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New Media News Every Morning

Disqus 3 Coming Next Week

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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.

Originally posted on August 19, 2009 @ 8:18 pm

Review: Contextual Partnership Plugin

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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;

    Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers. [Read more…]

Originally posted on August 7, 2009 @ 5:38 am

Blogger nears it’s tenth birthday

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As Blogger nears it’s tenth birthday the Blogger team has published some interesting data:

  • Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
  • Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
  • Almost two thirds of Blogger’s traffic comes from outside North America (What’s the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
  • The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that’s football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball

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.

blogger-chart

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.

Originally posted on June 19, 2009 @ 12:07 pm