The team over at Deutche WordPress just added the ability to browse WordPress blogs in Germany using Google Maps. Deutche WordPress maintains a searchable directory of WordPress-powered blogs in Germany and each directory level contains a new map overlay of locations. Check out WordPress blogs in Germany focused on soccer for example. Google Maps currently provides no map coverage of Germany so the site is using only the country outline at the moment. Tags: googlemaps, mapsmashup…
Category Archives: Software
Matt Mullenweg on VeriSign’s move into the blog space
Matt Mullenweg recently posted his views on VeriSign moving into the blog space with its acquisition of Weblogs.com. Matt is a lead developer of WordPress, an open source blogging tool, and one of the developers of Ping-o-Matic, a ping relay service that currently forwards a blog update ping to over 20 destinations. Matt has some first-hand experience with the team at VeriSign. We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they…
VeriSign acquires Moreover
Moreover Technologies has been acquired by VeriSign for between $25 million and $30 million. The acquisition is VeriSign’s second announced move in the blogging space in the past week having previously acquired Weblogs.com. Moreover founders David Galbraith and Nick Denton confirmed the deal on their own personal blogs. Rafat Ali reports Google came in with a higher bid a little too late. Moreover currently powers sites such as My MSN feed modules, and Microsoft has to be questioning its relationship with Moreover if it was not already. It’s interesting to hear Google attempted to make a play for the company…
Vote for the Internet Explorer 7 feed icon
The Microsoft Internet Explorer team is soliciting feedback for the icon used to represent the presence of a feed in a web page viewed in Internet Explorer 7. I personally like option 4. The suggested icon is very similar to Firefox Live Bookmarks icon and shows the transmission of content from one point to many possible receivers. Tags: IE7…
Blogger adds inbound links to posts
Blogger blogs can now easily add a listing of inbound links to any blog entry. The new feature utilizes Google Blog Search’s URL search feature to display the a list of links on the individual post page. Each view of the individual post page results in a dynamic JavaScript call to generate an array containing a link URL, title, excerpt, author, and time. Each link uses the “nofollow” attribute value. Users without JavaScript see a link to Google Blog Search for the post URL. Blog authors can enable the inbound links display across their entire blog and alter the…
Google Reader
Google just released their web-based feed reader named Google Reader. Users can login using their Google account and track web feeds in a two-column layout with a default sort of “relevance.” Google is not currently pulling from its archive of past blog entries and only displays the items currently present in the feed. The first column displays a list of subscribed feeds and switches to a list of posts when you click an item. Posts are displayed in the sidebar drawer using title and publication date only. The complete entry display contains the entry title, author, publication date, link, and…
Yahoo! RSS awareness whitepaper
Yahoo! conducted a study of Internet users in August in an attempt to quantify the ubiquity of RSS among Internet users. Yahoo! released a whitepaper covering some of their findings after surveying over 4000 Internet users in August. Findings Only 12% of those surveyed were aware of RSS, and only 4% have knowingly used RSS. 27% of respondents had interacted with RSS content in personalized start pages such as My Yahoo! but did not realize they were using RSS. The average RSS user subscribed to 6.6 feeds and spend an average of 4.1 hours per week reading those feeds. Only…
Interview with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons of NewsGator
I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons to talk about the NewsGator and its recent acquisition of Ranchero Software. I spent about 30 minutes with Greg and Brent talking about how they decided to work together, how NetNewsWire contributes to NewsGator’s product strategy and revenue goals, and what changes we can expect from both sides in the near future. I asked a few questions Greg and Brent had never discussed and there are definitely a few details yet to be worked out. We also talked about Nick Bradbury and NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradbury…
NewsGator appIcon for OS X
I just created a new application icon for OS X using the NewsGator logo. Here’s how you swap logos for NetNewsWire: Find the NetNewsWire application on your hard drive. It is most likely in your Applications folder. Right-click, and select “Show Package Contents.” Open the “Contents” folder. Open the “Resources” folder. Replace the existing appIcon.icns with the new NewsGator icon (you may want to back up your existing copy). Launch NetNewsWire. Yes, it could be more pretty with transparencies, so feel free to modify if you like the idea. Tags: netnewswire, icon…
NewsGator purchases NetNewsWire
NewsGator Technologies has a new page on their site about the acquisition of NetNewsWire. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, will be joining the NewsGator team as a product architect according to a release on the NewsGator site. Om Malik scooped the news last night. The phrasing of the announcement is around NetNewsWire only. I presume NewsGator has acquired all of Ranchero software, including products such as editing software MarsEdit, and not just NetNewsWire. NewsGator Technologies now produces software in C#, ASP.net, Delphi, and Objective C. Lack of a unified codebase and the company’s reliance on one engineer per…