ReadWriteWeb

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

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.

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.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has given his 2011 State of the Word address, and the state of the word is strong. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress, up from 8.5% last year. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run the popular open-source blogging software.

Mullenweg's address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today's minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress' user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators. But this year, WordPress conducted its first user and developer survey, receiving over 18,000 responses, and it found a thriving economy for developers and site administrators as well.

Cisco long has had its own exemplary in-house news site called @News. Last month they upgraded and are now rebranding it as The Network here. So what can you find there? At first blush it looks like many other Web-news portals, with a set of top stories from major tech freelancers such as Steve Wildstrom (formerly of Business Week) who has written an interview with Internet luminary Vint Cerf and another story on big data; Elizabeth Corcoran, the former Valley Forbes bureau chief, and John Dodge, someone like myself that got their start in tech journalism back at PC Week in the 1980s.

For those of you that are men (or women) of a certain age (as close to the age of the characters of the wonderfully named TV show), it will come as no surprise that the focus of our communications tools these days is social networks. But how our communications have evolved from synchronous to asynchronous is less well thought out.

Back when I was growing up in corporate America, we were coming off the mainframe era where most of the communications were encapsulated inside manila inter-office memos. That was mostly asynch - you received the memo and acted accordingly. Then came DISSOS and PROFS and the ability to email someone, and we quickly made the transition to more synchronous times. No more waiting, or so it seemed. It took a good ten years or so before email became the lifeblood of corporate communications, and this was before the Internet really took off in the middle 1990s, when dot coms could be purchased by anyone with a credit card.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Popular mobile app Instapaper isn't just a great way to catch up on reading when you're spending time offline. It's also a little bit of magic that blends the quiet of time disconnected with the buzz of the social web. It looks like that may become all the more true with the addition of a blogging tool to the Instapaper app, if a public conversation about the matter can be taken literally.

Instapaper stores stripped-down copies of articles you select from the web, but offline on your device so you can read without connectivity. With the latest version of the app launched a few months ago, you can designate an article for sharing out on Twitter or Facebook once you get back online later. Today WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked Instapaper founder Marco Arment to enable posting to a WordPress blog from inside Instapaper. "I'll make it happen," was Arment's response. Cool!

"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.