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New Media News Every Morning

Sugar Inc. launches ShopSense Program to help bloggers monetize sites

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Sugar Inc. just made blogging about a desired pair of designer heels or a favorite mascara a little bit sweeter with the introduction of ShopSense, a free affiliate program that allows participants to earn money by featuring fashion, beauty, home and
children’s products and links from ShopStyle in their blogs, websites, and other applications. Following the company’s launch of the OnSugar blogging platform and ShopStyle API last month, Sugar Inc. is the only media company to completely integrate an affiliate program directly into its blogging platform.

ShopSense offers bloggers, regardless of the platform they use, the opportunity to generate income for the traffic they send retailers when featuring ShopStyle products, links and widgets on their site. With access to ShopStyle’s catalog of more than 500,000 products from the world’s leading fashion, beauty, home and kids retailers, bloggers can create myriad posts featuring the items they desire. Bloggers with OnSugar sites can easily sign up for a ShopSense account through their Profile page and have direct access to ShopStyle images and captions without leaving OnSugar, making it simple to begin monetizing their sites. Non-OnSugar bloggers can sign up for a ShopSense account at www.shopstyle.com and immediately begin adding ShopSense-enabled products and widgets to their own sites and applications.

Originally posted on November 11, 2008 @ 4:43 pm

GrindTV launches new blog platform

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GrindTV.com, the action sports channel on Yahoo! Sports, has launched a new blog platform to promote amateur and professional journalists. GrindTV’s new blogging tool rounds out its robust user profile pages.

“This new blogging platform will encourage communication between industry, athletes and fans, and will allow us to promote the most active and knowledgeable writers to an audience of more than 20 million sports fans,” said Greg “TripleG” Morrow, CEO of GrindTV.

Select bloggers will earn “Kind Of A Big Deal” status, which will automatically elevate their posts directly to the sport homepages, and the best blogs will be featured on the GrindTV.com homepage and promoted across
Yahoo!

Originally posted on October 29, 2008 @ 9:05 pm

Mediabistro’s Mobile Apps Today features “App of the Week”

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Mediabistro announced that blogger Todd Ogasawara is now selecting an “App of the Week” which he’ll publish every Thursday in his blog MobileAppsToday.

Ogasawara, a noted mobile apps expert has attracted a significant readership since the launch of Mobile Apps Today in late August 2008. Individuals and organizations interested in submitting an App to this weekly feature should email [email protected] for consideration.

Originally posted on October 28, 2008 @ 7:40 am

Weblogs Inc. now on its third year with AOL

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AOL is celebrating the third anniversary of its acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. this month. In 2005, Weblogs had a large portfolio of niche blogs targeted at business and professional users, in addition to a general readership. Since then, Weblogs has honed its portfolio to 29 blogs focused on major consumer passion points such as technology, autos, finance, video games and travel. Since 2005, Weblogs has seen worldwide unique visitors climb nearly 1,000% (122% annually, on average) and page views rise over 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix.

In addition to Weblogs’ own growth, the acquisition was instrumental to AOL’s launch of successful sites such as TMZ, Asylum, FanHouse, BloggingStocks, and Spinner.

Over the next 12 months, AOL plans to launch of number of new blog brands in important consumer interest areas, as well as aggressively continue the expansion of its blogs internationally.

Originally posted on October 24, 2008 @ 11:26 am

Media Bloggers Association launches liability insurance and online course in media law

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The Media Bloggers Association (MBA) has launched a comprehensive program to provide bloggers access to the same sort of legal and financial resources long available to traditional media organizations including BlogInsure, a first of its kind liability insurance program for bloggers which provides coverage for all forms of defamation, invasion of privacy and copyright infringement or similar allegations arising out of blogging activities.

The cornerstone of the new program is an online course in media law developed by the Media Bloggers Association in partnership with The Poynter Institute’s News University. The course, Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers, was co-authored by David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project, which is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Citizen Media and Geanne Rosenberg of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College.

Because the MBA believes so strongly that all bloggers should take this course, it is made available at no charge and, although the course is an integral part of the new MBA membership application process, bloggers are not required to join the MBA to take the course. Payment of annual dues for MBA membership is not requested until after the course has been completed and bloggers may opt-out of the application process at any time.

After completing the exam, bloggers will be asked to take a course assessment; this exam is a prerequisite for individuals interested in joining the Media Bloggers Association so those wishing to join must opt to report their test scores to the MBA. It is also the basis for the significant discount on liability insurance available to bloggers through the BlogInsure program.

Originally posted on September 22, 2008 @ 11:54 am