Sites across the Web created some amazing tributes to Steve Jobs over the last day. One of our favorites was our friends at Boing Boing, who overhauled the theme of their front page with a touching, nostalgic classic Mac look. The team at WordPress loved it, too, so they worked through the night to make a retro Mac theme for WordPress users, and they're giving it away for free.
On the main WordPress blog founder Matt Mullenweg writes:
We work harder and have higher standards because of the bar set by Apple's experiences, and I don't know what WordPress would look like today if not for the inspiration he gave all of us.
Google just launched dynamic views for Blogger, its free blogging platform, and they are something else. Powered by AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, these new themes for Blogger users are heavy-duty, interactive designs, not mere blog templates. The announcement claims that they also load "40 percent faster than traditional templates," but that will require some testing. Just in trying to load Google's blog posts announcing this update, this author saw lots of new Blogger loading graphics with spinning gears.
Nevertheless, these designs look amazing. They have infinite scrolling, dynamic loading of graphics and new posts, easy re-sorting, keyboard shortcuts for navigation and, of course, one-click sharing to Google Plus "and other social sites." There are seven new templates, and they can be gently customized. More customization options will be added "in the coming weeks." The flagship Google blogs for Gmail, LatLong and Docs are getting dynamic makeovers, too.
WordPress has made a pair of announcements today focusing on reading rather than writing. Free WordPress.com sites now have a "small, cute, little" follow button in the bottom right corner for readers who are not logged into WordPress. This allows non-WordPress users to follow the blog by email. (Yes, disgruntled blogger, you can turn it off.)
In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.
Posterous, the niftiest self-publishing platform you've never used, just rolled out a whole new metaphor for the service called Posterous Spaces. What Posterous - and any other apparent blogging service, for that matter - used to call 'sites' are now called spaces. Spaces allow you to publish content to selected audiences. That's right; Posterous Spaces are no longer to be thought of as simply "blogs" or what-have-you. They're gunning for Google Plus and Facebook now.
The Posterous iPhone app has been updated to incorporate spaces, but the announcement doesn't mention the Android app. Posterous has also improved ways of finding and following spaces, adding a 'Popular' tab for real-time highlights from around Posterous and an 'Activity' tab showing likes, comments, follows and such from your spaces and those you follow.
This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.
Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.
Google has just announced a new iPhone app for Blogger, its pioneering free blog platform. Though quite orange, the interface is clean and native-looking, and it allows publishing, drafting and editing of blog posts while on the go.
The app doesn't offer a full-fledged blog post editor, but instead it offers simple photo uploading, tagging and location services, concentrating on features that complement mobile blogging. Its features are comparable to the Android app, which went live in February. The previous iPhone client for Blogger was built by a third party.
WordPress has revamped the WordPress.com Comments panel in Site Stats to give blog authors better insight into their most responsive readers. In addition to a summary of recent comments, the panel now displays leader boards for top commenters and most commented posts. For quieter blogs, the leader boards show all-time stats, but for active blogs, they cover the last three months of activity.
The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there's currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free "Social Stock Market" game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.
TechCrunch editor and founder Michael Arrington has left the popular tech blog to become a partner in a new venture capital firm called CrunchFund. As the proprietor of TechCrunch, Arrington has long been the blogger-turned-kingmaker in the startup ecosystem. With CrunchFund, he has now proclaimed himself king and is looking to build his kingdom. We will see if that is possible now that the influential blog he founded is no longer under his control.
Arrington's departure is indicative of the crumbling state of AOL, which bought TechCrunch last year. Arrington's departure will have a ripple effect felt throughout both the entrepreneur and media communities.
New blogs launch all the time, but The Daily Dot launched today with a well-known team of backers, $600,000 in the bank and a focus on using data analysis to unearth the stories of people online. The Dot says it wants to be the "home town newspaper" for all the different social networks and communities on the web - and it uses math to find its way.
Dot CEO Nick White, the most experienced of the team with traditional newspapers, tells a story about Jimmy Carter's old home town paper. The 70 year old woman who led that paper's local coverage for years would go through the phone book and call everyone, asking "have you got any news? Do you need to buy any classified ads?" White says the Daily Dot team does something like that now, but by using big data software and services. "The data is telling us about a lot of really interesting people we should be calling on the phone," he says, "and then when we do - we find out we're the first people to ever interview them."
Australian educational blogging platform EduBlogs announced this week that it now hosts more than 1 million blogs published by teachers and students. The six year old, 15 person company offers free blogs, paid blogs and campus-based blog networks. It's all built on top of WordPress and parent company IncSub says Edublogs is the second most-popular WordPress site online. (Presumably after WordPress.com.)
Edublogs celebrated hosting 100,000 blogs in the Fall of 2007. The growth of blogging in education is an important development.
