Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.

Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging - sometimes called micro-blogging - is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.

Here's an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:

2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)

One thing that hasn't changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste - it's much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).

At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls - due to the sheer number of people using it. Here's an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the "following" panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.

3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps

With light blogging, you needn't even spend time actually blogging - because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. 'lifestreaming'), it's just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.

To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I've listened to in the past week.

4. Customize Your Theme

All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you're handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too - if you want to make it unique. Here's a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:

5. Don't Take it Seriously

It's not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn't called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go...

From Sween's Tumblr blog

We're curious to know which of these services our readers use. Let us know in the poll below, or make a comment if yours is not listed.

In the example to the right, I posted a video of a band I like to my Soup.io blog by simply inputting its MySpace video embed code and adding a couple of lines of comment. Much less effort than writing a post on ReadWriteWeb ;-)

Compete data shows that Tumblr is the clear leader in this market, with Posterous about to overtake Vox as number 2. Note: we didn't include wordpress.com or blogger.com, because they are much larger than all of these and are used for different purposes too.

Here is our poll, please select the light blogging service you use most often. There are many smaller services around, so the list below is certainly not comprehensive. If yours is missing, add it to the RWW comments.

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday's news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

The proposed new format incorporates things as simple as bullet point summaries and playable audio interviews with a paper's author and as complex as click-navigable data visualizations and real-time citation analysis. Some of the AJAX implementations are quite smooth and useful looking. The full summary of proposed features is available on Elsevier subsidiary publisher Cell's site and the company is seeking public comment.

Blogs and websites are weighing in with different points of view. James Dacey writes at PhysicsWorld that "I reckon this is another key development in an interesting transitionary period for both the publishing and media sectors." Several commenters on this article on Canadian Law Library blog Slaw were far less generous.

Gary P. Rodrigues, a former LexisNexis publishing exec, had the following to say there:

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of the 'future' in the 'Article of the Future'. Rather, it seems to me to be a collection of everything that it is possible to do now, but for which there is no commercial demand. Reed Elsevier faces a major challenge to its dominant position in the market for scientific journals from the Open Access movement. It needs to do something major to meet that challenge. The prototypes just don't live up to the hype.

Indeed, the article prototypes are reminiscent of what in the tech world was being called the Social Media Press Release, an attempt to make press releases multi-media and filled with social media hooks that could make them more useful to journalists. That effort seems to have petered out as most people in relevant industries found the format more trouble than it was worth.

There is a possibility that The Article of the Future will suffer the same fate. Elsevier says that it hopes the new format will make consumption of scientific research more efficient and interdisciplinary. We suspect, though, that many people who are interested in reading a paper titled "A Dynamic Pathway for Calcium-Independent Activation of CaMKII by Methionine Oxidation," for example, would prefer to keep out the clutter and stick with a familiar, scannable, academic format. Some of the features proposed are undeniably useful, though, and could lead to change that's incremental, if not revolutionary.

For a more in-depth look at other attempts to disrupt the scientific publishing industry, see Michael Nielsen's article on the topic, this Nature blog post about scientists' use of social networks and this profile of a new social network for scientists called MyExperiment.

Is a new upload format terribly newsworthy? Not exactly. But there are a couple of interesting tangents to this news that make it worth a mention.

First, this announcement hints at the makeup of the SlideShare user base. I would have assumed that the bulk of people using the service were Microsoft PowerPoint types, but that might have been an incorrect assumption. SlideShare says that native Keynote uploads have been one of the "most requested features from our users." Or perhaps it's just that PowerPoint users are either completely satisfied with the service or unwilling to share their presentations publicly?

Second, this leads me to question whether PowerPoint remains the unassailable presentation format it was always assumed to be. Could it be that the rise of Keynote, Google Docs Presentations, OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat PDF and other presentation formats are beginning to put dents in the Microsoft's install base? Or do Keynote users just have more aesthetically pleasing presentations which they want to share?

Third (and honestly the most interesting point), by enabling native Keynote uploads, SlideShare will finally give us a glimpse into the metrics that can answer all of these questions. Remember when Flickr launched its Camera Finder, using the metadata from photos to give us a view into the models of cameras that Flickr uploaders were using? It doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to see SlideShare pursuing a similar offering.

To date, Keynote users who wanted to share their presentations via SlideShare have been forced to upload presentations as PDFs. That has made it difficult to tell who is using what software to develop their presentations - beyond visual clues. With the native Keynote upload, however, SlideShare will begin capturing real PowerPoint vs. Keynote metrics. And that may illuminate some very interesting trends - as well as answers to some of the questions above.

Do people really care what presentation software people use? Maybe not. But they care what Web browsers, operating systems, applications, and mobile handsets people use. And soon, SlideShare could be providing us with yet another data point that helps round out our understanding of actual user metrics - as opposed to just assumptions. Without a doubt, that information is going to be valuable to someone.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.

The AP Marketplace interface looks like a sophisticated, multi-media RSS reader but with limited sources. Publishers set up a workflow that lets editors send selected media items directly from the reader out onto the paper's website.

Below, the AP newsreader, click to view full screen image.

It's very reminiscent of of the CMS built by the Crowd Fusion team, which we profiled last week. There's one huge difference though between the AP's project and things like the Crowd Fusion project, the red-hot world of cool-hunting aggregation and even the new publishing strategy of web giants like Yahoo and AOL. The AP service finds and publishes AP stories, not content from around the whole web.

There was a time when it must have been hard to imagine getting more news to choose from than what the wires brought publishers each day. That time has passed and while the small Midwestern US newspapers that the AP highlights as happy users of the Marketplace may be on board - it's hard to say how for how long readers will remain excited about AP fueled news websites. Especially once they discover a little more about how the internet works. (We don't mean to be critical of Mid Westerners, they were just the demographic of several AP demo sites.)

The online research tools used by financial professionals, for example, could probably slap this service both ways to Sunday before it knew which way was up. The AP says, though, that many local papers find their readers overjoyed with the breadth of topical AP content published to content sections or niche websites.

Left: The North West Arkansas biker scene had nothing like this news site before the AP Exchange came to town, the AP says. This kind of site does look like a good idea for everyone.

Training Component

One very interesting part of the AP Marketplace is that it's very search-centric and the wire service offers weekly 30 minute-long classes in online search skills. The AP Exchange School of Search is a great idea.

Not all parts of the program are working well, admittedly. The Exchange "blog" and community on Ning are dead, for example. Perhaps early participants learned enough to escape out into the web at large.

News Publishing Around the Web

A year ago media analyst Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post about what Editor 2.0 jobs are shaping up to look like. Two years ago we wrote here about some of the exciting things that AP competitor Reuters is doing. [Disclosure, the Reuters semantic web project Calais is now an RWW sponsor.] The media business blog PaidContent says that the AP Marketplace/Exchange service is pitted against new aggregation services explicitely aimed at replacing the AP, like Politico.

It's a time of deep change in the news media world and though we love the feel of a good local paper and its website - their ongoing success cannot be taken for granted. Tools like the AP Exchange look like a great step to take and we enjoy getting to see what the RSS reader equivalent is inside hundreds of local newsrooms.

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens.

Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that's what Google posted.

Google Reader users will get a new folder for "blogs I'm following," and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft's fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It's what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It's what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it.

Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology.

"Follow" is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that "follow" will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think "follow" is still too unclear? We think it's pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right.

We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out "follow" language and links soon if the Google move is well received.

PostRank looks at every item that comes through an RSS feed and scores it on a scale of 1 through 10 based on the number of comments it's received, inbound links, saves to del.cio.us, times it's been Tweeted and Dugg. The excitement comes in when the service delivers a filtered feed of just the 15% "most popular" items in that feed. It's a great way to pay casual attention to prolific feeds when you just want to see its own highlights.

Today the company is rolling out a slew of performance enhancements and new metrics including clickthroughs from its extensions, bookmarks in Ma.gnolia and mentions on microblogging service Pownce.

The company also rolled out a dedicated page for its very handy Google Reader extension - GReader users should check this one out.

We use AideRSS here at RWW every day and can't say enough about this simple but powerfully useful tool. We've written about it numerous times, including in the following particularly popular posts:

• Want That Post to Go Popular? Here's the Best and Worst Times to Post It


• What's Next on the Web: A ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008


• How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet


• Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche


• Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond


• Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your Feed Reader


• Why Gen Y is Going to Change the Web


• Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again


• An Ode to RSS On RSS Appreciation Day


• Why Online "Noise" is Good for You

It's true, we love AideRSS. It's just so incredibly useful we can't get over it. We wish the algorithm for determining popularity was more transparent and we hope that today's performance enhancements make a big difference - but we love it none the less. We'd love to see the folks at AideRSS connect with the good people at Gnip, a social media pinging service plus that we wrote about here.

The prospect of AideRSS's PostRank being rolled into other applications around the web is an exciting one. In what contexts would you like to see just the most popular items in an RSS feed?

The 30 day trial of ScreenSteps Pro took us just a few minutes to learn how to use and we're already excited to use this service for product reviews and tutorials.

We would guess that many people have different export preferences, so it would be nice to see those options expanded even further. See below for some other examples of presentation type services you might also find useful.

Asset management, or changing the order of the images in a presentation, could be easier to do too.

The video below looks much better when viewed full-screen; hit the TV button to view it that way.

Other Services to Check Out

Last weekend Corvida wrote here about a number of online presentation tools, and readers offered even more suggestions in comments.

A few services that could be of interest that weren't mentioned include:

• Screenflow is the hottest new screencast video capturing tool on the market. It's Mac (Leopard) only but tough luck Windows users, you've had all the good screencasting software for years.


• JingProject is a free, quick and dirty screencasting service from the makers of Camtasia. It's Mac and Windows friendly. We've had it crash a lot and direct access to the files is not as simple as it should be, but when it works it's really easy to use.


• There are probably hundreds of other services that combine powerpoint, video, audio and other media types to let you create presentations. What are your favorites?

The two mentioned above capture moving images, which can sometimes take way too long to get right. We think that ScreenSteps looks like a very intelligent entry into this field as it only captures screenshots and is really easy to use. If you'd like to learn more about the application, check out the interview with its developers posted today at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Thanks to Jason Glaspey for bringing ScreenSteps to our attention.

From post revisioning to a "Press This" bookmarklet for quick tumblelog style posting, there are quite a bit of great improvements you'll see in Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1. So what else can users expect to see?

• Caching of static files with Google Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

Posting Revisions

What's Missing?

One of the biggest changes in Wordpress 2.5 was the dashboard and design user interface of the entire Wordpress system. It would've been nice to see an option to revert back to the "classic" Wordpress interface or maybe even more dashboard themes for users. While Wordpress 2.6 features a host of new improvements, let us know what you think is missing from the list. In the meantime, grab Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1 here. Don't forget to backup your files!

MagCloud is another project to emerge from HP Labs. Earlier this year, HP Labs launched BookPrep, a print-on-demand service for out-of-print books. Now, they're delivering MagCloud, a project devoted to providing small independent publishers the ability to publish digitized magazines as well as economically print on demand. Using HP's Indigo technology, the magazines are printed when ordered in full color on 80 lb paper with saddle-stitched covers.

How To Use MagCloud

To get started with creating a custom magazine, you must first create a PDF of your content using a tool that outputs high-resolution PDFs, like Adobe InDesign. You'll also need to have a PayPal account in order to sell the magazines with the markup you choose. Since the service is in beta at the moment, orders must be sent to a U.S. shipping address. Publishers can request an invitation here.

Browsing the MagCloud Selections

For those just interested in reading the MagCloud produced zines, you can create an account and then browse the selections of magazines available or subscribe to receive email notifications from the publisher as to when new issues are available. You can also choose to subscribe via RSS, but the feed does not contain the magazine's content as posts, only notifications when new issues are released.

There are already tons of magazines to browse through in diverse categories ranging from Art to Food to Literature to Finance and so much more. For example, RWW readers might be interested in the soon-to-launch magazine "The Rubyist" (for Rubyists, by Rubyists), which will focus on technical content and happenings in the world of Ruby, Rails, and Merb. Or for the more business-minded, the magazine "Professionally Speaking" may appeal, which gives tips on public speaking, giving presentations, etc.

Another great thing about a self-published magazine is that you can just purchase the issues you're interested in - the same as buying from the newsstand. You don't have to commit to a full subscription.

Previewing a MagCloud Magazine

A Great Addition To The POD World

As we noted earlier this year, the print-on-demand industry has really been heating up. Amazon launched CreateSpace and another Lulu-esque service called Wordclay began offering paperback publishing. Even casual publishing outfits like CafePress and Blurb have continued to offer options for less serious writers. Now, MagCloud seems to be a perfect addition to join the POD space. If you want to join MagCloud yourself, the signup page is here.

Today's announcement, first covered in the San Jose Business Journal (press release here), was that HP has made deals with 30 video content production companies for more than 4,000 titles. Classic TV, religion, independent film and geographically targeted content were among the examples of provided of available content.

Context

As points of consumption for video content proliferate and the cost of production falls, the market for video content is sure to expand substantially. Lingering brand fears around user generated content have kept demand high in distribution channels for professionally produced content. Facilitating a supply chain and market for small producers is a smart move by HP reminiscent of other large companies' offerings in the independent film and music markets. Related startups include digital content brokers Mochila, iAmplify and video licensing platform ImageSpan, among many others.]]> Sponsor

In this article we'll compare Six Apart and Automattic, two independent firms focused on blogging software. Most other blog platforms are owned by big companies (e.g. Google owns Blogger), so the competition between Six Apart and Automattic is intriguing. Six Apart is the firm behind Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox, while Automattic is associated with WordPress.

Overview Comparison

Apart from both being independent companies (i.e. not owned by bigcos), the overview table shows further similarities. In each case, the founders made software available for download prior to founding the firm. Ben and Mena Trott founded Six Apart nine months after making Movable Type available. Matt Mullenweg founded Automattic just under two years after first making WordPress available. Each firm subsequently introduced hosted software.

Contrasts

One of the most significant differences between the firms, in terms of product history, is that WordPress was free/open source at release. For those already familiar with free/open source software: WordPress was a fork of b2, which was under the GPL, so WordPress was in effect GPL'd before it existed. To explain some of the terms associated with such software: the blogging tool b2 was released under the GNU General Public License. This license allows you (or me, or Matt Mullenweg) to change the software, provided that if you distribute your derivative work, you do so under the GPL. Hence it would be possible for you or anyone else to build a fork from WordPress, just as WordPress itself was originally a fork from b2.

While WordPress was built on an existing and free foundation, Movable Type was written from scratch. Movable Type was in a sense free at first release. Ben and Mena did not demand payment, and neither (when it was initially founded) did Six Apart.

Then, on May 13 2004, Mena Trott blogged that It's About Time Six Apart got its licensing and pricing "right". Mena's post, and the changes it announced, was unpopular with many people who blogged using Movable Type. For example, Carthik Sharma remarked that with Six Apart's new policies in place, "it’s about time Movable Type users moved to WordPress" and then provided guidelines for bloggers wishing to make the move.

Hosted Services

Each firm offers hosted blogging, as well as a downloadable product. Six Apart has three hosted services, as the table above shows. Automattic has one, at WordPress.com (WordPress.org is the home of the downloadable product).

WordPress.com uses the freemium pricing model. There is no charge to create a basic blog, but premium services are available at a price. One example of such a service is domain mapping; it is due to my purchase of domain mapping that the URI changingway.org points to my blog (the original and basic URI for which was changingway.wordpress.com). Automattic reserves the right to run Adsense on WordPress.com blogs, although it does not seem to exercise this right frequently.

Revenue from premium services and from Adsense are not the only benefits of WordPress.com to Automattic. The site also illustrates the scalability of the WordPress software; there are now over a million blogs at WordPress.com.

Six Apart's hosted services use a variety of pricing models. Its original hosted service, TypePad, uses a tiered pricing scheme. Hence in pricing, as in look and feel, it is the most similar to Movable Type. There is no free price point at TypePad.com. However free TypePad blogs are available at Friendster.com; Friendster runs ads on these blogs.

LiveJournal, when acquired by Six Apart in January 2005, used the freemium model. There are currently three main LiveJournal account types: as well as the original Basic and Paid, there is Plus, under which LiveJournal provides extra features in return for being allowed to run ads on the blog.

Vox, which was launched by Six Apart in October 2006, is free of charge and ad-supported. Of all the hosted services described in this post, it is the one that most emphasizes and encourages social networking and multimedia.

Misc

Three further Automattic products merit mention. WordPress Multi-User enables the building of hosted services based on WordPress, and so is used by blog system administrators. Akismet is a spam detection service, not limited to WordPress or even to blogs in terms of the software that can use it; it is free for personal use and a paid service for commercial use.

BBpress is forum software, originally written to power the various WordPress-related online forums, and then made available for download under the GPL.

Free and open source models

Mention of the GPL brings us back to the point of free/open source software. Although the fact that WordPress has always been open source is significant, the firms are closer together in terms of open source software than they have ever been. Six Apart has made two large steps toward the open source model. The first was the acquisition of LiveJournal, which is open source software (see LiveJournal.org). The second step was part of the recent announcement of Movable Type 4. There will be a completely open source version.

Turning now to Automattic, there is a view that services such as WordPress.com represent a step away from free software. Although WordPress.com is based on WordPress Multi-User, which is in turn based on WordPress, the source for WordPress.com is not available. The GPL does not oblige Automattic to make the WordPress.com source available. This is because WordPress.com is accessed using a web browser, rather than by being downloaded to, and run on, the blogger's computer system. Since the WordPress.com software is not distributed, there is no obligation under the GPL to make the source available.

This is regarded by some free software advocates as a loophole in the GPL (and one that persists in version 3 of the GPL). However, it would not be appropriate to single out Automattic for "exploiting the loophole". If it is exploitation, then other firms - such as Google - are far larger exploiters than Automattic. Further, most of the WordPress.com code is the code for WordPress itself, much of this code was written by Automattic employees, and all of the WordPress code is available under the GPL.

Conclusion

One of the other similarities between Six Apart and Automattic is that each is privately held. Hence one of the difficulties of comparing them is that financial data is not available. On a financial note, there is a curious absence of acquisition rumors about these firms. Given the centrality of blogging to Web 2.0, I am sure that acquiring one of these blogging indies has been considered at the bigcos. However, neither seems eager to be acquired.

The title of this essay is Six Apart and Automattic, rather than Six Apart versus Automattic. The purpose is to contrast, rather than to predict a winner. But the firms are certainly competitors. For example, individuals looking for free hosted blogging may well consider both Vox and WordPress.com, as well as Blogger. However, I believe that the various segments of the blogging software market provide many opportunities for the "major indies" like Six Apart and Automattic, as well as for bigcos such as Google. What do you think?

Andrew Watson blogs at changingway.org using WordPress. He is on his second career, having left the software industry to become a business school professor.

Popular social news site Digg has announced a number of new features in anticipation of the new year, including a beta podcasting service and enhanced video on the site. Digg says the aim of the new features is to make Digg a more inviting environment for new users, in line with Digg's business imperative to broaden their audience beyond its techie roots.

The most significant of the changes is the increased focus on multimedia as a way to reach their audience. With podcasting and more video added to the mix, Digg can perhaps tap into the YouTube/MySpace user base some more. And given Digg founder Kevin Rose's history with podcasting and videocasting (which continues to this day in the form of Diggnation, Rose's popular weekly show), this plays to the strengths of the Digg team. I think it's a great move and one that is likely to appeal to a younger - less techie, but more media savvy - audience that up till now probably hasn't been aware of Digg. You could in a sense label this as 'The YouTube-ization of Digg'.

Interface Design, Digg Goes Widescreen

Digg moves from a fixed-width layout to a flexible layout allowing users to make use of screen real-estate on larger monitors. Navigation has also been moved to the top allowing users to quickly switch between sections.

Top 10 Stories/Videos

Digg stories move fast, so Digg has created a quick view of the top 10 hottest on Digg, updated in real time. This list changes as other stories accelerate in Diggs and can be thought of as a quick pulse of what's hot in any given section.

Videos Enhancements

Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, Digg has added a couple of new features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get a lightbox window in which users can preview and Digg the video without leaving the site.

Podcasting

Now users can Digg their favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Digg Podcasting becomes a one-stop destination for discovering, Digging, discussing, and sharing the podcasts and podcast episodes that appeal to users.

Profile Enhancements

Users will now be able to quickly jump between their Dugg News, Videos or Podcasts. With three separate sections, Digg is making it easier for users to sort through their own Diggs or their friends’ Diggs.

Digg says it currently has "over 700,000 registered users", so they will be hoping the new media focus quickly pushes that user base into the millions.

Here are some screenshots of the new features:

New digg homepage

videos

videos view

episode permalink

podcast permalink

podcast permalink extended

profile

I'm usually pretty skeptical of apps that try to do too much - because in this era of 'best of breed' apps, people will usually choose a variety of branded apps for specific purposes (e.g. Photobucket or Flickr for photos, del.icio.us for bookmarks, YouTube for video, etc). Either that, or they will choose a portal solution from a big company that they can 'trust' - e.g. Yahoo, MSN or Google.

Technology behind ZCubes

ZCubes though interests me because of the advanced ways it enables users to interact with and create content. Parag Mathur, who is VP of Product Management at ZCubes, told me that they use "the latest in next generation web technologies." He said that ZCubes marries client-side web technologies like DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, DirectX, XML/XSLT, and VML with server-side technologies like ASP.NET and J2EE. The ZPaint functionality uses VML vector graphics (supported only in IE) and they are in the process of developing support for SVG to make the platform compatible with multiple browsers.

That's a lot of acronyms! But the nutshell is that ZCubes relies heavily on browser-based technologies - so no plug-ins or downloads are required.

Test Driving ZCubes

In my tests of the product, I found the technology to be promising - but at this time the UI still needs a lot of work and I'm not yet convinced of the utility to most people. Right now there aren't any compellingly unique features that will draw people from MySpace or YouTube into the ZCubes world. Hopefully this will change over the next year or so, because I like the vision of the developers and the product focus on encouraging people to be creative on the Web.

Unfortunately at this time, ZCubes only works in the IE browser. They will release a Firefox version shortly, however it won't be able to use the advanced features in ZCubes. Hopefully this too will change over time.

The Future

Going forward, ZCubes says their primary focus is on collaboration. This includes developing shared 1D, 2D and 3D spaces, chat, and a NetClipboard (a web-based clipboard where you can store content in any structure). These functionalities will be based on a new technology called NetVariables that they have developed and submitted for a patent. In addition, the company is also developing a "simple" scripting language for ZPaint, that can be used to create/record/replay and animate drawings - which will also use SMIL 2.0. Other things in development are ZSlideShow, which will be similar to PowerPoint, and multi-layered ZCubes (a ZCube inside another ZCube up to infinite levels). They're also currently developing partnerships with online storage providers.

In summary, ZCubes is all about letting people create and mix different types of content - and share the results with others. Which is an admirable goal! It just needs a bit more UI spit and polish, along with a really compelling kick ass feature or two to draw in new users.

While I was in San Francisco I sat down to talk to Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic Inc - the company set up to leverage the popular open source blogging tool Wordpress. One of their main projects is WordPress.com, described as "a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained." It's pretty much the equivalent of TypePad, the hosted blogging service offered by Automattic's main competitor SixApart.

KnowNow Wordpress Enterprise Edition

The competition with SixApart was stepped up today when Toni announced on his blog a partnership with enterprise RSS vendor KnowNow, for a new product called KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition (KWEE). It's an enterprise version of Wordpress and comes just a month after SixApart announced Movable Type Enterprise 1.5, which we profiled on Read/WriteWeb. Toni told me that KWEE is an enterprise package of Wordpress MU (the multi-user version of Wordpress) - with additional enterprise functionality bundled in. So for example KWEE comes with LDAP, Automattic's spam solution Akismet and a stats package. KnowNow will market the product to their existing base of enterprise customers - and any improvements that KnowNow makes to the Wordpress product itself, will be released back as open source.

I asked Toni will it be a hosted service? He said it will be available as both a hosted service (by KnowNow) or customers can install it on their own servers.

Stats about Wordpress.com

As far as Wordpress.com goes, Toni reeled off some impressive stats. It gets 18 million unique visitors per month and 70 M page views. There are over 480,000 blogs hosted on wordpress.com. He also said there are an estimated 1-2 million Wordpress installations that are self-hosted. Toni told me the fact that wordpress.com is ad-free is a big part of the reason why people use it.

I asked Toni how wordpress.com compares to Typepad. He said that Typepad has similar traffic to wp.com, although he says wp.com is about to pass Typepad (at least according to Alexa). Here is the latest Alexa chart:

Toni said there is a developer ecosystem around wordpress, which was done without putting commercialism around it - e.g. he notes that themes have links back to the designers. He also told me there is a lot of innovation happening in the wordpress platform in general - for example the plugins. The fact that Wordpress.org is open source is also a factor in the growth of the product, said Toni.

Of course you will hear a different story from SixApart, but my general impression is that Wordpress has the advantage in innovation - but TypePad is seen as a slicker and more user-friendly product for the masses.

International Expansion

One of the more interesting aspects of wordpress.com is its international usage. While english is the number 1 language used, there are a multitude of other languages supported - and Wordpress users are encouraged to translate more. Spanish is the second most popular language currently - and indeed 4 of the top 10 Wordpress.com blogs are Spanish.

But while international support is expanding, Wordpress isn't immune to the problems of operating in China - where Wordpress is blocked.

Wordpress Widgets

One of the more promising areas of growth in Wordpress is widgets, or mini web apps that Wordpress users can plug into their blog. As of now there are 247 widgets. Around 15-20 of these are available in the wordpress.com service. Toni told me that most widgets are created by external developers. Basically this involves developing a Wordpress plugin and then widgetizing it in an HTML wrapper.

Summary

It's pretty plain that Automattic is taking on SixApart with both the Enterprise Edition and the continued growth and expansion of wordpress.com. Right now SixApart has the lead in marketing and probably resources, but Wordpress is a strong innovator and has an open source platform to attract developers. This little battle is far from over and it'll be interesting to watch it unfold!