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GigaOm acquires TheAppleBlog

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GigaOm has acquired TheAppleBlog making it the seventh property of its growing network of blogs.

Founder Josh Pigford will continue to head TheAppleBlog and will join the company remotely from Denver.

“I am a big believer in Apple and its ecosystem. The company has introduced a whole slew of products — including the iPhone, iPod and Apple TV — that are spawning an economy of their own, with hundreds of add-ons (and who knows, maybe even new products) coming to market,” Om Malik said in explaining the acquisition.

Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Originally posted on September 15, 2008 @ 4:45 pm

BlogHer goes straight to bloggers with Reach Out Tour

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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.

Originally posted on August 26, 2008 @ 9:16 am

Instablogs launches Club for bloggers

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Instablogs is opening its blog network membership by launching the Instablogs Club. By opening its network, external blogs can now apply to become members of Instablogs Club and enjoy the benefits that its blog network members have been enjoying.

“We decided to open our network to external bloggers so that they can also enjoy some of our network benefits, including but not limited to traffic, ad sales, technology, and networking with our great members,” Ankit Maheshwari, CEO of Instablogs, said.

“The Instablogs Club consists of those who host and maintain independent blogs and would like to avail our platform and showcase their content to millions of Instablogs readers each month. Our aim is to showcase the best blogs on a variety of topics and help bloggers get more exposure,” he added.

The Club is looking for bloggers who are passionate about their blog– one that provides compelling content, consistent in his or her frequency of posting, and is willing to share their knowledge and expertise to other members of the Club.

Club members stand to benefit from Instablogs traffic, revenues, and a vibrant community of blog network members.

Launched in 2005, Instablogs Blog Network enjoys more than 2.5 million pageviews per month. The Club will work to drive traffic to each member and benefit from this attention.

The Club is currently accepting applications and will be announcing its first batch of members next month.

Originally posted on August 25, 2008 @ 7:00 am

Mediabistro.com launches three mobile media-centric blogs

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Mediabistro.com has launched three new blogs: MobileMarketingToday.com, MobileDevicesToday.com and MobileAppsToday.com. These sites follow Mediabistro.com’s January 2008 launch of MobileContentToday.com.

The three new blogs are edited by Susan Schrank (Mobile Marketing), Michael Gartenberg (Mobile Devices) and Todd Ogasawara (Mobile Apps).

Mediabistro.com also announced Mobile Content & marketing Expo, a new tradeshow – Mobile Content & Marketing Expo which will take place in San Jose, California on October 6-7, 2008.

“The launch of these three new blogs clearly makes Mediabistro.com a central source for daily news in the rapidly growing mobile sector,” stated Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Jupitermedia. “We will continue to add content and services for the mobile community over the coming months,” added Meckler.

Originally posted on August 19, 2008 @ 10:38 am

Six Apart adds social networking capabilities to blogging with MT Pro

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Six Apart announced the release of Movable Type 4.2 and the debut of Movable Type Pro (MT Pro), a product that combines Movable Type’s advanced blogging tools and content management system with social networking features. Now any website or blog owner can create a vibrant social network by letting their readers and visitors become members of their sites, with profiles and the ability to rate content and follow each other.

Movable Type Pro makes building a community possible for anyone, including publishers, individual bloggers, educational institutions, small and medium-sized businesses or large enterprises. Site owners can build community blogs, in which members create their own posts, or forums, in which members participate using the same profile and avatars used throughout the site.

The release of Movable Type 4.2 introduces major improvements to the Movable Type platform, including: enhanced performance: common tasks are up to 100 times faster than on previous versions; simplified default templates that make it easy to get up and running quickly; the best, free open source antispam product, TypePad Antispam, is built in.

Movable Type 4.2 is available under a free, open source license or as part of Movable Type Pro. Six Apart also offers Movable Type Enterprise, which adds support for Oracle and SQL Server databases and LDAP on top of Movable Type Pro features.Sizx Apart

Originally posted on August 13, 2008 @ 11:46 am