facebook.com/php?id=500065899. Not very personal. Or inspiring. But by making up your own URL you can now be www.facebook.com/iamcleverandbeautifulandtoosexyfortheoldfacebook. It is a bit like a tattoo, though, in that once you’ve chosen your username you won’t be able to change it or transfer it. (So maybe I won’t choose www.facebook.com/myasslooksfatinallpants after all. I mean, I could just be having a bad day, couldn’t I? Surely my ass doesn’t really look fat in all pants?)

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, must be at least five characters in length and can only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a full stop (”.”). Facebook are also trying to figure out how to support non-Romanized characters, so if you want something a little less prosaic watch this space.

Meanwhile, for those web-fiends who knew all about Facebook Vanity URLs and their exact launch time (the middle of a weekend night, which meant a whole bunch of geeks decided to forego a social life in favour of waiting glued to their computer screens), apparently it was a veritable landrush as people tried to grab their ‘first come first served’ vanity URL. You’d think they could have come up with better names than these though:

http://www.facebook.com/moc.koobecaf.www – ooh, very clever: mirror-mirror, vanity. We get it.
http://www.facebook.com/alksjfalskjfoiwefalsdlasfaslleseouaiwejndlsknjkdfs – because that’s going to be easy to remember.
http://www.facebook.com/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa – who knew trying to find a username would be as painful as childbirth?
http://www.facebook.com/JackBauercouldwhoopChuckNorris – I don’t think so.

It’s all very silly really, but nothing wrong with a bit of silliness.

PS. Did you know that the Swahili version of Facebook has just been launched? Facebook is now available in around 50 language versions and clever analyst types reckon it could be launched in Hausa and Zulu next.

This means that in future we’re likely to see a few Kindle clones that will certainly improve on the current device.

Read more and get the source code link here.