Blogging platform WordPress just announced a major upgrade to its long-beleaguered app for the iPhone and iPad. The new version is awesome. (iTunes link.)
The company says it's now solved most of the major problems, squashed the bugs that caused 75% of the apps crashes and now it's time to add new features. New features added in the version now available in the App Store include: a "Quick Photo" feature that lets you snap and post a photo very fast, a mobile stats display, localization in 10 langues and more. This new version is the first one I've downloaded for awhile and I was thrilled to see how easy it was to add a self-hosted WordPress.org blog to the app now, too!
Flock, a Web browser with loads and loads of media sharing and social features baked inside it, announced today that it is shutting down. Flock went out with a sigh and the news of its closure has been greeted with a shrug.
Back in the old days, when Flock was born, things were very different. Five or six years ago when Flock was launching (it was a long, slow, hyped-up process), people loved it. Tech bloggers in particular loved it. It was, as PaidContent founder Rafat Ali said, "a new browser with a lot of geek-love." Top bloggers are so concerned these days with saving face by constraining their enthusiasm that I thought it would be fun to look back at what some tech stars said about Flock back then. Their early reviews are like a time machine that offers a ride into a simpler, perhaps happier time in the tech blogosphere. I miss that time and thought you'd enjoy reading some highlights.
Long-time blogging platform LiveJournal said today that it has been subject to "repeated, large-scale DDoS attacks" for the past two weeks. The company says that the attacks have targeted a number of different users' journals, some of whom are political in nature. While a small number of users may be targeted, all users lose their ability to publish and read on the platform when the site is taken down. "LiveJournal believes strongly in the ideal of freedom of expression," the company said, "and we're working very hard to ensure that users around the world have a place where their voices can be heard."
Among those affected is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who began blogging on Russian-owned LiveJournal two years ago this month. "As an active LJ user, I believe the hackers' actions to be outrageous and illegal," Medvedev reportedly wrote in Russian on his blog this week. "Both the administration of the blog and law enforcement agencies must look into the matter."
Over the last year, blogging platform WordPress has nearly doubled in size growing from 10.5 million blogs last March to 18 million today. With more than 10% of the Web powered by Wordpress - according to founding developer Matt Mullenweg - it has become increasingly important for the company to support more interfaces and today it has done just that with iPad-optimized themes.
The company announced today that an iPad-optimized view would be immediately available, bringing "swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad" to all 18 million blogs on WordPress.com.
"What the last 10 years has taught me, the main lesson, is to first give someone the benefit of the doubt."
Heather Armstrong is celebrating the 10th anniversary of her trailblazing blog Dooce this week and there aren't very many people who can claim that kind of longevity online. It's a new media world and Armstrong is on the short list of people who have advanced that sea change the most. She's spent the last decade opening up possibilities for self-expression that the rest of us are just the beginning to take advantage of.
I spoke with her last week by phone about how blogging has changed, about Facebook and about what she's learned from the last decade of leadership in online self publishing.
Tumblr, one of if not the largest blogging and curation platform on the web, today launched a new way to explore content by topic and discover the most popular Tumblr users on the hot topics of the day. Called Tumblr Explore, the feature is intended to make the huge quantity of content on the site easier to navigate and new content easier to discover. The company also framed the feature in its announcement as a way for users to get more readers on their own blogs.
Who's the hottest Tumblr on the topic of food right now, for example? That would be Rachel Lauren Spence, author of SheSalty. Egypt and Libya are newly hot topics and the most popular curator across the Tumblr network on both those topics is Joshua Nguyen, who just happens to work for Tumblr. Six of the twenty six hottest blogs on the hottest topics listed on Tumblr Explore right now are written by Tumblr staff members.
Blogger, the Google-owned blogging platform, announced today that it finally has an Android app. The funny part, of course, is that Android is Google's smartphone platform and Blogger has had an iPhone app since September 2009.
That said, Google loyalists rejoice! You can now update your Google-powered blog on your Google-powered Android phone!
