So there was a little spat on Twitter about UrbanVancouver (owned and operated by Bryght) which is an blog aggregator, normally these work out great. This blog is included in a few like the Open Wiki Blog Planet, the difference is that we opted in to this aggregator. Local radio host Buzz Bishops blog entire archive was taken and posted on Urban Vancouver without his permission.

You can see most of it here http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Urban+Vancouver

Edit: Looks like there are a few more people finding their stuff on UV that never approved it.

Another Edit: Buzz has posted about it here.

Why are we posting this?  We want UV to change its method of Opt-Out to totally Opt-In.

Boris wrote last month (yes its August already) about some Tools for Startups, and we even got a mention so I thought I might talk about some of the tools ScribbleWiki is using.

• Paypal - Yes, I know they suck; but, for creating subscriptions payments nobody really seems to have anything else they can offer me.  Although, I was pretty stoked about Amazon Payments then I find out they don’t currently offer it for Canadians.  If you do find one, drop me a line.
• Highrise - It was easy it first we had a few customers and everything was going well; then, we started forgetting people, losing numbers and had to figure out something fast.  Now Highrise manages all our contacts, what we’ve said to them, and anything else going on.  37signals (the creators of Highrise) also have a great blog called Signal vs. Noise you should add to your feed reader if you don’t already.
• Internal Wiki - Obviously we use our own product.
• Google Apps - Downtime? None.  Upgrades? None. Email, Word processor and spreadsheets that all work great.  Also the spreadsheets are great for collaborating on.  See I think this “collaboration” thing is going somewhere
• GotVMail - 800 numbers that forward to our cell phones, sometimes your customers just want to talk to you on the phone and not really having a office makes that hard.
• OTRS - Its an open source system that takes all our email support requests and puts them in a nice little ticket system, so we don’t have multiple people helping one person.
• Google Reader - We have feeds from Google blog search, Twitter, and Google news all fed into our Google Readers to see what people are saying about us and being on time to get in on the discussion.  This is one of my favorite things to do in a day.

There are probably others; but, these are the ones we use daily.