ReadWriteWeb

Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews.

Surprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps.

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.

A small team of high-profile developers are unveiling its new service for hosting customizable but automatically maintained WordPress publishing software installs tonight. WP Engine seeks to serve what they believe is a large market: businesses that need more customizability than WordPress.com hosted accounts offer at low-end prices but more ease of use and scalability support than the millions of WordPress.org users get running open source installs on their own or rented servers.

For $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. Scalability durring traffic spikes is one of the company's biggest sales propositions.

These days, it's no longer enough to have an inviting storefront and amazing products on your shelves, whether physical or digital. Fueled by social media, with which even the search engines scrambling to keep up, the Web is now happening in real time. How can a small company stay competitive?

One critical component of the answer to that question is something that most businesses have never had to consider doing in the past: become a publisher.

Squarespace, one of the largest professional blogging platforms, just announced that it has received a $38.5 million investment from Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Until now, the company, which was founded by then 21-year-old Anthony Casalena, did not take any institutional outside investments. Instead, Squarespace, which offers a trial version of its service but no free tier, has been growing organically. The company plans to use the new cash influx for product development and to hire more team members.

ReadWriteWeb is looking for a part-time, late-afternoon/evening news writer. It's a great opportunity to make a name for yourself, to work with an awesome team and to learn a whole lot about the web and new media journalism. We'd love for it to turn into a full-time job, if you prove successful. Your geographic location is not important. Your work will be syndicated to the New York Times technology page online, so your family will understand what you're doing. (To some degree.)

I (co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick) wrote up this job description and Founding Editor Richard MacManus said, "We'll do it live!" So here you go. Read on for our description of what we're looking for in the next addition to our team.

The conversation about conflict of interest for bloggers (and other social media types) never really dies down, and flares up constantly in ways large and small.

Sometimes it's something as major as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission going after blogger freebies. Sometimes it's just a drive-by accusation that a blog post is "link bait", and not a useful or genuine contribution to the conversation.

The common thread is this: What responsibility we have to our audiences, when are our own interests in conflict with theirs, and what do we do when that happens?

Ten years ago, most people were not aware of blogs and blogging. Today, however, blogging is a mainstream phenomenon. While it doesn't get the same hype as Twitter and Facebook today, there are still millions of blogs and bloggers out there. Looking at almost 100 million blog posts in its database, social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos created a mini-census of today's blogosphere. Specifically, Sysomos looked at the age, gender and location information attached to these posts.

Links - are they a net negative for readers online? That's the idea being deliberately explored by a number of publishers, says writer Nicholas Carr today.

The iconoclastic author says that he has grown sympathetic to the thinking of Steve Gillmor, the almost incomprehensibly future-bound sage tech journalist who has argued for years that "links are dead." Links within articles are a distraction and imply that the reader ought to leave what they are reading to read something else, Carr says. Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person's intentions and concentration. Do you think that's true? I'll skip putting links in this post, until the end, and you can let me know how it feels.

Last month we wrote a short post about using Google Wave for live blogging. Today, during Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook privacy press conference, we decided to put this theory into practice and live blogged the event with Wave. The reaction to our experiment was overwhelmingly positive, so we decided to share how we it up for our live blogging session today.