Back in October the communications company imposed a limit on user downloads to 250 GB a month without providing any monitoring tools of its own short of installing special software. Additionally, customers are only given one verbal warning before a one-year service suspension if they go over that limit.

Oddly enough when the cap was first announced, we had gotten a confirmation that Comcast would indeed be offering a bandwidth tracking tool of its own. This was later recanted by a Comcast spokesperson who said “there are numerous free or fee-based meters that are widely available on the Internet to anyone who wants one.” Comcast’s excessive use FAQ still urges people to use McAfee’s security suite, but now notes that “we are in the process of creating a usage meter that will measure consumption for the Comcast account which will be available in the coming months.”

Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas tells us the meter must first undergo an employee trial: “When that testing is complete, we plan to launch the meter to all of our high-speed Internet customers. It will be available for free via a customer’s Comcast.net account and it will enable them to very easily keep track of their aggregate data usage each month.”

Also, if you’re looking to track your usage, worth checking out is my CNET colleague Seth Rosenblatt’s look at half a dozen different bandwidth monitoring tools.

Techmeme also runs the sites WeSmirch, Memeorandum, and BallBug. McCarthy will focus on Techmeme, but said she may also work on the other sites from time to time.

Although Techmeme is a 24-hour-a-day site, McCarthy can’t, of course, work 24-7. “I don’t think they’ll be able to tell when I’m working or not,” she said, modestly. “It should be pretty seamless. I started a few weeks ago and a lot of people haven’t noticed.”

To be fair to McCarthy, however, people have noticed. Here in the CNET newsroom, one writer told me recently she’s seen that Techmeme story clusters now more frequently have the story that first covered a new item at the top of the group–not just the most-linked-to item.

In his post announcing the new hire, Rivera said, “Writers and publicists unhappy with the headlines on Techmeme are encouraged to transfer the bulk of their resentment to Megan.” For this, McCarthy’s experience at Valleywag will serve her well: “I have a very good background in people being dissatisfied with my work. I got a lot more complaints at Valleywag than commendations.” Regarding her new role, she says, “I want to hear feedback. Any feedback helps.”

Top of Techmeme: A story about Techmeme

In addition to the complaints, McCarthy will also be on the receiving end of entreaties from bloggers who want their stories placed well on the site. “It will be a welcome change,” McCarthy says, “to the running and hiding that I used to do at Valleywag. I’m looking forward to when people have breaking stories that they shoot me an e-mail.”

Asked if McCarthy has a mission to promote certain blogs or types of blogs (for example, up-and-coming blogs over mainstream sources), she said, “I’ll take things on a post-by-post basis. If someone has something unique and special that adds to the story that’s being told, you can make a case of wanting to expose that to more people.”

Although McCarthy may be an open book when it comes to motivations and editorial perspective, Techmeme’s algorithms remain proprietary. Asked if there was a move to make the code that places stories on the site more open, McCarthy demurred. “That would be something for Gabe,” she said.

While Apple’s iPhone has helped make surfing the Web from a mobile device easier, it’s still difficult to type in complex search queries. But Proximic has introduced a new application called Promixic Agents for the iPhone that will help. The new technology, which is language-independent, uses point-and-click technology to highlight bits of text. This means that users don’t have to type in a long string of search terms.

Unlike other search engines, which rely on keywords to find results, the search technology from Proximic looks for patterns in the text to see where these patterns overlap. It then delivers relevant results based on these patterns.

Proximic co-founder and CEO Philipp Pieper believes that conducting searches in this manner provides more contextualized and relevant search results and also makes conducting complex searches much easier.

“Mobile phones today lack ease of use when it comes to complex searches,” he said. “But with our technology users can click on a paragraph or a whole Web page and get other relevant stories or information.”

The application is initially being offered on the iPhone through the Apple App Store. It’s free to download. But Pieper said that the technology will eventually be available to other smartphones. Future releases of the software will also allow users to do much more, like find more relevant search results based on location. Other search companies such as Yahoo and Google are also using location-based technology to provide local search results for mobile devices.

But Pieper believes that the Proximic technology will be able to take location-based search a step further. For example, in future releases of the software, users will be able to go into a store and take a picture of a product description and then be able to search for that product or a product with similar features. Users will then get reviews of that product or will even get results for where they can buy that particular product nearby.

“Imagine you’re shopping for a TV in Best Buy,” Pieper said. “You punch the product description or take a picture of the description, and you can get search results that show you the same TV is being offered for a lower price down the street at another store.”

Pieper went on to say that these kinds of search results could be a boon for mobile advertising.

“Advertisers are looking for useful ad placements,” he said. “Especially now in the current economy, advertising needs to be useful and relevant to users. It has to be something that users value and engage in to make it worthwhile to the advertisers.”

If the content can be found on the Pirate Bay’s search index it shows up as a “Download 4 Free” link on the top of the Amazon product page. This links directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.

The extension developer’s site, along with the link to download the software is currently offline. The extension made the front page of Digg a few hours ago, which is likely what took the site out (not legal intervention). I’ve contacted Amazon to see if the company is making any efforts to block the extension but have not heard back yet. As it stands, the extension still works, albeit without the “Download 4 Free” thumbnail, which is hosted on the developer’s servers.

As blog Torrentfreak notes, this is a really bad time for such an extension. Piracy continues to be a huge problem for movies, music albums, and PC games. Amazon’s online MP3 store is one of the least expensive places to legally purchase DRM-free music, and this extension manages to make it that much simpler to pirate. It also coincides with a time of year when online retailers are getting an increase in traffic due to holiday sales.

That said, anyone who knows how to pirate content probably did not need this to continue their habit.

A similar add-on is available for IMDB users from Userscripts.org that cross references movie titles with torrent sites to find copies of films online. Despite its clear lean toward piracy, I’d argue that one of its more useful features it is to track down subtitle files, which can provide translations in smaller countries where the content might be legally available but not localized.

Below is a demo of how the extension works. Expect the developer’s site, along with the download links to be back up later today.

Google and the Hallmark Channel announced Wednesday that they have formed a partnership that will make Google TV Ads the channel’s exclusive advertiser. All of the ads will be placed on both the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel.

According to Hallmark, many of the advertisers it’s now trying to attract through Google’s TV Ads platform are new to the television platform, so it will provide more in-depth viewership data to help advertising partners make “real-time adjustments” to campaigns.

Google TV Ads are unique in the television advertising business. Instead of employing conventional techniques for television advertising, Google takes its online model and applies that to the medium. The company aims to provide greater relevancy by using proprietary targeting tools and an auction-based pricing system, which only costs advertisers when impressions are delivered to their ads.

Hallmark and Hallmark Movie Channel now join Google’s growing list of TV advertising partners, which includes Sci-Fi, MSNBC, CNBC, and Bloomberg Television.

If you’re going to be traveling solo in a few weeks for round two of the holiday season, worth checking out is the Boarding Project. It’s a social service that uses Twitter to helps you meet up with others at the same airport. To use it you simply tweet #boarding along with your airport code. It’ll send you a reply with a link to the other Twitter users who you can message directly to meet up with.

What’s neat is that Boarding Project’s system does not require users to sign up for anything. It also seems to be keeping an eye out for any FAA or IATA airport code mentions in public tweets, and will send a reply to that user urging them to check in to see who’s there.

The service plans to make money by offering special coupons to travelers, which could be shaped around any contextually relevant information from their Twitter stream. I didn’t get any with my reply, but a discounted meal or bookstore coupon could make a delay or layover that much more bearable.

The Boarding Project can show you other stranded Twitterers at airports.

It’s a pretty nice offering that simplifies the search experience for products found not just on Amazon.com, but also on partner retailers Target and Macy’s.

The bulk of the app is dominated by a search bar you can launch either from the home screen or from a separate Search screen. While there’s a tiny promo area on Amazon Mobile’s home screen, the app completely omits browsing by categories. The vast majority of shoppers probably beeline to their wanted product, but there should be an option to browse from the More menu.

The surprise feature is one Amazon is trying on for size that lets you snap a photo of a product to jog your memory later. In addition, the app will try to find the product in Amazon’s catalog. Amazon Remembers, as the feature’s called, was a little slow when we tried it out, but found our products in the end.

This visual shopping assistant is a great feature that replicates many others we’ve seen for iPhone and Google Android. SnapTell for iPhone (free) is also more flexible, pulling in data and price comparisons from IMDb, Barnes and Noble, and Wikipedia, along with Amazon.com.

However, Amazon Mobile’s advantage to registered members is its simplified purchasing that honors 1-Click buying and Amazon Prime, and its memory for items you’ve flagged in your wish list, shopping cart, and now, photo bank.

The Cloud OS features a browser with an integrated, OS X-like dock and a Linux kernel that boots “in seconds,” according to the company. The browser looks oddly similar to Google’s Chrome, though no official connection between Google and gOS exists. Within the browser window resides a dock that provides quick access to a number of apps–Skype, YouTube, Google’s Docs, etc.–that you can fire up without running Windows. From the dock, you can also boot to Windows.

Unlike the gOS, the Cloud OS isn’t meant to replace Windows but live alongside it, similar to what Asus offers on some of its laptops and Lenovo on its IdeaPad S10 Netbook with the SplashTop app. Good OS states that Cloud “does not require additional hardware and is compatible with any operating system.”

Good OS demonstrated its Cloud OS on a gigabyte touch-screen Netbook at the World Summit in Paris. The company says that such touch-screen Netbooks running the Cloud OS and Windows will be released at CES next month.

Personal Budget Droid is a simple budget- and bills-tracker that lets you create multiple monthly budgets for groceries, housing costs, and so on. You enter every budget name and transaction by hand, but the app keeps a transaction history and calculates how much you have left for each category.

The more sophisticated FireWallet works with budgets inside various accounts and protects your information behind a four-digit pin you change from the all-zero default. It’s a bit trickier to navigate, but also shoehorns in more options. In addition to a more refined interface, FireWallet has graphs and charts to help visualize your spending, and a rudimentary tool to alert you of upcoming bills. Both it and Personal Budget Droid are missing templates and more powerful features to optionally suck in real-time data from your checking, savings, and stock portfolios. Time for a mobile version of Mint?

Flick to either side for a calc that rounds up; up or down gets you a breakdown of numbers to pass around.

(Credit: TouchTip)

TouchTip is our current favorite tip calculator for Google Android. Flick a finger left or right to slide between a simple tip calculator that rounds up to the nearest dollar or ten dollars, and one featuring a ten-digit keypad. Both views use the bill total, tax, and number of diners to calculate your total payment. Flicking up or down produces a breakdown of what you owe that you can pass around the table to friends.

Personal Tip Jar hails from the same developer as Personal Budget Droid, and shares a few visual characteristics, including a useless “news” tab. Yet Tip Jar is a great niche nod to those whose incomes are built substantially on tips. While a fuller budgeting app could easily accommodate gains from tipping, this application provides a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly summary at a glance.

Stock apps on Android are extremely mediocre, but the simply named Stock App is better than other skeletal tickers. This one opens with Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500, Yahoo, and Google presets. You can add your own by pressing the menu key, and can browse frequently traded stocks. Stock App displays the value and percentage change up front; double-tap an entry to see more stats. While it’s functional, Android is sorely missing the completeness of a stock-tracker like Bloomberg for iPhone. Get to it, developers.

There’s yet another new blogging platform out there: Kontain. It’s designed for non-technical users, and it’s easy to use and very good-looking. I don’t think I’ve seen an easier platform for beginning bloggers, in fact. Everything on the site is clear and simple. But there’s a downside.

The negative of Kontain is that while it’s easy to use, it’s very limited on the presentation side. You get no blog templates to choose from. While the default layout of Kontain blogs is attractive enough, the lack of customizability is surprising in a product that is so strong on the authoring side. Also, the blog pages display slowly.

Creating a Kontain blog is simple. Adding media to blog posts is simple. Even viewing and organizing the media files you’ve uploaded to previous posts is simple–something that’s not true in almost all other blog platforms.

It’s the little things that make Kontain a delight. From the start, it gets out of your way. While it requires a valid e-mail address from new authors, you can start posting right away, since you have 15 days to confirm registration. If you’re writing a post and want to share it with friends, you can enter in their e-mail addresses from the posting screen.

Quite possibly the simplest blogging interface ever.

All entry fields are nice and big. I would not feel uncomfortable recommending Kontain to people with poor eyesight, or those simply afraid of technology or the blogosphere. It’s really that easy.

You can’t choose your display template or even colors.

However, pretty and simple is not enough, unless you’re Apple and have an Apple-like advertising budget. There are other super-simple, quick-to-use blog platforms, like Tumblr. And there are certainly services that already have the community angle dialed in (like Vox). And for anyone halfway serious about blogging, there’s nothing wrong with expending a few brain cycles to learn how to use free mainstream services like Blogger or WordPress.com.

There are ambitious plans for Kontain, including social features (friend following, for example), privacy options, Web-based audio, image, and video editors, SEO options, and reader analytics. I don’t know if Kontain will still be as simple when it gets these features. I also don’t think there is a big untapped market for new bloggers, since it’s a safe bet that most everyone who wants to blog now is already doing so. Kontain isn’t a bad platform for teaching about blogging, but I don’t see it supplanting any current platforms.