901am

5 Twitter Etiquettes You Should Care About

For businesses that maintain twitter presence, there is an unspoken list of etiquettes that one must adhere to. These etiquettes arise out of a need to acknowledge your target audience and give respect to all those who interact with you using the medium of twitter. Some of these etiquettes are pretty simple and do not consume much time. Let us discuss these over the following points:

1. Acknowledge those followers who send a message to you. While there may be automated bots that could have been used to follow your account, there is a chance that many genuine followers will use a manual effort to follow your tweets. And these visitors and followers need to be acknowledged to offer them the respect they deserve.

2. If you run a business, then your twitter language must adhere to professional levels of excellence. You must try to avoid language that is mostly abbreviated.  The language being used must be clear, concise and crisp.  [Read more…]

9rules sells up to Splashpress Media

In a post titled 9rules welcomes its new overlords, Paul Scrivens has announced that the network has been sold to Splashpress Media (owner of 901am):

Over the past couple of months the Triad has been considering what to do with 9rules. If you have followed us over the years you know that we have no problems making big changes to our site and community with the chance of making it better. However, we came to the point where the ideas stopped flowing and we were stuck.

…we have decided to reach out to a company that knows a thing or two about blogs and could bring in a fresh new team of talent to take 9rules even further. Enter Splashpress Media. Why Splashpress? Because not only do they have the people that have a passion for publishing online content, but they also have the resources to make things happen without being too large as to forget the core of what makes 9rules special, the community.

[Read more…]

Boing Boing launches gaming blog Offworld

Boing Boing announced the launch of Offworld, a new gaming blog edited by Brandon Boyer with regular contributions from all of the ‘Boingers.’ Offworld aims to distill the fractured, esoteric world of gaming forums, academia, communities, websites and blogs, into an easily digestible feed of the most important and interesting developments in the gaming world.

Offworld covers everything from major mainstream gaming titles to the world of small, independent game developers. Keenly aware that most gamers don’t have the time to troll through all the scattered news sources and sample all of the new games, Offworld contributors will do all the heavy lifting for their readers and profile only the clever, innovative, interesting and fun games that get released.

AOL launches Autoblog.com in UK, France and Germany

AOL announced the international expansion of Autoblog.com to France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Part of the Weblogs network, Autoblog.com and attracts 2.2 million monthly unique visitors worldwide.

Autoblog delivers cutting-edge news, commentary, rumors and images to a global audience of motoring enthusiasts. The site offers live, in-person coverage of every major auto show in the world, while always giving readers the opportunity to engage with the writers and contribute to Autoblog’s pages. By partnering with AOL Autos, Autoblog is a jumping-off point for in-market auto buyers who can combine a virtual window shopping experience at Autoblog with the comprehensive buying information at AOL Autos.

Each international site has a local editorial team that creates specialized content as well as syndicates content from the U.S. and the other Autoblog sites. In addition, standard and customized local advertising packages are available.

BlogHer goes straight to bloggers with Reach Out Tour

BlogHer announced the launch of its Reach Out Tour to take place in October 2008, stopping in six U.S. cities for lively one-day conferences that will bring highlights of its popular sold-out annual conference to a more local stage. The success of the annual conferences prompted BlogHer to embark on a two-week tour to meet the growing demands of its online community of women, and give local bloggers a more intimate environment to discuss blogging basics, lead sessions on local themes and network with their community.

The three BlogHer co-founders will kick off the tour in Boston on October 11 and then continue on to five additional cities. The tour schedule includes: Washington, DC (October 13), Nashville, TN (October 16), Greensboro, NC (October 18), Atlanta, GA (October 21), New Orleans, LA (October 25)

General Motors will be sponsoring this inaugural event by providing attendees within 200 miles of each scheduled city with Saturn hybrid vehicles for carpools to the event. Participating carpoolers will blog about their experiences with the vehicles on BlogHer.com. In addition, GM will bring back their popular “ride and drive” events at each tour location, where bloggers will have the opportunity to test drive varying cars on site.

The conference agendas will be broken up into three distinct sections including: blogging basics to help newcomers start a blog and figure out what their next steps are once they have one; custom topics per city based on themes that will resonate within existing local conversations; and a Geek Lab, facilitated by Sarah Dopp, a creative professional in the tech industry based out of San Francisco.