While this might not seem like anything spectacular (after all YouTube is 20 time larger with 2 GB), Tumblr fans will be able to broadcast their videos immediately without dealing with the hassles of transcoding.

(Tumblr Staff) Over the next few hours, we’ll be rolling out crazy simple native video uploading to all accounts. This is designed to be an easy alternative to full-blown video sites when all you want to do is post a quick video to your blog. [...]

Tumblr will immediately post most H.264-MP4-AAC videos without transcoding! That means no waiting and no quality loss. Photo Booth videos and iMovie’s “Export to iPod/iPhone” work great.

Tumblr still limits users to the “5 minuet rule” when it comes to video uploading, although hopefully that will change once they unleash the rumored premium features.

Despite its simplistic approach to blogging, Tumblr is quickly turning into a full fledged blogging platform, whose previous additions of pages and comments could make it a strong contender against both Blogger and WordPress (especially for bloggers looking to save some money during this recession).

• GeoType allows you to associate GoogleMap data with an entry. Each map extends the MT Asset framework, so it’s managed similar to uploaded images or documents, and associated to an entry in the exact same way.
• PostOffice enables blog posting via email. You may have been following along in MTOS earlier this week about this one, Brad Choate made a lot of handy fixes.
• CentralAuthenticationService allows you to configure MT to delegate user authentication to a CAS server in place of the built-in native authentication scheme.
• BuildTracer benchmarks statically-published templates and provides a visual display of how long it takes each tag to publish. It’s originally by Akira and available on his site, but we’ve been updating it in Github to match the latest builds of MT.

Other plugins released this past week:

Taku Amano released CustomFieldsSearch which, as you can guess, let’s you search against your custom fields data.

ExpandCategoryAreaCSS from Yujiro Araki makes the category list on entry editing expandable so it’s easier to use.

RandomFeed by Junnama Noda displays a random feed from a set you specify in your dashboard.

We’ve also got a couple of tutorials to tell you about. Mike shows us how to create print-friendly entries using the Readability service.

Also, Maarten Schenk explains how to list entries from multiple Movable Type blogs sorted by date. What Maarten is doing here goes beyond what the built-in multi-blog functionality can do.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

If I received a guest post from an unknown player in my niche, I would delete it almost as if it were spam.

My energy is better spent focusing on long-term relationship strategies as opposed to a few links.

As Barry Deutsch mentions in his comment, the yield of cold calls is very low and often it’s a bigger waste of time on our end, because of the poor quality submitted, than for the application/submitter. This brings me back to the daily emails of writers interested in a paid blogging gig that land in my inbox. Let’s start the week with a selection of how not to ‘cold call’ apply for a blogging gigs. The best of 8 months of email applications and yes it’s a list. It’s also Monday.

Words fail me. Maybe it would be a good start NOT TO SHOUT AT ME WHEN TRYING TO LAND A BLOGGING GIG!!!!!1!!!1

How to get started, how to land a blogging gig via an open application? That’s the question. Maybe it would be a tip to at least submit a link to your to your website, call me old-fashioned but it makes things easier for me.

Now we have the issue of ‘that link’ sorted, let’s move on and look at the kind of sites and info you throw at us when applying. If you are going to send me to a pink blog, your mugshot welcoming me in full real screen estate size (OK, I exaggerate, I don’t have a netbook), how about first learning to use your keyboard properly. Apparently you have not discovered all keys yet, how do you expect me to offer you a gig and pay you for your art, knowledge if you even haven’t discovered the [Shift] key yet? Let me help you, you can find it at both left and right side of most keyboards and you have to push it at the same time as you hit the key of the letter you want to capitalise. It looks like this.

Somehow your email still managed to tickle my curiosity. 8000 Readers, even on a blogspot blog, I should be dumb not to check out your site, right? I wished I never did, it would have saved you a listing in this entry. Do you really think that with 17 Blogspot followers your 8000+ readers are believable or did you want to tell me that your almost 300 entries have received more than 8000 views in total, over almost 3 years? You go, girl! NEXT!

Dearest Ashu,

Thank you for getting in touch and making me feel important. I could indeed do with a virutal assistent but you see… the issue is that I am not the best author. Just liek you I liek mudkips I am foreign and Engliss izn’t me first language. Nevertheless I have discovered that my prefered internet browzer the habit has of decorating my entries and emails with red dotted liens. It’s a spell cheque aid.
I hope that my virutual assistend lesz tipos makez than I do. Thank you for yer tiem.

This email went on for another 3000px but even before the ‘Skills’ listing started I had already fallen asleep. Suffice to say that this is the internet and there is no need to provide me with your full address details, your objectives, complete resumé and I don’t know what else you all planned including. Be short, concise and link me to your content. Don’t make me fall asleep. If you can, capture my interest in Twitter alike style, 140 characters make you a better writer.

Dude, wouldn’t that be lovely?!?! You just said everything I dream of and I will gladly send you an apple and an onion, I assume you meant onion and not opion, right? Sadly I do not think TSA and Customs will agree if I Fed-Ex you an apple, let alone an onion.

Who Did Make It?

According to Gmail I received more than 1100 cold call applications in almost 6 months. Six (6!) applications I shared with my editor colleagues, one person was hired and will soon start here on BloggingPro. And the winner is…

This application email is perfect: short, call me old but I do appreciate the necessary ‘email niceties’ and also included is a list of sites I can find entries written by Jennifer. If one, I would have loved to see 3-5 links to reference content but within five minutes after I replied to Jennifer, I received a good selection of links to published content: reference guest entries published on influential sites within requested niche, all without using (too) formal language. Jennifer will soon publish her first entry for BloggingPro.

That’s it, folks. That’s how to land, or not to land, a paid blogging gig and write for 16k subscribers. If you don’t know how to contact site editors and site owners to at least tickle our interest with your ‘cover email’, you don’t have what it takes to be a successful blogger.

You have 30 20 seconds to impress me with your initial email.

In this post, I’ll share my favorite method of guest posting that’s given me a lot of link building success. I call it the “Cold Call Guest Post Method”.

It’s probably not the best name since cold calling has bad connotations. But the method has worked very well for me and the bloggers I targeted have been very happy with my guest posts.

Guest Posting Made Simple

Basically, you find a blog with good stats. Next, read their last couple of posts to get an overview of their type of writing and their audience.

Then, send the blogger a guest post that fits their blog and their audience. If they use images, find good images. If they write in a scholarly formal tone, use the same tone. Of course, do not stray from the blog’s topic.

That’s all there is to it. You don’t have to make guest posting complicated to be successful.

Some people advise on building a relationship first before sending a guest post. This advice is great because networking does yield many benefits. But if you just want to build many quality links as quickly as possible, I would skip the networking stage and just send them your guest post.

I call it the cold call method because you’ll be targeting total strangers. This tactic may not seem like it would work, but bloggers love free content as long as it’s well-written and relevant to their blog.

Again, the key is relevance. Obviously, you want to write a high quality post. But you’ll really catch the blogger’s attention if your post fits their blog and is valuable to their audience. One way to do this is to include relevant links in your guest post to old posts on their blog.

A great example of this is on Copyblogger. If you look at the guest posts there, you’ll see that they link back to old Copyblogger posts.

Rejection Just Means a New Opportunity

What happens if you get rejected or don’t receive a response? Well, I’m glad you asked.

It defintely doesn’t mean you wasted your time. You have a great post you can publish on your blog. Or you can find another similar blog and send it to them.

Over to You

Have you ever sent a guest post to a total stranger? If you have, how did it work out for you?

Similar to how other micro blogging apps like Echofon and SimplyTweet function, Buzzie will send a user an alert whenever they receive a new comment or “buzz” (the latter which I do not recommend if one has over a hundred followers).

While this addition makes the app much more useful than the Google Buzz web app, Buzzie is still lacking in image support, a feature its rival Buzzr has (thanks in part to TwitPic).

Hopefully Buzzie continues to launch new features for this app, as it has the potential of helping bloggers on Google Buzz reach a different type of audience than other types of micro blogging platforms (like Twitter and Tumblr).

(Blogger Buzz) We’re thrilled to announce that the Blogger Template Designer has launched toBlogger in Draft, our experimental playground where users can try out Blogger’s latest features. The Template Designer brings a new level of customization to your blog. [...]

We worked with iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace, to put together a great collection of beautiful images and patterns to use as backgrounds on your blogs. The photos are stunning, and are free to use on your Blogger blog.

Google is also teaming up with the Blogger theme designers in order to have their creations featured within the new theme store, which should help make BlogSpot blogs slightly more attractive (as not everyone is gifted in web design).

But what is really impressive is the fact that Google is introducing advanced customization tools that enable blogspot fans to easily change the layout of their blogs without touching one line of code.

Previously if users wanted to create a blog with multiple columns, they had to dig deep into the HTML and CSS of their site in order to manually adjust the appearance.

Now lovers of Blogger can (with one click) select whether they want to their blog to have two, three or even four columns (or even none at all) which will help save blogspot fans time and frustration with layout design.

In order to access these features, blogspot fans will have to visit Blogger’s eternal beta site at draft.blogger.com, although if you are still using Internet Explorer 6, these features will not work properly (as Google is no longer supporting that dead browser, and neither should you).

Google is promising to release more features for Blogger, which should help them maintain their lead as the world’s most popular blogging platform.

Little did I know that I was about to discover a book I was going to recommend to people and even would become my new reference book for a certain group of WordPress users.

As soon as I had opened my review copy it was clear that this book promised to be a great book, covering most different elements of WordPress in a simple but in depth way.

Who Is The Book For?

As one would expect the book deals with all different elements of WordPress, walking you both through the different versions, wordpress.com and wordpress.org in a simple and very understandable way.
The book is divided into four parts. The first three parts walk you through using WordPress and are valid for both wordpress.com as the self-hosted software version. In the fourth part the reader is not only guided through the different parts of WordPress Extend but the authors also have a closer, and in depth, look at the structure of themes.

As can be seen from the index table at the right it takes 70 pages before you are told how to create your first post but by then you’ll already have received an extensive insight in both the WordPress interface and several configuration options for your blog, the things you would expect from your average ‘Technical Blog Consultant’ who will charge anywhere between $25 and $100 to setup your blog and configure some widgets.

WordPress In Depth is clearly aimed at the beginner all while including little gems such as the Linking Strategy part on page 94-95.

Part 4: WordPress In Depth, The Truly In Depth Part

The fourth part of the book, which is aimed exclusively at self-hosted use of WordPress, is the real discovery and main reason to purchase this book. Where up to now the reader has been guided through every element of the WordPress software, from adding widgets to using the WordPress editor and often forgotten elements by users such as adding music files to your entries, Part 4 is the ultimate guide to themes and plugins for the beginner.

In this part you will not only learn how to tweak a theme but the insight offered by Bud Smith and Michael McCalister is enough to start building your own basic WordPress theme. This is also where you learn how to setup WordPress locally (Windows only), how to FTP and get a quick introduction to PHP and WordPress plugins.

What Not To Expect From ‘WordPress In Depth’

If your WordPress knowledge has reached beyond ‘understanding and knowing how to use WP’ and you regularly use WordPress Tutorials or are a big fan of sites such as WPEngineer and WPRecipes this book is not for you but will merely serve you as a reminder of all the features in WordPress. Still, if you have an extensive WP book library and regularly lend out your books, you should purchase it as the ‘ultimate WordPress guide for beginners’.

Should You ‘Buy WordPress In Depth’?

In the same category as WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin E. Wilson, WordPress In Depth is the perfect guide for the WP beginner and at $21.59 at Amazon (RRP $29.99, $14.09 for the Kindle version) will save you many hours of Googling or browsing through the WordPress.tv library to find the solution or guide for your question. If you considered hiring a WordPress consultant in the range of $25 -$100 (or more even) to install and configure your WordPress blog, you should buy this book instead and save your money.
WordPress In Depth is a must in any WordPress library and if you are new to the world of WP this excellent guide, which gets a solid 8.5/10 from me, should be top of your shopping list. Buyers of the book also get access to a free online edition of the book.

‘WordPress In Depth’ Book Giveaway

BloggingPro thanks QUE and the Pearson Group for offering three copies of the book to our readers.

To participate to the giveaway and win one of three WordPress In Depth books by Bud Smith and Michael McCallister, follow follow BloggingPro on Twitter (we will check) and leave a comment with your Twitter ID below or tweet about the BloggingPro giveaway.

This competition will be close on March 13th 2010 at 23:59PST.

However, like its Friendfeed predecessor, Google Buzz is slowly becoming a hit amongst many in the tech blogosphere, and I’m beginning to see even art bloggers embrace Google Buzz (as they can easily display their albums to the delight of their fans).

For those of you who are more interested in using Google Buzz as a micro blogging service, here are 3 iPhone apps you may want to check out.

Buzzie

Launched with much fan fare throughout the blogosphere, Buzzie is thus far the most elegant Google Buzz app upon the app store, which basically allows you to post status updates, search for new friends and find nearby buzzers on a Google Map (note: be careful who you contact though!).

You can even download images that you see from within your buzz stream, although there is currently no way to upload any pictures to your stream from the app itself (note: this is unfortunately due to Google’s limitation of the API, which they are promising to resolve in the near future).

Buzzie is currently selling in the app store for about $2, although the price will go up once Buzzie 2.0 hits (which will hopefully have image and video support).

Buzzr

Created by I See U, Buzzr is at its very essence the mobile web app of Google Buzz with one extra feature: image uploading.

Buzzr gets around Google’s lack of “developer foresight” by utilizing Twitpic, a popular third party image service for Twitter.

Unfortunately there is no way they can associate your image with your Buzz account (so all images uploaded are public), although hopefully they will give users other image uploading options in the future (perhaps via Picasa or Flickr?) as Twitpic can be very slow sometimes (especially during lunch).

Buzzr is currently selling for about $1 in the app store (which is perfect for a blogger short on cash).

Ultimate Notifier

While technically a push notification app, Ultimate Notifier is one of the first push services that officially supports Google Buzz (which is helpful if you are gaining a following with the service).

Priced at around $2, Ultimate Notifier may help satisfy your buzzing urge, although if you have purchased another push notification service (like Boxcar) you can simply type in your buzz feed address in order to receive notifications.

Any others?

These are the only 2 Google Buzzing apps (3 if you include Ultimate Notifier) that survived Steve Jobs app approval process, although developers are busy creating more apps for the iPhone (and hopefully other smartphones as well).

The issue is obviously an important one, especially for many bloggers who make a living from their content, but at the same time it is a total and utter waste of time and takes away from what self-employed online authors should be doing, write valuable content. Some content producers even go as far as calling adblock users ‘thief’.
The issue of adblockers, and ‘lost revenue’ is rather simple to break down and although I entirely support sites relying on ads revenue, all I can say about this is to Get over it.

Before you get upset now, let me honestly tell you that my blogging revenues depend mainly on ad revenue, but I also use ClickToFlash to improve my web experience and thus regularly block ads. Feel free to call me a thief, if I steal I also steal revenue of myself.

Decisive About Adblock Usage Statistics Is The Niche You Are In

The main decisive factor about the popularity of adblockers on your site is the niche you are in. When your content is tech focused, whether about new gadgets or about blogging (platforms), you probably will have more readers using Firefox and other standard compliant browsers, and also adblockers. Chances are high that you have also used an adblocker, during your many years online, or use a plugin such as ClickToFlash to at least limit the annoyances of Flash.
Tech minded users, surfers are the most active and often most prolific ones. They read sites such as Lifehacker and usually stay up-to-date about what the fastest browser is and how they can tweak their browser and internet connection, or network settings, to enjoy the fastest browsing experience.

But at the same time they also are the most prolific readers and often the most active participants to many a site. They use several social media accounts and chances that they still use locally stored bookmarks are very small. They will tweet, submit your great content to Delicious, Stumble and/or Digg your content. Or comment on your entries.

If your content revolves around philately or you run a popular ‘mommy blog’, chances are that you have a higher percentage of Internet Explorer users and less Firefox/Google Chrome/Safari or mobile users even among your readership. Most of your visitors might never have heard about adblocking technology.

They are the ‘influential’ users you need to get buzzed and go viral with your entries

Although I do not have any statistics about the more active and prolific participation of more tech savvy, and ‘addicted’, users in social media we all know that this is true. Being often online for more than 12 hours ourselves, just think about what your own online habits are. When was the last time you saved a bookmark locally but how many times have you (re)tweeted a good post you read instead? Ultimately you have to think less shallow-mindedly and trust the avalanche effect.
These maybe 5%-10% of regulars, often also fastest readers/absorbers of your content, who use any adblocking technology probably represent up to 80% of the first submissions and early votes on the social sites. They are the ‘influential’ users you need to get buzzed and go viral with your entries. To help your content reach the masses, masses who do NOT use any adblocking technology and thus actively generate you revenue. Once you have that base of tweets, stumbles and diggs your valuable content is more likely to be shared on Facebook, linked in local communities/forums and on smaller, less known blogs. Read by people who aren’t tech savvy and don’t know what an adblocker is. People who actively generate you money. People who will click your affiliate links without even knowing it’s an affiliate. People from whom you don’t have to hide/cloak affiliate links.

What Should You Focus On Then?

If you have to lose time trying out the best method to block these extensions, you’re doing it wrong. Instead you could try out alternative ad models, do some A-B testing about the location and popularity of your ads, but most of all you should return to your post editor and/or notebook and start focusing on your content again. If your content is great, the biggest content ’spunges’ will also promote your content. Remember that these are probably the same ones who read your content from their feed reader, a rather ad-free environment and if you have ads in your feed, these have the worst conversion rate of all anyway.

Why did they come to your site? Maybe because they wanted to comment on your content, participate to your community, but instead you just annoyed them, hijacked their browser experience. Remember that one annoyed customer will share his/her experience with everyone who wants to hear about but you need more than five satisfied customers to tell their friends about you.

Lesson learned: get over it and move on. We had the exactly same discussion in 2005 with feeds already, today most of us have more feed subscribers than daily page views.

We’ve also got a couple of new plugins this week. SKYARC System Co., Ltd,. created BasicAuthAutoCompleteLogin, which allows you to use your MT credentials on pages protected with basic HTTP auth.

Konjak from ELASTIC Consultants Inc does translation of your blog posts using either Google or Bing translation services.

For those of you running multiple blogs on MT, you can use QuickRebuild from Taku Amano to republish all your blogs at once.

One of the most powerful features of MT is the ability to publish your entries any way you want. Gercek Karakus needed an XML feed for Flash, so he created this template.

Finally, Maarten Schenk has a few tips and tutorials for us this week:

• Loading any Object (Entry, Page…) Based on a Custom Field Value — This will be useful if you’re writing MT plugins. Maarten shows how to use the search_by_meta method to do lookups based on custom fields.
• Looping over a List of Numbered Custom Fields in Movable Type — This post explains how to loop through your custom fields in a particular order.
• Optimizing Movable Type’s Standard Templates for Speed (part 2) — Maarten brings us more tips for optimizing our templates. This time, he talks about using caching to keep all parts of your site up-to-date while minimizing publishing time.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.