Despite the uncertainty of the economy and the convenience of microblogging, blogging is hot again, baby — and during a gold rush, it’s the shovel salesmen who make the most money. The Joy of Tech shares the real secret to monetizing your blog. Time to polish those event management skills.
A recently launched iPhone application called Say What? allows integrated searching of Twitter, Digg, plus thousands of forums and blogs, from one interface.
iCrossing’s application has actually been freely available for about a month now, but I’ve only just discovered it.
While I personally don’t search in Digg much, the ability to search across both a significant section of the web (blogs and forums) as well as Twitter sounds appealing.
The 9rules blog network just opened its doors for a new round of submissions. If you think your blog’s got what it takes to join their network, submit your blog here. Hurry: submissions close at 11:59 PM EST. More →
Intense Debate may have been acquired by Automattic (the people behind WordPress), but Disqus remains the blogosphere’s favorite comment networking service. Not content to rest on their laurels, they’re rolling out a slew of new features with Disqus 3 next week.
Now all I need is a white label version of Disqus, and I just might use it on my blogs.
The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…
If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.
According to the developers the plugin is designed to;
Blogs are hot again, baby. Right after Web browser inventor Marc Andreessen announces a $300 million venture capital fund for tech startups, he personally raises a $500,000 to $1,000,000 round for the profitable political blog Talking Points Memo. More →
As Blogger nears it’s tenth birthday the Blogger team has published some interesting data:
While the team at Techcrunch a comparison with other blog platforms and Twitter published (see graphic below), the real question to ask here is in how far Facebook a blogging platform has become for many people.
Like many people I started blogging on Blogger and moved then to a self-hosted WordPress setup but would not set up a personal blog anymore in 2009. Facebook and Twitter certainly have filled in the need for a personal blog for me. Like Paul Boutin says:
Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.
There is no doubt that Google made a great decision purchasing Blogger, especially considered the amount of Adsense ads the Blogger platform runs, but the biggest question is if blogs will continue to grow perpetuously or if there will be a new shift towards bigger CMS platforms now new media companies such as B5Media Inc. are integrating forums as well on their main blogs.
What is a blog? The line is blurred and we have seen many sites evolve from ‘blog’ to multi-authored magazines. I, for one, am looking forward to read the next State of the Blogosphere at Technorati. You can read the 2008 State of the Blogosphere here.
A new blog from Hooked on Phonics focuses on the needs of families helping their children become confident readers.
“We’re members of a huge community preparing children for kindergarten with basic reading skills and nurturing that love of reading until they master it,” said Judy L. Harris, CEO of Smarterville, maker of Hooked on Phonics. “Our blog is a platform for teachers, reading specialists, physicians, children’s book authors and literacy advocates to share resources and expertise with parents, caregivers and educators who are helping children become confident readers.”
The blog will also feature a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Hooked of Phonics new learning program as told by the team of authors, illustrators, educators, animators and musicians involved in the year-long, multi-million dollar overhaul (due out in August 2009).
A pending application to the New York Supreme Court seeks to force Google to divulge the identity of an anonymous blogger because of a few comments made on the Internet on one single day.
A hearing on the motion to reveal the anonymous blogger’s identity is scheduled for tomorrow. The petitioner, fashion model Liskula Cohen, alleges that references to her as a “skank” and “ho” on the website “Skanks in NYC” constitutes actionable libel under New York law and on that ground seeks to unmask the anonymous blogger.
“Despite its seemingly petty underpinnings, this case carries serious implications,” says Debra J. Guzov, co-founder of Guzov Ofsink, LLC, which is defending the anonymous blogger. “We strongly believe that if the plaintiff were to succeed in her efforts, it would move toward the erosion of our basic constitutional right to anonymous free speech.”
“Ideas are exchanged freely on the Internet in large part because participants can speak using assumed names or no name at all,” Guzov added.
How about you? What is your take on this arguments?
Twitter is lauded as today’s microblogging and lifestreaming application of choice for top bloggers and new media users. Some users also use Twitter to share links to articles or blog posts of interest. The linkage usually goes one way only, though, with the tweet linking to the blog post. However, with two “tweetback” plugins launched recently, this would no longer be the case.
Dan Zarella and Joost de Valk have both released their respective plugins, both of which are called Tweetback. The concept is simple. It works much like a trackback or a pingback, in which excerpts from a tweet (or its entirety) will be echoed as a comment on the original blog that is being linked.
They work kind of like trackbacks, but instead of listing blogs linking to a specific post, it lists Tweets about a specific post. You can see it in action on my blog, just above the comments. It currently finds mentions of the URL through the top 5 most popular URL shorteners on Twitter: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Twurl, and SnipURL. I used cli.gs’s list of top shorteners to prioritize. To prevent it from running afoul of Twitter’s search API rate limits it functions via javascript.
People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
While both plugins have the same goal, they don’t necessarily do things the same way, and so it’s up to the user to determine which is best to implement on their sites.
Jonathan Bailey, who rights on intellectual property on the Blog Herald, has recently lauded these efforts but raised concerns about the copyright implications of Tweetbacks. For one, the question of whether tweets are copyrightable at all is raised. But then the main issue in this case is whether a Twitter user would find it to his advantage if his tweets were cited and linked from other blogs and websites.
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, as copyright is beginning to be a big issue among bloggers (incidentally, Splashpress Media and Performancing are offering copyright management services to bloggers). Twitter has its nuances, particualrly with the 140-character post limit. But if Haikus can be copyrighted–short as they are–can the same hold true for Twitter tweets?
