RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.
PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.
Like it or not. You're a writer. You're creating content on a daily basis, updating your Facebook status, commenting on blogs, sending tweets. Social networking requires that level of communication. But as a writer, you're also a potential victim for writer's block, a condition that plagues even the most prolific authors.
The next time you find your desire to write lacking, Plinky may be just the inspiration you need.
In November of last year, Six Apart announced a new community management tool, TypePad Connect, a service designed to give bloggers more insight and accessibility to the conversations taking place on their blogs - whether they used Six Apart products or not. Now, the community with access to TypePad Connect just got exponentially larger.
Web 2.0 Called; It Says It's Just An Ad Platform Now
When we saw drag and drop widget creation service Sprout Builder launch at the DEMO conference a year ago this month, we called it far and away our favorite company that launched there. A year later the cold reality of financial survival beckons and Sprout has announced that there is no longer any such thing as a free widget. Users will need to pay a minimum of $140 for a year of uptime for three widget projects.
Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.
In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.
Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.
RSS and podcast publishing service FeedBurner has been a great friend to bloggers over the years but this morning announced that it will shut down its own blog Burning Questions. Readers will now be referred to a new blog, AdSense for Feeds. FeedBurner is so useful for so many things beyond serving up ads in feeds that there's something sad about the symbolism here.
As a part of the announcement FeedBurner offers information for publishers about how to migrate from FeedBurner to a new Google account, as in the future all feed related services will require a Google account. It's the end of an era, really.
The last time WordPress - the popular open source blogging platform - changed their user interface, they got a reaction. And it wasn't positive. Even diehard fans were questioning the reasoning behind the changes, trying to figure out ways to work within the new construct, or simply throwing their hands up in despair. So, it comes as little surprise that the latest release, WordPress 2.7 - codenamed "Coltrane" - has had a great deal of time and energy focused on improving that interface. But could the WordPress development team win back the adoration of those angry users with yet another interface change?
San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has announced they will be giving away free accounts on their TypePad blogging system for professional bloggers and journalists who recently lost their jobs as well as those who fear the axe is coming. Cleverly dubbed the "Journalist Bailout Program," the service includes one free blog, a place in the Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, a as well as other tools and advice on driving traffic to your site, all courtesy of Six Apart.
In September of this year, Automattic - the company that manages the development of the popular WordPress blogging platform - acquired IntenseDebate, a plug-in designed to provide a more feature rich system for blog comments. As a result of the acquisition, IntenseDebate was immediately placed into invite-only status for new installations as they began to rework their software for higher volumes of users.
At the time, it wasn't clear when the new version of the IntenseDebate product would be publicly available. But assumptions were that it would remain under wraps until the release of WordPress 2.7. Now, IntenseDebate has returned from its post-acquisition secrecy with some "hi-octane conversational mojo."
