Human-powered search site Mahalo, created by notable entrepreneur, investor and blogger Jason Calacanis, may soon be involved in a class-action lawsuit, the result of a change to its Terms and Conditions that may have affected the pay of its contractors and employees.
Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.
These days, blogging isn't just about sitting down at a keyboard with a cup of coffee and writing a wordy post. Blogging now also means sharing pictures, video and other media, and it means doing so at a moment's notice from wherever you are. WordPress, the Web's most popular content management system, has supported mobile blogging with its assortment of mobile apps for some time. Today, the iOS version has received a significant upgrade with added support for video and improved draft and autosave functionality.
Hossein Derakhshan, who had been rumored to be facing the death penalty, has instead been sentenced to 19 and a half years in prison. Reporters Without Borders listed the "crimes" he has been found "guilty" of.
"Derakhshan was convicted of collaborating with enemy states, propaganda against the Islamic Republic, propaganda in support of counter-revolutionary groups, 'insulting what is holy' and creating immoral websites. He can appeal against the verdict."
Microsoft and WordPress just announced that WordPress.com will become the default blogging platform for Windows Live. Live Spaces' 30 million users will have six months to migrate their blogs over to WordPress.com and the two companies will offer a number of tools that should make this migration very easy. This announcement, which was made at TechCrunch Disrupt, comes as a bit of a surprise and will surely upset some of Windows Live Spaces' most active users. It does, however, fit into Microsoft's vision for its Live.com brand.
While blogging was still a major topic of discussion just a few years ago, things have been rather quiet around it in recent times. Even in the so-called blogosphere, we don't talk a lot about the actual activity of blogging anymore these days. According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, however, blogging is still alive and well. Today, half of all Internet users read blogs and while blogging itself remains somewhat of a niche activity, about 12% of U.S. Internet users update a blog at least once per month.
Over the last several months we have mentioned how minimalist micro-blogging service Tumblr has attracted traditional media outlets. The New York-based startup has begun providing publisher-friendly features and even managed to snag former Newsweek editor Mark Coatney, who serves as a liaison for traditional media.
Today, National Public Radio (NPR) became the latest media group to join Tumblr, and I spoke with senior strategist Andy Carvin to find out how the organization plans to leverage the quickly growing platform.
Tumblr is quickly becoming one of the Web's most popular and unique platforms on which to share and discover interesting content of all media. According to Tumblr, over 5.3 million posts are made each day by the service's over 7.5 million users. Posts are passed on over and over through Tumblr's "reblog" feature, but at such a high volume it's easy to lose track of where content originated. Tumblr hopes to solve this dilemma with some new attribution functionality launched earlier today.
Leading blog software provider WordPress.com will now offer multi-media and article link recommendations based on the words a user types into their blog composition window, in real time. The company announced today a new partnership with the service Zemanta.
Zemanta is a startup that captures more internet buzz words than almost any other I can think of: semantic web, rich media, recommendations and real-time. I mean that in a good way, too. In addition to a browser plug-in and this new relationship, Zemanta is available through partnerships with blog platforms Movable Type, Blogger.com and Scribefire. The company claims it now reaches 30% of the blogs online.
Let's say you are going to, or hosting, a conference and you want to make a good impression with the attendees and organizers. One way to do that is to create useful and thoughtful original content and resources regarding the event.
Thanks to tools like Mechanical Turk, Google Custom Search and of course Twitter, you can now do incredible things around conferences that would have been very inefficient to do before.
MOG, an up-and-coming streaming music service, has just launched its own editorial hub called the MOG Music Network. This online news source goes hand-in-hand with its music listening service, the latter which is available both online and as mobile applications for the iPhone and Android.
The MOG Music Network (MMN) includes music-related news from the company's network of 1,200 music blogs plus in-house news, reviews another other features. According to MOG, its network of blogs now generates more than 20 million monthly unique visitors and its goal is to become the largest music network online.
