Blogging is fast, informal and easy to do. Spelling, grammar and factual errors happen - but do they make a material impact on the success of a blogger? A small but interesting survey run by crowdsourced copy editing service GooseGrade concludes that they do.
Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren't a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media - or not.
Despite the competition and rumors of its demise, email remains a very prevalent part of our daily lives. (That's one reason why Google continues to pour effort into Gmail.) Yet even with its familiarity, we're still discovering new ways we can use email to control other applications and perform simple tasks.
Now WordPress.com has embraced email for exactly that purpose. A new WordPress.com feature - currently in closed beta - adds actual utility to those "You've got a comment" emails: Reply via Email.
PollDaddy, the online polling and survey tool we use a lot here on RWW, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform. This is Automattic's second major acquisition in a short time. Just three weeks ago, Automattic also announced the acquisition of IntenseDebate, a popular blog commenting plugin. Neither Automattic nor PollDaddy, an Irish startup, released the terms of the acquisition.
The media world is changing and its jobs are changing too. The rise of the blogger is an often-told story, but are the lucky few bloggers who do it for a living well paid? We did a survey to find out.
We asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to tell us how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month - however their rates are set. Half of them told us, on the condition that we wouldn't disclose who they were or where they worked.
In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier) - with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, from technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.
The user interface isn't nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.
WordPress may be one of the best blogging platforms around today, but that hasn't stopped a worldwide community of developers from thinking they can do better. Desiring a more open environment where individuals can contribute and extend the project with their own work, they designed a platform called Habari to utilize a unique community participation model. Within this model, users whose contributions are consistently of a high quality are granted more privileges within the project. What has resulted from their efforts so far is a next-gen blogging platform that may eventually give WordPress a run for its money.
A team of leading bloggers from the early days of AOL-acquired Weblogs Inc. has come together again to build their ideal blogging software and raise a new network of blogs to challenge top sites in personal electronics, eco-awareness and other niches yet to be announced. Calling themselves Crowd Fusion, the company is lead by Weblogs Inc. co-founder Brian Alvey and has raised $3 million in venture capital from investors like Netscape and Ning co-founder Marc Andreeson and Ross Levinsohn, one of the key players in the Fox acquisition of MySpace.
The company's first site launched this week and we got a look at the blog software powering it - both are beautiful.
Blogging is a fast medium, that's one of its advantages over traditional media. There are bloggers who specialize in reporting fast about breaking news on a wide variety of topics. Most of those bloggers use Google's RSS publishing technology FeedBurner as a middleman to deliver their posts to subscribers and capture analytics.
If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that's bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now. We've been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That's a pretty serious problem and we're not alone in experiencing it.
Technorati says blogging is mainstream, we think the numbers indicate otherwise.
Blog search engine and ad network Technorati released its 5th annual State of the Blogosphere report and the numbers are quite interesting. Technorati says its findings indicate that blogging is now mainstream. We're not so sure. Although reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream, is writing them?
Zemanta, the blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts, has just released a major upgrade to their service. This new release allows you specify the sources you want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. You can now incorporate your own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos from your Flickr account into your blog posts. This makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation.
