We love it when members of the ReadWriteWeb community share links with us to things we might like to write about. In order to make that easier to do, thus hopefully something you'll do more of, we're posting a bookmarklet you can drag up to your browser toolbar and click anytime you're on a page you want to share with the ReadWriteWeb staff.
Tip RWW <-- Just grab that link and give it a click any time you're on a page you want to share with us. An email window will open (just using a mailto: link) pre-populated with the link and page title, addressed to us. Hit send, maybe add a note if you like. Breaking news, good background information, critiques of the things we've written - whatever you like. We'll give you credit for anything we use in a post, unless you ask us not to. Consider yourself part of the RWW team.
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the highly popular blog host WordPress.com now allows its users to reply to comments by email, but starting today, WordPress.com is taking its email strategy even further, and now allows users to post text and images by email as well. Those WordPress.com users who subscribe to the VideoPress upgrade will now also be able to upload videos to their blogs by email, and those who subscribe to the WordPress Space Upgrade can also post MP3 attachments. The service now gives every user a 'secret' email address to sent their posts to. These addresses can be activated from the WordPress.com dashboard.
If there's one thing that social software can never get enough of, it's usability testing. Good old WordPress has the advantage of a global community of super loyal fans to tap for testing, and this morning that's just what the company announced it is going to do. WordPress usability testing is being opened up to the community of users.
It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.
This morning, the Wall Street Journal features an article about professional blogging, a topic that is obviously very close to our hearts here at RWW. Mark Penn, the article's author, even cites some of our own numbers, though the most astonishing number he arrives at is that America is now home to over 452,000 professional bloggers who use blogging as their primary source of income. If these numbers are indeed true, then that would mean that there are now almost as many bloggers in the U.S. as lawyers (550,000). We do, however, have our doubts.
In December, Movable Type announced a new product called "Motion," which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company's hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro. Now, after much testing and feedback, Motion for Movable Type has become publicly available. With this software, built on open standards, blogs can add social activity streams to their site. These are similar in appearance to those from the social web aggregation service FriendFeed, but are entirely within the blog owner's control. Motion also adds a social networking element to online communities with its user profiles and authentication tools that permit signing in from any provider, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, or OpenID.
While Matt Mullenweg was in France for WordCamp Paris 2009, the team from ReadWriteWeb France took the opportunity to catch up with him and ask him a few questions about open source, WordPress, and the future.
Lifehacker founder and former lead editor Gina Trapani announced this morning that she's started a new blog called Smarterware.org. She says the new site has "no ads, no digg badges, lots of sentences starting with 'I'." It won't have dozens of posts daily under a rigorous publishing schedule - it will be a place for "stuff that fired off a synapse or two in my head," Trapani says.
After four years leading what's become the most widely read productivity blog and one of the biggest blogs period on the web, Trapani announced at the start of the year that she was leaving her position as Lifehacker lead editor. She posted a long goodbye and look back at the site's history two weeks later. Trapani has been one of the most important figures in the rise of the blogging medium. She's also one hell of a nice person.
Blog reading on Facebook is becoming a popular activity. One of the top applications for following blogs through the social networking site is NetworkedBlogs, an app which launched last year bringing the blog community to the Facebook platform. Half MyBlogLog, half RSS reader, the application lets users add their blog, favorite the blogs of their friends, and click though the latest headlines. Most importantly, the app brings blogs to the more mainstream Facebook audience.
Feed manipulation service BlastCasta has released a new feed widget this morning that allows publishers to offer more sophisticated feed subscription options to readers and is highly customizable.
The BlastCasta widget works with or without FeedBurner and provides options to filter your feed by keyword, sort it differently or translate it into any of 23 different languages. There's tickers and widgets and an API. BlastCasta could be a good option for publishers targeting tech savvy or mainstream international audiences.
A source close to AOL has informed ReadWriteWeb that it will be shutting down and relaunching the Weblogs Inc. "Lifestyle Blogs" as online magazines. These blogs make up roughly 1/4 of what remains of the Weblogs Inc. network that AOL acquired four years ago. From the heady days of carrying the flag of the blog revolution in 2003 and 2004, to a high profile buy-out by AOL in 2005, the near-term future of Weblogs Inc. raises interesting questions about the ballyhooed medium of blogging itself.
