‘Slightly’ spammy to say the least (click the image for full-size view). This follows a really buggy (and rather slow) copycat service.

If this is what to expect from Mesiab Labs there is no competition for Tweetmeme.

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Chad Randall, Vice President (Sales) for b5media is no longer with the company, The Inquisitr has learned and confirmed through an online source.

The circumstances behind his departure though have not been disclosed. What we do know is that at the time of writing Randall has not been replaced, and we are unable to find the position advertised online either at the b5media blog, or through an extensive Google search.

Without 100% certainty, the evidence points to Randall being put off unexpectedly. He’s removed b5media as his current job on LinkedIn, he hasn’t replaced it with a new job. He’s also disappeared online, not updating his Twitter account or blogs since he left the company; that’s more significant than it sounds because one of Randall’s blogs is dedicated to Twitter marketing, and he’s a heavy Twitter user. If he was leaving the company for another position or on happy terms, he would have likely mentioned it somewhere publicly, but instead there is silence.

The unconfirmed news follows shortly after Jeremy Wrigth’s step down as CEO and seems to be the result of cost-cutting management and the (unconfirmed) news that the blog network might be selling off its business blogs.

Although still bound to a NDA for the ‘early b5media days’, Duncan recently went as far as speculating that VCs, who have invested more than $2m in b5media, are looking to sell the blog network.

I’m still legally restrained on talking about the early days, but there’s nothing in that paperwork that says that I can’t speculate on the company today. I don’t know the new CEO at all, but I’ve done some reasonable background reading, and I can come to only one conclusion: she was parachuted in by the VC’s to prep the company for sale. Whether she’s up to the task I don’t know, but with the three year anniversary of the first funding round coming up, both investors will undoubetedly be starting to look for an exit in the next 12-24 months.

Edit: If you’re looking for awesome ‘Pop Corn material’ read this entry from January 2009, especially the comments.

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If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

The possibility to update Twitter about photos, videos and notes posted to FB clearly shows that the social network wants to ‘own it all’ and use the microblogging platform as another traffic resource.

Testing the application, which is already available, I could easily submit two pages to the same Twitter @franky account. Updates were posted to Twitter within seconds. Posted links are redirected to the original URL without FB frame. It was no problem to inject two links in a page update: the shortened link goes to the original source and the shared picture link to the Facebook page, without URL shortening though, which seems to indicate that both services have a deal in place. As can be seen in the screencap, Twitter shortened the URL to the original link via its preferred Bit.ly URL shortener, but did not shorten the link to the Facebook photo.

There has to be a small print I have not seen yet, especially because this might make Twitter more popular for page admins who spend their life on FB and do not understand what the point of Twitter is. If there is such a thing.
Last but not least… will Twitter go after its trademark and protect its brand? Will they sue FB for using the name Twitter?

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The new “friends function” brings an element of social networking to the site, allowing students to connect and send secure messages to one another, bookmark other pages and access a news feed so they know when friends pages are updated. Not new features for anyone used to blogging and other social networks by any stretch of the imagination, but good to have them added to this more secure, niche educational site.

Last year we reported that British kids were to be taught about podcasting. Teachers see the value in social networking and Scottish kids adopted blogging to aid study.

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Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

The reason why the application was rejected: other companies had previously applied for terms close to ‘tweet’ as Sam Johnston uncovered. Tweetmark, Cotweet and Tweetphoto are the applications which were annexed to the rejection.

Suddenly it seems as if the microblogging company is becoming the new online bully and the application for the term Retweet, almost 3 weeks after retweet.com was announced, is a perfect example of this. The @retweet account has been suspended since 13 August 2009, the day before Twitter filed application for the term ‘retweet’ (#77804841).

We can now continue our Tweet Herald plans without fear and I can change my name to Franky ‘MG’ Branckaute.

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Here’s Retweet.com:

Looking familiar?

And here’s TweetMeme:

They are both pretty similar, albeit not identical. On the other hand, both have ripped Digg off, so what’s the big deal, right?

Well maybe the big deal is the fact that Retweet.com isn’t trying to brand itself more uniquely. That might or might not mean something. Maybe they want us to mix them up while trying to catch up to the mighty lead that TweetMeme, the Digg of tweets, or maybe they just think this is the best way to present the service?

That race might be a short one, should Twitter get its way with the phrase “retweet”. On the other hand, the microblogging service is eying “tweet” as well so that could possibly mean that TweetMeme hangs loose as well. For some reason I think Retweet.com is more in Twitter’s headlights, but maybe that’s just me reacting to what’s been written online?

Anyway, all those trademark thoughts might not mean so much. Sam Johnston has a nice post (found via Mashable) on the matter. In short, if you follow his reasoning, the idea that “tweet” might be trademarked by Twitter isn’t likely to happen. The same should apply to “retweet”, meaning that Retweet.com might be in the clear.

Three things strike me:

• Will Retweet.com be able turn all those big heavy blogs already having implementet the TweetMeme button around to its server? There needs to be money and gains involved for that to happen, and the chance of winning $10,000 isn’t likely to do the trick with these giants.
• If Twitter should be able to trademark “retweet” and “tweet”, is Retweet.com more exposed to cease and desists than TweetMeme? I would think so. And don’t forget, the @retweet Twitter account is suspended.
• What will happen if Twitter gets serious about retweets? They are working on it, and that might mean the end of both services, although not very likely in my opinion. But think about it, a pumped up Twitter with retweet exposure, why not push that rather than TweetMeme or Retweet.com?

What do you think, does Retweet.com stand a chance at all?

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WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Great praise indeed, and true at that. Launching a site using WordPress (or any other SEO friendly platform for that matter) is a good idea if you want to rank well in the search engines. If you’re interested you might want to check out Matt Cutts’ slides from the presentation as well.

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ScanSafe’s latest analysis of over a billion web sites discovered that over three-quarters of companies now block social networking sites — up 20% in the last six months.

As well as the supposed benefit in productivity from blocking non-work sites that can sap employee time (though a blanket ban may be counter-productive and a restricted hours policy might be better for morale) there’s also the reduced risk of malware creeping into a company’s systems, as well as saved bandwidth.

“Social networking sites can expose businesses to malware and if not used for business purposes can be a drain on productivity and bandwidth,” said ScanSafe’s director of product management, Spencer Parker. “Given the option, companies are increasingly taking a sterner approach to the sites that their employees are allowed to access. I imagine before long, social networking will be up there with pornography in terms of categories blocked.”

It’s a fine balancing act. Some companies are using social networks for business purposes, but where is the line drawn?

Does a blanket ban actually sap employee productivity? Might it be better to allow the use of Facebook et al during lunchtime rather than not at all?

What do you think? Facebook at work, or not?

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Disqus is obviously one of those comment hosts that can take care of your site’s comments. A lot of sites swear by it, and we are considering switching to it here on the Blog Herald as well.

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Be sure to read the whole thing. It is pretty interesting after all.

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It looks like the boys and girls at Blogger (aka Blog*Spot) are at it again! With their 10th birthday about five days away, the Blogger team hinted that they would be rolling out some new features for Blogspot fans (one of which I can not publicly disclose here).

Blogger is rolling out PubSubHubbub to all Blogspot users, which will enable “real time publishing,” which is geek speak for instant updates to RSS feeds as soon as you hit the publish button.

(Blogger Buzz) We’re happy to announce that Blogger has rolled out support for the PubSubHubbub protocol, which turns feeds into real-time streams. What does this mean to you? As feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, your posts will surface immediately for their users. For example, Google Reader has started rolling out support for PubSubHubbub; when it’s complete, your Blogger posts will surface in Google Reader as soon as you publish them. FriendFeed, Livedoor Reader (a feed reader popular in Japan), and FavIt already support PubSubHubbub—which means that their readers are already benefiting from this new feature.

Best of all, your blog is already broadcasting updates—you don’t need to do anything to enable it.

This news should please Blogspot fans everywhere as it means as it means their audience will be able to see the latest post as soon as possible instead of every hour (or 15 minuets which was considered “speedy” not too long ago).

Although this originally started as a Google project, hopefully we will see other blog platforms adopt this, and if

Even though this originally started out as a Google project, hopefully Blogger will inspire its rivals to adopt this feature, as it could help spark another blog revolution (that is not centered around microblogging platforms like Twitter).

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The news here is that a theoretical bill had come about from the blogosphere based on the knowledge of the actual menu and wine selection from ‘Le Cirque’, which was grabbed by local journalists and deemed as the actual bill, which you can view below.

A publishers note (courtesy of MLQ) was then released by the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

TWO RECENT news stories and an editorial mistook an intellectual exercise for hard fact.

Yesterday’s editorial mistakenly attributed the alleged itemization of the Le Cirque bill incurred by President Macapagal-Arroyo and her party to the “New York Post.” In fact, the hypothetical itemization was done by columnist Manuel Quezon III in his blog on Aug. 8, and introduced as “a theoretical breakdown of how the presidential party could have racked up the bill.”

Our story on Aug. 9 reported that “The purported menu included caviar; such appetizers as lobster salad, wild burgundy escargot and soft shell crab tempura; main courses of black cod, halibut, Dover sole, saddle of lamb and prime dry-aged strip steak; and Krug champagne at $510 a bottle.” There was, in fact, no such menu, only a hypothetical list of ordered items.

Our story on Aug. 10 reported that “The restaurant tab, purported copies of which have since circulated on blogs, showed that the Arroyo delegation had five servings of wild golden osetra caviar ($1,400), 11 bottles of Krug champagne ($5,610), and 25 orders each of the Chef’s Seasonal Menu and Tasting Menu (totaling $1,450 and $4,500 respectively), along with 17 other items.” There were no such copies circulating, only links and images from Quezon’s blog.

Based on these two stories, yesterday’s editorial criticized the presidential party’s insensitive self-indulgence. We stand by that assessment, however, since the original New York Post report is a fact. It read, in part: “Macapagal-Arroyo ordered several bottles of very expensive wine, pushing the dinner tab up to $20,000.”

Providing context through the itemized bill is perhaps the biggest bait for the fish. It makes us wonder though if journalists these days are still quick to decipher authenticity in reporting the news. Perhaps this is the beauty of blogs, where the rules are less stringent and one’s actions is more forgivable.

Nonetheless, this still doesn’t save the Philippine president from controversy.

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Not necessarily. Blogging does have its costs. And these can sometimes be attributed to you, while it can sometimes be carried by someone else. Offhand, one could think of several costs that you can directly attribute to blogging. For instance, here are a few costs that I think I’ve been incurring through the years.

Software costs. WordPress is free, indeed. But the software I use on my several computers is not exactly free. At my home office, for instance, I run one laptop with Vista, which I bought at about $130. Two other laptops one came bundled with Windows XP Home, and let’s say the imputed cost was at about $40 each. My Mac Mini came with OS X Tiger, and at that time, the imputed cost was, I think about $130. That’s a total of $340. I’ve also paid for some other software over the years, but those are not directly related with blogging use. If a computer had a serviceable lifetime of two years, that’s about $14.67 per month for me.

Equipment Costs. I didn’t buy my computers all at the same time, but for discussion’s sake, let’s say every one was bought at the same time. That’s about $2,400 in all (two low to mid-range laptops, one netbook and one Mac Mini), from which I’ve already taken out the software costs. So for my serviceable lifetime of two years, that’s $100 per month.

Hosting Costs. I host my personal sites using mid-range accounts that give me sufficient bandwidth, disc space and allocation for unlimited domains. I pay a monthly subscription of about $20 for these.

Utility Costs. I run my office from home, so I subscribe to residential DSL. And I would say part of my electricity bills would also cover for my home office use. These amount to $60 per month, including the fraction I consider part of my electricity use.

Travel Costs. When you work as a blogger or writer, you don’t actually have to spend money on gas or train tickets to commute to work every day. But one is sometimes invited to attend events, press briefings, movie screenings, and the like. And you get to spend for transportation, food and even coffee, including occasional visits to a WiFi-enabled cafe near my kids’ school. I guess it’s safe to say I give myself an allowance of about $25 per week, or $100 per month.

Yes, I live in a country where cost of living is cheap.

Opportunity Costs. Now this is one aspect of costing that’s a bit more difficult to compute for. Opportunity cost basically refers to the money you could potentially earn or gain if you were doing something else. For instance, instead of earning $2,000 a month from ads on your blog, you could be earning $6,000 per month working as a designer or a developer at a local company. So the opportunity cost here is $6,000 less $2,000, which amounts to $4,000.

In my case, my previous jobs (including corporate and government work) earned me substantially less than what my online undertakings are earning me, and so I don’t think I have lost opportunities. That’s unless I count non-monetary benefits, like free meals during meetings, free coffee, free health insurance, and the like. I could also perhaps count the free use of office equipment, bandwidth, free vacation trips, and others.

I guess computing for your monthly blogging or other Internet-related expenses could help you determine how much net you are earning, particularly if you’re running an online business like blogging, design, consultancy, and the like.

Costing can even be more difficult if one considers those expenses borne by third parties. For instance, your blog network or your boss could be subsidizing your hosting expenses. Your blog software could be subsidizing their “free” offering with advertisements or sponsorships.

In all, my monthly blogging activities would cost me about $294.67 per month.

I don’t usually feel it’s this big, though since the regular cost I really get to attend to are the utilities and the hosting fees. That’s unless I pay for computer and software purchases on installment basis, which I don’t usually do.

May I ask you, using my methodology, how much are you spending per month? And do you have a better way of computing for costs?

Image credit: flickr/ginnerobot

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…all twittering really delivers is the ultimate in mini-munchie banality. Instead of real emotion, in-depth opinion, considered arguments about why the NHS works, or the many reasons for not eating veal, what we get is breathless trivia. It certainly says bugger-all about what really happens at home with the Browns – which is why, presumably, Sarah, a former PR, loves it.

Twitter works for the middle class, the middle-aged and for work-weary wannabe trendies because it lets them feel they’re part of a big happening club, when in fact all they are doing is exchanging mindlessness.

Known for her ‘high class’ style, regular reality show participant and former ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Here’ contestant, Street-Porter claimed that Twitter was useless both as an influential news platform and as informative platform to help base decisions on.

If I want to know whether a show is worth going to at the Edinburgh Festival, or if Bonnie Prince Billy’s latest album is worth buying, I certainly don’t want a 140-character Twitter; I want an intelligent review written in real sentences, not some bastard lingo that’s the ugly love-child of texting and abbreviations.

If she would have worked for a modern minded media organization she could have included the recent Twitter is 40% Babble whitepaper, fully ignoring the 9% useful links and information stated in the study. JSP totally missed the point and ignored the fact that Twitter, together with other social networks, a news-breaking platform is, useful even to old, retired and deprecated journalists traditional media. Or as Paul Carr said:

While bloggers can own the first five minutes of any breaking story – a plane crash, a fire, a burglary – it’s always going to be the professional reporters who own the next five days, or five weeks. They walk the streets, work their contacts and – yes – trawl the blogosphere for eye-witness reports, and then take all of that information, analyse it, follow it up and ultimately provide an account of events that readers can trust.

What JSP has shown us with her most recent entry is that she clearly does understand social media and the art of linkbaiting.

Photo Credit: Jem Stone.

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This is something CEO Leon Hill says that the company has never done.

“The definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false,” he said.

His theory is that Twitter isn’t happy with the company’s services, because it artificially inflates accounts with paid-for followers.

“The people at Twitter who are sending these claims are just flailing around trying to look for any excuse they can, though it’s going to take much more than this if they want us to pack up shop,” Hill continued.

It certainly will: many people are out to make money from Twitter even if Twitter is struggling to do it themselves.

Via

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• “Post from anywhere” capabilities with email, iPhone, and TypePad bookmarklet
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• All backed with support and training from TypePad One

These features might be new for Typepad users, I personally fail to see where they are new. Other than having ‘built-in plugins’ for the technically challenged people. Everything else, and much more, can be obtained freely via Tumblr and/or WordPress. For the minimum $4.95/month TypePad charges, I can host my blog on my own domain and have much more freedom.

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Did Gawker Media just grow up? The little web publisher that big media loves to hate is now teaching them a thing or two about brand advertising. No belly-fat ads, ads with festering sores or diet-success stories; just big, splashy brand ads from HBO, Audi and Samsung.

I don’t exactly recall the Gawker Media brands being littered by Civony Adsense ads before everything went downhill in the advertising industry. But fine, yeah, there’s no doubt that the 45% revenue increase accounts for some sort of maturation. I’d like to put that to the fact that advertisers get the web and its strengths over old media channels better these days. After all, when you feel the pinch it is a good thing to be able to track everything in realtime.

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Woodward also promised that he will continue to cover financial costs to continue the service. Donations are welcome and accepted. Further on it was announced that tr.im data will be released in real-time to anyone interested and that the possibility to use the tr.im platform on self-maintained domains will be offered as well.

Personally I am getting a little bored of the constant change in direction coming from Nambu and I do not expect anything else than a news update in the next days, announcing that tr.im has been sold.

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In the actual digital era it is not new anymore for news to be broken on the popular social media platforms and often games can be followed on Twitter or on many a fan page on Facebook. Sometimes live video finds it way to streaming platforms such as Qik or captures are uploaded only minutes after important events to Youtube. The SEC now calls these fan activities illegal.

Ticketed fans can’t produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event.

Is the SEC effectively trying to protect its revenue stream or actually censoring the fans?

Source: Tampabay.com via Mashable.

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In plugin news, Byrne Reese has announced Image Cropper — a new plugin that lets you crop and resize images to make more interesting thumbnails. Be sure to watch the screencast to see how it works — the interface looks very nice.

Finally, Dan Wolfgang has an updated version of his More Custom Fields plugin. This version adds a “Selected Entries” custom field, which can be used for things like custom related entries lists.

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

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David Ogilvy is a legend in the advertising world, despite having first retired some 30 year ago and not having published a book in nearly 25. His works are required reading for advertising students today and his philosophy of creating ads that generate sales made millions for his clients. He had a characteristic style or writing and design that remains instantly recognizable to those who’ve studied him, even today.

Though Ogivly died in 1999, just as the Web was beginning to take off, many of his lessons and ideas remain just as valid today as they did half a century ago. Last year I wrote an article entitled “7 Blogging Tips from David Ogilvy” that focused on applying some of Ogilvy’s techniques to blog writing. Ttoday however, I’m going to focus on how his design tips can help you choose a good look for your blog.

Ogilvy had a very famous and classic layout that focused on combining visuals with easy-to-read text. It’s a simple layout that draws the reader’s eye and lures them into the content. It’s a design that at least some elements easily apply to blogs, including the ones below.

1. Clean Layout

Ogilvy’s layouts were very clean. A visual element at the top, a strong headline and text below. The eye had a set course to follow and nothing in the ads was allowed to take away from the focus on the content.

Blog design can learn from this too. The WTF Blot Clutter series on the site contains some excellent examples of things that could distract your readers from your content, thus making it less likely to be read.

Be smart about what you put around your content and make sure it is worthwhile before adding something that could be a diversion. Is it something that’s useful and warrants a potential distraction, or just “fun” and “interesting”.

2. No Reverse Type

David Ogilvy repeatedly found that reverse type (white text on a black background) is harder to read and that having black text on a white background. Though the rule was written for the print world, where Ogily did the majority of his work, it seems to function well on the Web.

Though some environments that people are going to look at for long times at a stretch, such as programming and Web development applications, are easier to view in reverse type as it can reduce eye strain, most people find it easier to read regular type on the Web.

The exception, of course, is if your readers are used to reverse type. At that point, it most likely is better to use it. However, always make sure that your text and background are of a high contrast (no gray on white, for example) to one another for easier reading.

3. Visual Before Text

Ogilvy’s advertisements had a visual element to draw the eye of the reader to the ad and to lure them into the text. To aid in this, the visual element, the largest one at least, was placed BEFORE the text, so the ad could create a trail for the eye to follow, visual, text and then the call to action.

The idea is simple, get people to look at the text with a good visual, hook people into the text with great writing and then walk them through with subheads and compelling copy until they read the call to action.

Remember, with blogs, you aren’t just designing for the Web but also for RSS. Feeds need a strong visual center as well to help them stand out from the hundreds of other feeds your readers likely subscribe to.

4. Font Play

When it comes to choosing fonts for your site, it is more important to use what your readers are familiar with than follow any specific rule. Some readers find serif fonts easier, others find sans-serif fonts easier to read.

It seems to largely be based upon a digital divide, those who are more used to printed works are fans of serif fonts while those who are more used to reading materials on the Web prefer sans-serif.

The important thing, however, is to NOT use a font that is outside of the norm. Fonts that are too new and too unique are difficult to read and will turn readers away. This also means keeping your font size within the normal range too, usually between 10 and 12 pt.

5. Narrow Columns, Small Paragraphs and Subheads

Your writing has a direct bearing on your design so you have to write for the eye as well as for the ear. Use shorter paragraphs and regular subheads to give your readers breaks and make long copy seem shorter.

Also, make sure that your main column is narrow enough to be easily read. Ogivly used a newspaper layout with multiple columns per page. This is not something most blogs can use, but with monitors approaching 2000 pixels wide and beyond, place some controls on how wide your main column can be so that the reader can easily get to the next line.

Bottom Line

Granted, there are many elements of Ogilvy’s design that don’t translate well into the Web. For example, drop caps, a staple of his ads, are all but gone from both the print and Web world, making them more of a distraction than a benefit.

However, much of it, if not most of it, does still apply very strongly and it is well worth studying. Because David Ogilvy’s design style was clean, simple and effective, not to mention ideal for layouts with a lot of words.

Though you don’t want to make your site look like a giant ad, using some of advertising’s design tricks can help make your site easier to read and more effective for your reader. It’s only logical that the industry that is expert and motivating people to buy products might hold clues on how to motivate people to do other things, whether it’s subscribe, take some kind of political action or simply come back.

As such, it’s worth understanding how advertising works and, to that end, I can not recommend David Ogilvy’s last book highly enough.

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Arbor Networks suggests that Twitter accounts are being set up to broadcast links to malicious code. Those computers already part of the botnet would then follow these links, via RSS feed, in order to get new instructions/targets.

The tweets are typically encoded in Base64, so would be unintelligible (and effectively benign) to any human reading them. The now suspended account appeared to be directing a distributed denial of service attack to a banking web site.

Given the relative anonymity and near-ubiquitousness of Twitter, it would seem be a good communications medium for these activities – that is, until the accounts are shut down.

Via

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It rests to be seen if Mesiab Labs will get the approval for the mark retweet granted because there might be a lot of objections to the application, not only from Twitter, who now seem to be in a unique position to claim the mark, but also from competitors such as Tweetmeme. Funnily enough, the whole RT concept is just another Twitter community driven and created component and it seems ironic at least if someone were able to claim the mark for a concept or term which is owned by the Community.

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• WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world
• Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now
• These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink
• It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones
• The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around
• WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com

Other than the restriction of only being available to WP.com users, WP.me sounds like pretty much any other shorturl service to me. Most bloggers will not care about the rel="shortlink" code in the header nor will most users bother thinking long term if their links will still work in a year. But all credits to the Automattic team to cover most angles for their users and keep adding services to their platform, making WP.com better and better on an almost daily base.

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I am sure you now all have fired up IE8 of course. Nor did I, but that’s mainly because I’m on a Mac and have not touched Windows at all anymore since I switched two years ago. Still it is a fact now and Microsoft Evangelist Giorgio Sardo published the results of a security poll, conducted by NSS Labs among the 5 top browsers and Internet Explorer 8 came out on top.

Especially in the malware detection department IE8 scored very well and left any other browser far behind.

• Internet Explorer 8 “was by far the best”, thanks to the SmartScreen® Filter technology
• Firefox 3 “comes in a distant second”
• Safari 4 presented a declined compared to the previous tests, with two short periods of sever security dips
• Chrome 2 performed very consistently, albeit very poorly

Also in the phishing detection department IE8 scored best, closely followed by Firefox 3 (with the Google anti-phishing add-on).

In both tests the fast Safari and Google Chrome browsers performed rather badly and the three people using Opera (OK, four) also better know what links they click. You can read more and see examples at Giorgio’s blog or dicover the truth about the poll.
I will gladly continue using Safari 4 and give everyone details to my empty bank account.

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1. Decide going in to the blog content creation effort that you will get something “done” in a certain amount of time.
2. Remove/destroy distractions, or remove yourself from their presence.
3. Emphasize focus and the task at hand – getting a great article or content chunk done ASAP.
4. Think about for whom you are writing or producing the content.
5. Think about what specific problem you will be solving through the content, or what question you will be answering.
6. Come up with a catchy headline.
7. Make sure the headline is clear and conveys a compelling promise of some benefit. (You don’t always have to do this, but it’s important as a general rule.)
8. Write, write, write – or record, record, record if audio/video, or snap, snap, snap if photos … just produce raw content. Don’t edit yet.
9. When you’ve spilled out all your ideas, go back and revise and organize. Do NOT overdo this part.
10. Now it should look at least semi-decent. Try to flesh out the content chunk by referring to related chunks among your own repositories (first) and elsewhere online or offline (second).
11. Check your timer – how long has it been? Always measure your publishing efforts. Figure out whether it’s initial composition or final editing/publication that’s slowing you down.
12. Ask for help if needed – if you get stuck, don’t hesitate to ask for help from trusted friends or even just passers-by who seem like they’d have a few good ideas.
13. Stop when you’re done and just publish the thing.

Got any tips to add?

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So we took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

Get the whole thing from the PA blog post.

So 40.55% of the tweets are pointless babble. That will throw kindling on the Twitter is just nonsense fires out there for sure. Now with numbers!

So what?

Look at blogs, they are a force to be reckoned with for sure. How much pointless babble will you find there?

In fact, look at old media as a whole, do an analysis of a newspaper, or a tabloid, of whatever, and the content within. How many procent will be pointless babble?

I’ll tell you, it would depend on where you were looking.

There’s probably less pointless babble in the New York Times, than in The Sun. The same applies to Twitter, and to blogs. It depends on who you’re listening to.

Again, for the haters out there: it depends on who you’re listening to.

No need to say it a third time I suppose? After all, if you can build your Twitter bashing on a random study from public tweets without any real categorization, then you could move on and strike off the internet as well. Listening to the public timeline is like searching the web without Google removing all the rubbish.

So yeah. There’s pointless babble on Twitter. So what?

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Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.

From the sketch presented by @ev, and the explanation, it seems that Twitter plans to show all retweets in your stream, even if you don’t follow the people who retweeted. I for one can not say that I am looking forward to even more (RT) noise in my Twitter feed but am happy that the company plans to fight fake retweets.
The Retweet option will also officially be implemented in the Twitter API.

No official release date has been announced yet but the company plans to test the feature on a small scale before launching. Hopefully I am not among the testers unless I can turn retweets from people I do not follow off.

The company also posted mockups for the implementation to the the Twitter Dev Google Group. This looks a lot cleaner already than the sketch posted above.

Is this Twitter trying to look like Facebook and ‘likes’?

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Reports suggest that Ben Southall has been so busy that he’s not had enough time to document his experience, hence the need for help.

From August 26, Tourism Queensland will begin accepting applications for “The Best Experience in the World”.

Details are scarce at present, but expect the site to be inundated with applications and the job requirements to be very similar to the original post.

Does it really take five people?

Via

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“Social networking website” means an Internet website containing profile web pages of the members of the website that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs placed on the profile web pages by such members, or any other personal or personally identifying information about such members and links to other profile web pages on social networking websites of friends or associates of such members that can be accessed by other members or visitors to the website. A social networking website provides members of or visitors to such website the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile web page and may also include a form of electronic mail for members of the social networking website.

Maybe it would be easier to ban sex offenders from using the internet for a determined period. This period should be decided by a Judge and not by a politician.

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Right now the WP.com domain still redirects to wordpress.com. It will be interesting to see if this will become the new wp.com domain or will be ran as a promotion campaign, similar to GetFirefox.

Via WordPress Philippines.

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#Blamedrewscancer is a Twitter campaign which went viral very quickly after Drew Olanof was diagnosticized with cancer earlier this year. Ever since then Drew started blaming his cancer for everything, also via Twitter. On 09.09.09 Drew organizes a 24hour Blame-A-Thon which is also sponsored by 23andme. All proceeds of the Twitter publicity stunt and the Blame-A-Thon will go to the Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong Foundation.

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Perez Hilton in the middle, that’s what women want in a blog? Jezebel’s Tracie Egan isn’t too worried, and said site also picks CocoPerez to pieces in a post. Sure, they’re a bit biased, but it is a funny read nonetheless, snarky and with a touch of the old days when the blogosphere sucked even harder. I think this will be fun to watch.

CocoPerez is slated to go online sometime today if reports are to be believed.

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The group found that Herbal Groups, Inc. and Urban Nutrition had posted reviews for products they owned, yet failed to disclose that fact.

Urban Nutrition has since added disclosure to its web site, stating “Urban Nutrition sponsors this Web site and distributes Miracle Burn, Miracle Burn Cream, and Arctic Essentials. Reviewers compensated by Urban Nutrition.”

Herbal Groups, Inc was found to be pushing one of its products via a free blog, including making unsubstantiated claims about a product’s benefits. It subsequently took down the blog.

An interesting couple of cases, though surely just the tip of the iceberg. I’m all for disclosure, am not against compensation per se, but blogging needs to be as transparent as possible.

What do you think?

Via

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2. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).

Facebook users have time to leave feedback on the proposed changes until 18th August 10.00PDT.

This is a bold move in a fight against the the Pay Per model, better known from Izea (Formerly PayPerPost), who recently launched Sponsored Tweets.

At the same time Facebook announced that they can block the right to publish page updates to the newsfeed, killing the concept of generic pages.

When you publish content or information to your Page we have no obligation to distribute your content or information to users.

When the Facebook redesign was launched one of the main features was the new power which was given to pages and it should have come as no surprise that companies but also marketers would play with these. I have found the new pages to be a great social tool and potentially a vertical business. It did not take long before new companies such as Status Plug launched and offered sponsored status updates for page owners. Status Plug which listed several page with more than 1m fans at premium rates, such as Laughing when someone fails (minimum offer $390), pulled the plug today after the new policy for pages.

Although I can understand that Facebook doesn’t want users to earn money from the platform I think they are missing out on a major stream of income here, just like Twitter does. With the size of both platforms each could easily set up their own ads market place and cash in all while making the users happy. The argument here is simple: it are the users who contribute to the popularity of the platform and certainly deserve some credit. No one else can better implement and control a maintained disclosure policy than the platform development team.
For Facebook at the same time it would be a great opportunity to show that they know how to implement advertising, while using the users name, without creating havoc, because I for one am still waiting for the first pundit to shout: ‘Facebook, DO evil’ as new motto for the Palo Alto company.

Of course you can always become a fan of Google Adsense on Facebook.

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The first thumbnail prominently displays today’s statistics for the platform. The redesign comes only days after WordPress.com published its stats wrap-up for July 2009.

How do you like the redesign? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.

We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.

So the URL shortener is back from the dead, but for how long? That is a valid question, despite the fact that they are “overwhelmed by the response”, they still think that all the reasons they initially listed for shutting down tr.im are valid.

Would you trust tr.im with your shortened URLs after this affair?

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Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.

As always you can upgrade automatically from within your admin interface, or download from wordpress.org.

Update: The WordPress MU 2.8.4 version is out too. Download or upgrade automatically.

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It’s simple: search for @youropera and then add a line of 140 characters or less.

Tweets will be compiled and sent to be scored by composer Helen Porter, and will be performed at the Deloitte Ignite 09 (4-6 September, Royal Opera House, London).

It’s not clear when submissions will be accepted until, but it probably won’t be long now because it has to be transformed into music and rehearsed in less than a month’s time.

Find out more at twitter.com/youropera, or read the libretto so far. It’s… interesting:

“A small bird twitters over there, He sings without a single care, If only we could be so free, Without the worries and the …

concerns of a nihilist. I would bring you flowers, but they would die. I would love you, but, why?

The bird responded, “Flowers they are strange to me, The fruits of nature that I see, Are worms and seeds and cats and rats -

“Nuts, i love hazelnuts.” Bang! The bird dropped from the sky, dead, its tiny wings were frozen.

he woman looks at the bird sadly, she is confused: “William, I’m not sure where this is going for us”

‘Darling, I must tell you. I can’t stand you – no, stronger. You are a horse. And now escape is what I long for.’

She sighed, “Why am I standing here, listening you sing to a bird? I have my career as a biochemist to be getting on with.”

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That is one hardcore supporter you’ve got there, Williams!

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The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

They seem happy enough, and while no immediate changes are planned, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that we’ll see new features roll out on Facebook. Question is if FriendFeed will live on as a separate identity or not. My guess is no, but we’ll see.

More in the Facebook press release and on Techmeme. No financial terms have been released.

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For the cases that could have a direct impact on your life, you often have to dig deeper. This is true for the case of Brayton Purcell LLP v. Recordon & Recordon, a seemingly dull case about two law firms in a dispute over content posted on their respective Web sites.

However a recent decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case, if upheld by other circuits or the Supreme Court, could have a drastic impact on the way copyright issues are litigated in the United States.

How big is the difference? The dissenting judge on the panel said the following, “Under the majority’s opinion, every website operator faces the potential that he will be hailed into far-away courts based upon allegations of intellectual property infringement, if he happens to know where the alleged owner of the property rights resides.”

In short, if you are accused of copyright infringement, it is no longer safe to assume that you would be sued in your own district, but rather that you could be forced to litigate in the plaintiff’s court, enduring the extra costs and expense that comes with it.

Background

Brayton Purcell is a large law firm based near San Francisco. Recordon & Recordon is a two-person firm from San Jose. According to Brayton, Recordon plagiarized content from their site that pertained to its elder abuse practice. The district court agreed and ordered both Recordon and its Web design firm, Apptomix, to pay a combined $184,000 in damages and legal fees.

However, the case was unusual in that Brayton had sued Recordon in the Nothern District of California. Recordon, being in the southern part of the state, is in the Southern District. The district court had allowed the case to go forward, finding that the Northern District had jurisdiction but Recordon appealed to the 9th Circuit on jurisdictional grounds and, in a split decision, the Appeals Court found that Brayton had met its burden on the matter of jurisdiction.

According to the majority opinion, Recordon had “expressly aimed” their actions at the Northern District by choosing a site from that district to plagiarize. This means that, since the company was aware that they were using content from a company within that district, they had given that district jurisdiction over the matter, even though it is over eight hours away from the court and had no business in that district.

Implications

The issue was a fairly minor one in the case itself. If the 9th Circuit had tossed out the ruling on jurisdictional grounds, most likely Brayton would have simply filed in the Southern District with much the same results. It would have been more about delaying the ruling and negotiating a settlement than winning the case.

However, if the ruling stands over time, it could have a drastic impact in future copyright cases.

As Judge Stephen Reinhardt, it’s conceivable that, should this ruling stand up over time, that by infringing someone’s copyright and knowing where that person is located, you’ve done enough to give that person’s local district jurisdiction over the matter. It’s conceivable that you could see yourself defending a copyright dispute across the country, bearing the expense of doing so.

This would have the effect of making it much cheaper and easier to file a lawsuit for copyright infringement and make it much more difficult, or even impossible, to defend. It would almost certainly increase the number of lawsuits filed and make it much easier to obtain a settlement in those cases. While this could be a boon for smaller copyright holders, who often lack the resources to file cross-country lawsuits, it could also be a nightmare for alleged infringers, especially if it is abused.

At this time, this ruling only directly applies to the 9th Circuit. However, it and the 2nd Circuit, which overs New York state and some of the surrounding areas, are considered the major copyright circuits and make up the bulk of precedent on these matters.

Still, this does not mean that you can expect to be sued in random districts all over the country just yet. Since the issue is far from settled, and likely won’t be until either other circuits or the Supreme Court weigh in, most won’t risk having a suit tossed on jurisdictional grounds as it is usually cheaper and easier to file it correctly the first time. Even the 9th Circuit could reverse itself if a different panel of judges were to take up the issue.

In the meantime though, it is even more imperative to not infringe copyright or, if you do, at least not be aware of where the person you are infringing from is located.

Bottom Line

The punchline to this very sad joke is that, according to Recordon, the entire infringement was carried out by Apptomix. They were not aware of the infringement and only found out about the existence of Brayton after the dispute began.

Stephen Recordon, one of the partners at Recordon & Recordon, said, “Years of litigation, thousands and thousands of dollars, and all because you hire the wrong person.”

But while the case is definitely a big blow to Recordon, it could also be a major setback for countless others in the same position. Turning cases that would have been simple cease and desist letters or small settlements into expensive lawsuits in far-flung districts.

Right now that’s only a possibility, but the groundwork has definitely been laid.

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It’s not so much of a news story over at SAI, but more of a success of a fellow blogger report, which is always nice to read. I especially like the raw data which is provided at the end of the story:

John, reached by e-mail, wouldn’t comment on how much money his site makes, but he says it provides his full-time income. He says the site has recently been close to averaging 2 million monthly pageviews and about 250,000 monthly unique visitors — including some very important ones at Apple headquarters. He also estimates about 150,000 subscribers to his RSS feed.

Say what you will, but a powerful and influential blog sure packs a punch. Even if it is minimalistic in its approach and uncluttered by ads.

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And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.

All tr.im links will continue to work until December 31, 2009 at the very least, says the manager. It might, however, not be an issue at all since Mashable reports how bit.ly apparently have offered to take over the reins. Makes sense, why not grow the service with all the tr.im links after all?

This is a reminder that shortened URLs might suddenly disappear, or point to some other place altogether. What if tr.im were sold to someone dishonest? That would be a lot of links trying to trick you into buying fake Viagra. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case here, but it is worth remembering when shortening URLs in the 140 character conversation.

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It’s not clear from the report I read exactly when this deal occurred, or how successful it was, but it’s surprising that the account only has around 30,000 followers. I’m surprised it didn’t have more organic adds, despite the fact that it’s only been online since 7th July this year.

Then again, three tweets in one month isn’t exactly scintillating stuff. It’s also worth noting that the account doesn’t have a Twitter “Verified” badge, but I suppose granting it one would be a rather special, and slightly macabre, case.

CEO of uSocial, Leon Hill, said that the company had been “in touch with someone in his family recently who tasked us with conducting a Twitter campaign on an account relating to him”.

Does the worldwide pop icon really need a lot of help gaining Twitter followers? What does the family intend to do with the account? (Not much, it seems, if the past month is anything to go by). It seems just to be a pointer to Michael’s memorial page and YouTube channel.

Last year, USocial got into trouble with, and ignored a cease and desist notice from, Digg over its paid social bookmarking service.

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Following Wednesday’s Twitter outage (in which the site is still recovering from), it looks as if there was a connection between Twitter going down, as well as Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube experiencing problems.

(CBS News) A pro-Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

Cyxymu’s Twitter account, and YouTube channel seem to be back up, although his Facebook page and LiveJournal Blog are apparently down as of this writing.

Despite the fact that Cyxymu lives in free and democratic nation of Georgia, his views apparently did not sit well with Russia, prompting the attack that crippled some of the hottest internet sites online.

While this type of censorship is unacceptable, bloggers (especially those in free nations) should take note that freedom of speech often comes with a price–and should contact their hosts to find out whether they have to resources to defend against a DDos (or at least spare them the bandwidth bill when one occurs).

(Hat Tip: Hot Air Headlines)

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More: LiveJournal and Facebook also affected.

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