ReadWriteWeb

Half of the team that founded Etsy, along with a former Etsy and Amazon.com product manager, have quietly launched a new startup. Postling is a centralized platform for small businesses to publish to the social Web.

The pitch is that it's a single place to do all your social media work. If you're thinking it sounds like a clone of other multi-network social media apps, you'd be only partly correct. By signing up on the site, businesses get a single place to blog, share photos and post to social networks. With no free option, it's clearly positioning itself as a business tool and not a place for social media addicts, like FriendFeed or Ping.fm.

A few days ago, we got a chance to talk about the state of blogging and social media in Germany with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com - one of Germany's most popular blogs. In the interview, Weiß told us that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention. With regards to Germany's Internet startup scene, Weiß argues that, with very few exceptions, most companies are also years behind the U.S. and just aren't innovative enough to compete.

This month we are offering some additional value to our long-term sponsors. It's a new type of contextual link advertising and we think it is important to the future of blogging as a business. For our wider audience, some of whom operate websites that are monetized through advertising, the background may be interesting.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a journalist. My heroes were people like Woodward and Bernstein and the people reporting from war zones. The profession seemed to be both glamorous and worthwhile. Faced with a real decision as a young adult, I went into the IT industry. Then, later in my career, I started blogging, and then writing for ReadWriteWeb, and now I am COO of this news media business. So that got me thinking about the past, present, and future of journalism. Disclosure: I do not come at this from a long career as a journalist. This is a personal, blog-style view of the journalism profession by somebody who cares about the outcome.

Most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal features an article about professional blogging, a topic that is obviously very close to our hearts here at RWW. Mark Penn, the article's author, even cites some of our own numbers, though the most astonishing number he arrives at is that America is now home to over 452,000 professional bloggers who use blogging as their primary source of income. If these numbers are indeed true, then that would mean that there are now almost as many bloggers in the U.S. as lawyers (550,000). We do, however, have our doubts.

Analyst firm Forrester published a report this morning telling corporations that it's a good idea to engage bloggers in "sponsored conversations," or the exchange of goods or credit in exchange for blog coverage. The report, titled "Add Sponsored Conversations to Your Toolbox", is 8 pages long, focuses on a number of high profile examples like the case of KMart and Chris Brogan, and sells for $795.

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Momentile is a new photo sharing service with some very cool twists. There is, of course, no dearth of photo sharing services online, but momentile has come up with an interesting way to combine photo sharing and lifestreaming with the spirit of micro-blogging services like Twitter. The basic idea behind momentile is that you will upload one picture per day, so that after a year, you will have a collection of 365 pictures that represent that year. Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we do have a few invites to give away. Instructions for how to get them are at the bottom of this post.

Zcapes is a new "augmented reality" application that lets you instantly transform any object or event into a mini blog using your mobile phone. But this is no ordinary blogging platform. Instead of focusing on publishing, Zcapes focuses on integrating streams from the "Live Web" into whatever blog you create. The end result is a Zcape page that taps into the real-time conversations surrounding an event, activity, thing, or group.

Blog reading on Facebook is becoming a popular activity. One of the top applications for following blogs through the social networking site is NetworkedBlogs, an app which launched last year bringing the blog community to the Facebook platform. Half MyBlogLog, half RSS reader, the application lets users add their blog, favorite the blogs of their friends, and click though the latest headlines. Most importantly, the app brings blogs to the more mainstream Facebook audience.