Guidewire Group

I’ve spent the last seven days trapped in the house with two sick children, which means I have more links piled up than I know what to do with, and my fuse is shorter than Balloon Boy’s 15 minutes (too soon?). So if I offend anyone, deal with it. This Vortex will also have to tide you over for a bit, as I am moving to Austin next week (whoop!) and will be offline. Now that you know far too much about my personal life, on to technology.

News from the Social Media Vortex

–This is biased but I don’t care. If you haven’t read Chris Shipley’s response to the latest Calacanis rant on angel investors, please do so posthaste. Surprise – she actually agrees with him! But she has some fun with it too.

–If a Nordic country falls from the Internet and no one notices, does it make a sound? Due to a typo in a script, Sweden dropped completely off the Interwebs for an hour and a half Monday night.

–Comic book fans now have reason to join Twitter. Neil Gaiman is conducting a storytelling experiment on the service, enlisting followers to help him create an audiobook. Madlibs for nerds, if you will.

–In news that surely made old-media stalwarts curl into the fetal position, the Huffington Post passed the LA Times and Washington Post in site traffic this week.

–It’s pretty hard to win the Worst. Post. Ever. award. When you consider the millions of blog posts that appear each week – many of which feature piano-playing cats – one would have to write something really painfully awful to win this award. So let’s all send hearty congratulations to John Biggs at MobileCrunch.

Apps on the Radar

–Jason Meserve pointed me to the super-cool AutoStitch app, which lets you create panoramic pictures on your iPhone.

–During a search for a friend, I was referred to Get Apps Done, something of a clearing house for iPhone app developers and the people who need them.  Love stuff like this – a simple, logical concept that is needed by a large group of people.

–Were it 1989, I’d be excited about this.

–And finally, thanks to Apple’s new policy allowing developers to build paid upgrades into free applications, the follow-up (or part of it at least) to hugely popular game Rolando is now available for free.

Tweet of the Week

–It’s rare that the winner triumphs so easily but you’d be hard-pressed to trump Billy Ray Cyrus this week. After his daughter Miley threatened to leave Twitter, he responded with this:

Miley. You are a light in a world of darkness. You were born “Destiny Hope Cyrus” for a reason. You can’t leave everyone now. We r countin on u.

If I’d known the messiah was going to come in the form of an autotuned child star, I’d have watched more Disney Channel.