The new version also now automatically saves posts and restores them if the network connection is lost during the publishing process.

Just like the first version, Wordpress for iPhone 2 is an open-source program.

It's important to note that this new version will not appear as an update to the old version. Instead, users will have to install a new app, which can run side-by-side with the older version.

The new version, of course, still offers the same basic feature set as the earlier version. These include support for multiple blogs, photo uploads and post previews, as well as full support for tags, categories and password protected posts.

Blogging on the iPhone

There can be little doubt that the iPhone - or any mobile phone for that matter - isn't the ideal platform for writing long, thoughtful blog posts. Maybe that's why Wordpress for iPhone 2 puts more emphasis on comment moderation than the first version.

For a quick blog post on the road, though, the app is perfectly adequate, especially if you just want to upload a few pictures. It's not as easy to use as the more specialized PicPosterous, but Wordpress for iPhone 2 is a far more flexible application and Wordpress has a different user in mind for this app.

I get that sometimes, which says a lot more about my own insecurities and the extent to which the social Web replicates the social dynamics of high school than it does about any real risk. My social network includes some very forgiving, open-minded people... and the online world is much, much bigger than anything I've tapped into so far.

Just an example: when I look through the list of the top 100 Vancouver Twitterers by number of followers, I don't recognize the vast majority of names. That tells me that a big conversation is going on (or a lot of small conversations) that I'm not a part of.

Which is cool. It's a big ol' blogosphere, and I can't possibly hope to keep tabs on any more than my small corner of it.

It's also a handy reminder to avoid the temptation of generalizing about the social Web from our own experience if it. For any of us who wants to understand how the Web and the way we use it are evolving and make some intelligent guesses about the future of social media, breaking out of our comfortable little circles and exploring a little is critical.

More Noise to Signal.

All easy enough for me to say, of course; I have a job and make a pretty good living (touch wood). I can imagine that I might be tempted to modify my views if money was short and a blog review could put another meal on the table for my kids. Then again, for every blogger out there who's struggling to make ends meet, there are countless more blog readers - the people the marketers are really trying to reach. Don't they deserve to know about the relationship between product and blogger when they assess what they're reading?

I'm a fan of disclosure, and while I haven't examined the FTC guidelines in detail, I support the idea in principle.

But it's interesting that the FTC went after bloggers rather than, say, entertainment writers who don't mention the expensive junkets that movie studios take them on. A blogger who has to disclose that she or he received a free package of hot dog weiners has every right to feel burned after dropping fifty bucks to take the family to the latest "THRILLING!" "FANTASTIC!" "SURE-FIRE WINNER!"

More Noise to Signal.

I've fallen prey to this temptation myself, so I say all of this with a certain amount of chagrin. But I hope I'm on the road to reform: embracing my uncertainty, and vacillating with confidence.

(By the way, the title of Chris Brogan's smashing blog post inspired the Neanderthal's line in this cartoon.)

More Noise to Signal.

Today, the company has announced TypePad Developer Program, a resource that will give developers access to the TypePad API and back end while running their sites on their own web servers. Six Apart is simultaneously launching TypePad Motion, a microblogging service built from the Pownce code base. Six Apart acquired Pownce from founders Kevin Rose (also founder of Digg), Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka in December 2008.

As the inaugural open-source app built for the TypePad platform, Motion is written in Python using the Django framework and is intended to help site owners build their communities quickly and simply. You can see the app in action on actor Zachary Quinto's site.

The functions and form are reminiscent of Yahoo! Meme or Tumblr, and content can be cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. Site owners will have to contact Six Apart directly to integrate Motion into their sites.

In a post on the Six Apart blog, CEO Chris Alden wrote, "Our platform enables developers to use structured objects, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.

"We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube."

We always liked Posterous, which launched last July, because of the simplicity of the service. Just one email to post@posterous.com will get you a new blog, for example. Over time, however, the company has added lots of additional features, including the ability to use your own domain name, track subscriptions through Feedburner, and embed a wider variety of media files. In addition, Posterous also launched a very nifty iPhone application (iTunes link) last month.

Given that Tumblr is probably Posterous' strongest competitor, it only makes sense for Posterous to give users an option to import their Tumblr blogs.

The new themes still follow Posterous' minimalist design philosophy, though given that users can edit the CSS themselves, they can now take control of their own designs.

Earlier in the email Technorati addresses why member authority has fallen across the site. The company explains, "As our intent is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis, we stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations."

If this tells us anything, it's that in this new environment of conversational media, many have abandoned their blogs for less labor intensive forms of expression. We just hope the company has some form of compensation for contributors. It'll be tough convincing bloggers to contribute posts and patch holes in what might already be a sinking ship. Nevertheless, if you're the type of person who likes a challenge and you've got the energy to increase your posts, you can apply for the program on Technorati's contact page.

Whatever your opinion of the arrangement, it's hard to swallow Leanne Italie's Associated Press write-up calling it "a 21st century fairytale." Karp writes a blog called The Girl's Guide to Homelessness and says she's very excited about the opportunity. It makes me feel a little nauseous.

On the other hand, a gig with Elle is a huge opportunity. Blogging for pay is something only a few lucky people get to do. Having worked as an executive assistant in the past, adding a current engagement at Elle Magazine to her resume will be a big boost in Karp's search for full-time employment.

Still, Cinderella 2.0 ought to be paid at least the legal minimum hourly wage in California by a famous fashion magazine, ought she not?

Weiß argues that blogging and social media adoption in Germany is far behind similar trends in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence over local or national politics. The mainstream media still likes to describe the Internet as a dangerous place, full of malware, porn, and scammers. While regular newspapers in Germany have also started to feel the pressure from the Internet (and every major German paper has a web site), the absence of a successful Craigslist-type site in the country has given the newspapers a longer lease on life than in America.

Unlike the U.S., no political blog has the influence of American sites like DailyKos or Talking Points Memo, though a recent (and misguided) move by German politicians to censor the Internet in Germany in order to combat child pornography led over 130,000 German Internet users to sign a petition against this plan and galvanized the German Internet community in an unprecedented way. It remains to be seen, though, if this sudden rise in Internet activism in Germany will have legs, or if it will just fizzle out quickly.

While political blogs in the U.S. also got a push during the Bush years when mainstream media outlets were generally seen as too close to the administration, German news outlets did not suffer from a similar pushback and most Germans still generally trust the mainstream media's reporting and equate blogging with excessive over-sharers who write Internet diaries about their German Shepherds.

In a post that created quite a stir in the German blogosphere (with a focus on blogging about economics), Felix Salmon argued that Germany's culture was basically the antithesis of what blogging is all about. If this is true, then maybe there is really little hope for blogging in Germany in the near future, but at the same time, there are also a number of news blogs that are doing quite well (Netzwertig is one of them), and there are a lot of passionate German bloggers who are trying to change the current negative perception of blogs.

The Absence of Social News

Unlike in the U.S., the German blogosphere also doesn't have large social news sites like Digg or Reddit to bring readers to blogs. With Yigg.de Germany has its own Digg clone, but it's not only hampered by a rather unpleasant design, but even the top stories there hardly get more than 20 votes. In addition, a headline on Yigg or similar services like Webnews.de barely drives any traffic to a site.

With regards, to blog monetization, things obviously also look equally bleak. Weiß told us that most companies still don't quite get that they could find a very targeted audience on blogs - but of course, the fact that blogs are still struggling to find a large enough readership doesn't exactly help matters here.

Startups

To some degree, the same is also true for the German startup scene, where, as Weiß argued, too many companies simply try to copy popular concepts that were developed elsewhere. The prime example for this is obviously StudiVZ, a blatant Facebook clone. Yet, while StudiVZ was able to quickly grow in Germany while Facebook was still ignoring most of the market outside of America, development of the site has now mostly come to a standstill and while Facebook is turning itself into a platform, the team behind StudiVZ has no interest in making any platform play whatsoever. Indeed, as Weiß told us, very few German startups are actually interested in the platform business and providing APIs for developers is still seen as unnecessary.

That doesn't mean that there aren't some interesting and successful German startups, of course. Xing is a good example for a service that gets things right, and SoundCloud, a very cool music service based in Berlin is another one (though the founders are actually from Sweden). It's important to note, though, that Germany never really had much of a startup scene and that there are a lot of cultural and bureaucratic barriers that would hold even some of the most determined founders from starting their own businesses.

Outlook: Bleak - But With a Silver Lining

There are multiple reasons why blogging in Germany just isn't taking off, but there is a chance that things might turn around this year. The upcoming election in Germany, for example, will give political blogs a chance to shine, especially if they manage to capitalize on the current discussion around Internet censorship. And while Twitter isn't quite a mainstream phenomenon yet, the discussion around its use in Iran during the current controversy around the elections there, also brought Twitter into the spotlight in Germany.

A number of Germany newspapers have also started to run blogs on their own sites, and with Rivva.de, the German blogosphere also has a very interesting meme-tracker that looks and feels similar to Techmeme and Memeorandum, and which provides a central focal point for the German blogosphere.

Of course, in a piece like this, we can only touch upon a small number of examples and have to rely on some sweeping generalizations. Feel free to take issue with our (and Marcel's) assessment of the German Internet scene and leave a comment.

CC-Licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Will Palmer.

Here is an example:

The sponsor's name is clickable and points to the sponsor's landing page.

All that our sponsors have to do is provide us with up to three "trigger phrases" that define their business. A phrase can be a single word or two linked words. For example:

• Hosting (single word)
• Dedicated server (two linked words)
• Web hosting (two linked words)

Think of these as search terms. It is search advertising within ReadWriteWeb. More importantly, it is in context, in posts that are relevant.

The idea is (a) to offer value to our readers by providing advertising links in the context of what they are reading and therefore more likely to find of interest, and (b) to offer a higher level of engagement to our advertisers, resulting in both more branding impressions and click-throughs.

Background on the Technology

We experimented with this manually to test whether the theory made sense and whether both readers and advertisers got some value from it. As you can imagine, doing this manually is difficult at any level of scale. So, we hunted for a technology partner who could build what we envisaged. This was not a simple technical challenge. What is easy for a human to do (read an article and quickly determine which phrases are most relevant) is quite hard for a search engine to do.

We needed an engine that would return ranked/scored results. We decided to limit the number of ads to three per post. Any more would detract from the reader's experience. We imagined that such an engine could come up with more than three matches for a sponsored trigger phrase in a single post, so we needed the engine to return the three most relevant sponsored trigger phrases.

That raised the bar considerably.

Our Partner: Hakia

We were delighted to find a partner that could jump this high bar. Even better, the partner is also a ReadWriteWeb sponsor (so it will have its own sponsored trigger phrases matched by the engine). Our partner is Hakia.

For those who don't know Hakia, check out its semantic search engine. It was a meeting of minds from the start. When we outlined our vision of what we wanted, it was clear that Hakia was headed in the same direction. Becoming partners to make it happen was a natural decision. Increasingly, we see our ability to partner effectively as being a core competency. We build our business with partners and couldn't imagine it any other way. Hakia clearly shares this partnering philosophy and competence.

Together with Hakia, we have big plans for what to do with this in future. We see it as something of a native revenue model for blogging. As always, we are keen to hear your feedback in the comments.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Blogging is open to anyone. You do not need to be trained as a journalist, nor do you need a job that pays you to blog. But many bloggers have created media businesses that employ people, cover the news on a regular basis, and sell advertising. They have created newspapers without the paper. Which turns out to be a fairly good business, with overheads low enough to make a reasonable profit.

However, the imperatives that come with running a real business tend to shift bloggers from the classic blog mode to something else. This has generated a lot of anguish among blog veterans who worry that blogging is "losing its soul." Journalists, on the other hand, face a starker, more existential threat as newspapers close shop.

So neither bloggers nor journalists are happy today.

But my optimistic nature inclines me to the view that some new model will emerge that makes for a fulfilling and reasonably well-compensated career.

Blogging Compared to Journalism

Blogging seems wonderful compared to traditional journalism: anybody can do it; the style is informal, fun, and personal; no editor has control of your voice; you're not tied to a fixed schedule; and you encounter incredible diversity.

But now that many bloggers have morphed into small-media business owners, they are starting to feel pressure to follow a schedule and cover key news stories. This is a world that a traditionally trained journalist can recognize.

But there is a fundamental difference. Bloggers are passionate experts first and journalists second. Somebody who blogs about technology could not credibly switch to politics, and vice versa. The journalism profession is adept at taking somebody from a story on a bank robbery and allocating them to a political sex scandal. Their professional skills enable journalists to be switch-hitters.

This difference is generally advantageous to bloggers. Training somebody in the basics of journalism is easier than creating passionate expertise in a subject.

However, this is where the blog media business is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater

We don't need print or TV to deliver news. Throw out the bathwater.

But the baby is cute. Let's keep the baby. Let's keep all the good things about journalism, the things that inspired me as a kid and that have inspired countless journalists:

1. A really strong desire to find the truth, wherever it may lurk;
2. An assumption that everyone knows more than you, and that your job is to find, cultivate, question, and listen to your sources, and then come to a view;
3. An inclination not to take anything at face value, because everyone has a point of view, and those points of view are usually driven by self-interest;
4. A resolve not to let commercial interests (in other words, advertisers) influence your search for the truth.

I don't know if this is taught in journalism school. It is a personal point of view. I hope that is okay. I did declare up front that this was a personal opinion piece.

Begone, You Self-Interested Tech Cynics

I have always been in the technology business. I like writing about the technology business because I find it fascinating and there are a lot of really smart people to talk to. But techies can spout the most self-interested baloney when it comes to content. The Web 2.0 vision of user-generated content is millions of passionate experts creating content that really clever algorithms deliver to audiences. The people who create those really clever algorithms become rich beyond the dreams of avarice while throwing a few crumbs to the content creators. Don't try paying a mortgage with AdSense or other CPC-affiliate revenue deals.

To a techie, "content" is just something to throw in a software system. Content creators don't talk about "content." They talk about their art or craft. Journalism is a form of art, albeit closer to craft than art. To a techie, art is just content. Which is more important, code or art? If you had to choose between a world without computers or a world without art, which would you choose?

But let's not get carried away with this. Journalism is still just a job.

Would Citizen Journalists Have Exposed Watergate?

Yes, they would have.

We don't need to protect journalism with public money or grants. The greater social good will be delivered by thousands of people on the ground reporting what is happening. That massive flow will be analyzed and edited ("curated") by a small number of experts who are motivated and trained to uncover the truth.

It won't be perfect. But the current system isn't perfect either. It is fair to say, though, that scumbags won't rest any easier. They will still be exposed.

Sacrifices will be made. One cannot imagine foreign bureaus surviving in anything close to their current form. Instead of having a few stringers on a loose contract, media firms will have a standardized deal that applies to anyone who covers fast-breaking news. That way, whoever is on the spot becomes a "just-in-time stringer."

Is that better or worse than what we have now? It's worse for the people working today in foreign bureaus on good salaries. But mostly, it's just different.

Online Revenue Models for Quality Need to Evolve

The newspaper business was fantastically profitable in its heyday. So it has the potential to pay a lot of journalists and editors reasonably well. The online business would likely pay less and employ fewer people because the overall revenue would be lower.

Will there be enough revenue to pay for "quality" journalism. Nobody can really define "quality" journalism. It is a bit like a judge who says, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it."

We can recognize "low-quality" journalism when we see it, and, boy, is there a lot of it online! The free-for-all nature of the Web is bound to produce a lot of junk. The question is, will it let the good stuff float to the top?

Why Pay $2.50 to Buy a Copy of the Financial Times?

Business people pay for quality content. The Financial Times costs $2.50 on newsstands and $99 for an annual subscription. The ROI is massive. Can you imagine a CEO making a bad decision because she neglected to read an article that would have saved her from the mistake?

Even the lowest-paid executive wastes more than $99 a year by not optimizing his cell phone bill.

I repeat: business people pay for news-driven content. If you doubt this, try prying a Bloomberg Terminal, which costs $2,000 per month, from a financial trader!

Consumers don't pay for news-driven content. Consumers pay for entertainment. Reading the news in the form of a newspaper was entertainment, a relaxing thing to do at the end of the day. People will still pay for entertainment. Just don't confuse that with the news business.

Monetizing Quality Online Is Harder

The Financial Times has been the savviest newspaper at balancing free and paid. It has a shot at getting it right because it has a business readership for whom time is money.

But the fundamental reality is that news, and everything that follows from news (opinion, analysis, insight), has to be primarily monetized by advertising; subscription revenue is the icing on the cake. Not much dispute on that score.

The problem is, how do you get an ROI from the additional investment in quality?

In a subscription-based business, that ROI is simple. If The Economist ever compromised its incredibly high standards, I would cancel the subscription I have had for decades. They would have then lost another good-quality advertiser.

But online, the correlation between quality and revenue is weaker. There is some correlation: a site focused on senior managers gets a higher CPM than a site targeting students.

But because the audience for a website is not measured in any way like an audience for, say, a controlled-circulation magazine is measured, there is a large element of faith that the "right" people (i.e. influential people with big budgets) are reading. That need for faith leads to a discount.

Until we as an industry can do a better job at monetizing quality, at correlating quality with revenue, the sensible business decision is simply to go after page views, any page views. This leads to the "aggregator bait" posts (Digg bait, Techmeme bait, Google bait, etc.) that we all deplore. Plenty among us really want to produce quality and have faith that the technology and business models will evolve to the point that quality journalism will be a rewarding profession to pursue.

In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.

A Few Caveats

Because LinkWithin does most of the computing on its own servers, it can take a little while before its results appear on your blog (usually around one hour). The plugin also doesn't play nice with every theme, though the team promises to fix any problem you might encounter within a few hours after you contact them.

Verdict

LinkWithin is still a bit rough around the edges. It would be great, for example, if you could actually customize how the related items are displayed on your blog. For now, you are restricted to showing three related stories, for example, and the related stories will appear on both your homepage and on individual posts.

If you are looking for a different way to showcase more of your blogposts on your blog, however, LinkWithin is definitely worth a try.

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for telling us about this new service.

Some of the numbers in this piece, however, seem more than far-fetched. Penn, for example, argues that it "takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year." Given that Technorati's latest State of the Blogosphere, where Penn gets this number from, reports that the mean CPM (that is, the income per 1,000 ad impressions) that U.S. bloggers are getting from advertising is around $1.20.

Actually, once you read the Technorati post, you can see that Penn ignores the fact that this number is based on the average income of bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, and that the median annual income for pro bloggers was only about $22,000 (in comparison, the median income for U.S. households is about $50,000).

Penn also quotes some of our own statistics. Last October, we asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants about their income. While we indeed reported that these top tier bloggers can get $75 to $200 per post, we also mention that the average tech blogger who responded made about $25 per post.

We also wonder if the calculations that Penn uses to arrive at 452,000 pro bloggers aren't a bit off. Penn, for example, says that 1.7 million bloggers 'profit from their work.' This number, however, comes from a statistic on the Blog World Expo site, which doesn't even quote a source for this number, and which doesn't even say that 1.7 million make money from their blogs, but that 1.7 million list making money as a reason to blog.

Some Good Questions

Penn does ask a number of good questions, though, even if they are clearly colored by the current state of journalism as a profession and business:

are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America's Newest Profession.

[...]

But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most, no formal training?

These questions are indeed worth pondering (though some of them could also be asked about newspapers as well). Unlike Penn, however, we are quite optimistic that many journalists will see the light in the long run and that readers will quickly weed out the blogs that have no ethics codes and standards. As for formal training, Penn's selective use of statistics in his piece seems to make that argument for him - and Penn, of course, isn't even a journalist himself.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

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.

We disagree with these arguments. For more conversation see Jeremiah Owyang's post on the report.

How Much Marketing Would a Marketing Blogger Blog About If A Marketing Blogger Could Market Marketing?

Effectiveness for advertisers is only a consideration because the price point is so low. Chris Brogan, for example, was given a $500 gift card to KMart in exchange for writing about the store. Chris Brogan is a new media rock star who does not need $500 but presumably participated because he's a marketing guy who's willing to experiment with new tactics. He specializes in it, in fact, and we have a lot of respect for him. His new media rock star status, however, does not mean that he has an audience with numbers that are significant to KMart's. His numbers are probably worth more than $500 in large part because of the visibility that the controversy helped stir up.

Even more than Brogan, many of the other participants in the KMart program are marketing bloggers who approach blogging in the style of John Chow, who says plainly: "I make money online by telling people how much money I make online."

In other words, very very few blogs have the kind of audience numbers that would make this practice effective at any but the lowest price point. Of those blogs that do have substantial numbers, we suspect that many of those are blogs about marketing - not general interest or blogs on other specific topics.

Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?

It's hard not to juxtapose this practice with the consolidation and struggles of more traditional media outlets. As Nick Carr might argue, the companies now paying specific bloggers to write about their products used to sponsor whole newspapers - thus subsidizing the kind of investigative reporting that no one will otherwise fund.

Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with "pay for play" pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.

Admittedly we say this from a position of privilege, as professional bloggers. Shouldn't everyone be able to get a piece of the action? We are sympathetic to this position, but can't help but feel like it's a morally ambiguous argument. Other than marketing bloggers, it seems that much of the "Pay Per Post" crew is made up of "mommy bloggers." Who would tell a mom with a blog that she doesn't deserve to make a buck, too? It's easy to be high minded about writing as an art when you make a comfortable living doing it.

How is This Different From Any Other Advertising?

One of the other arguments that gets made in favor of "sponsored conversation" is that it's just another form of advertising. The old paradigm of maintaining a wall between advertising and editorial still has a lot of validity, though. It's easier said than done, especially when it comes to tiny operations like almost all blogs are - but the ideals that paradigm offers can't be forgotten because of convenience.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we've recently begun running "sponsored posts" that are written not by our writers but by our advertisers. The best among these have been several by API management company Mashery ("Mashery: Untold Secrets Behind Managing an API", for example). Those posts are undeniably valuable for our readers (readers have submitted and cast more than 100 votes on Digg for several of them) and they are very, very clearly identified as coming from our advertisers. They are an interlude from our regular programming; we maintain a wall between that and the original content our writers create.

That said, if anyone charged for almost anything in this Web 2.0 economy, we would probably regularly receive free software to review. That might get a little more complicated.

When I got my first job at one of the largest tech blogs on the web, I was warned by staff of another of the largest tech blogs to not let the limo rides and champagne from vendors go to my head. That was no exaggeration for that person's blog, but here at ReadWriteWeb we very rarely get offers anywhere near as extravagant! We do sometimes get travel paid for, though. We disclose that if we end up writing about the companies that paid for those expenses - but it's an admittedly complicated situation. We don't accept being "taken out to dinner" individually but we do sometimes attend events where a group meal or travel is covered by a vendor. The bigger those events are, the more interesting they tend to be; the smaller and more personalized events tend to be more nauseating - so we say no!

Except in cases where the most ham-handed PR handlers make it more appealing to do so, it's hard to really think as critically about companies that are treating you nicely and introducing you to their staff.

We think that all of the above differs substantially from a shopping spree. That's just taking things too far, debasing a young medium too much. The examples at hand may not be like Juan Cole taking a break from blogging about Iraq to post about all the cool stuff he scored from Target, or what have you, but the whole idea still strikes us as dirty. Bloggers are replacing mainstream media and we believe that the community as a whole has the same kind of obligation to inform the public at large about those topics that we're dedicated to covering. Objectivity may be something we're transcending, but that doesn't mean we have to swing so far the other direction that we become cheap tools of corporate interest.

We recognize that this is a complex situation unfolding in a changing media landscape, but we didn't find Forrester's reasoning compelling enough to change our minds.

One Photo per Day

As you would expect, you can upload your photos directly to the service, or you can send them to a personalized momentile email address. Whenever you upload a new photo, you can add a short message that will then be sent out to your followers (momentile calls them 'stalkers') by SMS, Twitter, or email. However, momentile stresses that this is only meant to inform your followers about a new photo upload and should not be confused with tagging or adding a caption to a photo. Indeed, you can't add captions to a photo yourself - only your followers can add these.

You can upload more than one picture per day, by the way, but momentile enforces its one-picture-per-day rule and will automatically discard the older picture. Every day, you have until midnight to update your picture. That constraint, of course, is the focus of the service and it does make you think twice about which picture you want to choose to represent a given day.

Not a Social Network

Momentile insists that it is not a social network, but it does have a number of social features like following other users or saving other users' photos in your own 'stash.'

365

In a way, momentile codifies the 365 meme that is pretty popular on Flickr right now into one coherent app, with a focus on the mobile aspects of sharing and taking these pictures.

Overall, momentile looks like a fun and interesting app. It does have some minor usability problems, but the core idea behind the service is pretty cool. A few weeks ago, the cool kid on the blog was Plinky, a web app that asked you a different question every day. In some ways, momentile is a logical extension of that idea and it will be interesting to see how momentile's users decide to utilize the service in the long run.

Invites

Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we have ten invites to give away for now - just send an email to 'momentile AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will get one to you ASAP.