Weblog platforms

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How will Twitter make money?

Micro-blogging service Twitter will celebrate its third birthday in March and may have a revenue model to support the company over the long-term. Last month Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Kevin Maney of Porfolio.com the company will kick off new revenue streams by March 2009 to avoid raising another round of venture capital funding. Twitter’s deeply engaged community would love to see a sustainable business develop around the site, its services, and the community. In this post I will take a deeper look at Twitter and its revenue potential as publicly hinted by its founders.

Windows Live Spaces launches

Windows Live Spaces has just launched, tying new social networking features into the blogging service. The new release features an integrated friends module tied into your contacts defined in Messenger and elsewhere, and adds new customization options using Microsoft Gadgets. The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a “gleam” next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that…

Windows Live Spaces announces features

The next version of Microsoft’s Spaces hosted blogging product will include more social networking, gadget integration, and premium options such as no advertising on your blog. The features were announced tonight in a post on the Spaces team blog. Spaces has a whole new look (pictured above) with cleaner lines and additional featured content than current spaces blogs. Your IM friends list can be exposed as a blog module showing off all their latest content and online activity. You can add the same gadgets to your blog sidebar that run on the Live.com personal homepage. The new site also…

FeedBurner redesign, new podcast features

FeedBurner unveiled a new look for their statistics package today and a few new features for premium members. It’s the second major update in FeedBurner’s two years as a company and affects all of FeedBurner’s 140,000 publishers. Paid members can now track more information about individual entries such as popularity of a post by day and active readers vs. feed downloads (reach). Members utilizing the free service will notice better graphical data plotted over time, JavaScript tricks that allow you to easily dig deeper into a specific user-agent, and a separate display for user-agents not in the FeedBurner database as…

Odeo audio messages

Odeo introduced some new features last week including extended profiles and the ability to send any Odeo member an audio message. I’ve been asking Ev for audio comments for a few months and I’m glad it’s finally here! Anyone with a Flash player can send an audio message to an Odeo member. You can add a special button to your podcast site and instantly collect audio comments for each episode. Choose from over 20 pre-made buttons to include on your site and you can enable audio comments in minutes. I added a “Send me an Odeo” button to my contact…

MSN Spaces upgrade: more photos, more locations, and search

Microsoft just announced major upgrades to MSN Spaces. Highlights Search MSN Spaces blogs using MSN Search. The search index is still being populated and found no results for “kitten.” MSN Spaces member search Mobile versions of all MSN Spaces blogs, including search. Xbox gamer card integration. MSN Spaces is now available in Latin America, South Africa, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Members can now upload up to 500 photos each month. The new photo uploading feature supports photo descriptions and comments. It’s now easier to make money with Kanoodle contextual ads or Amazon’s associates program. Over 100 themes to choose…

Scuttle: open source social bookmarking

I use open source project Scuttle to manage my bookmarks on my server with full control over all my information. Scuttle is GPL licensed and uses PHP and MySQL to create a multiuser environment for storing bookmarks for public or private consumption. Anyone is welcome to join my social bookmarking tool on NiallKennedy.com. The API is a del.icio.us clone and open for import and export of your bookmarks if you try it out but don’t like it. Tags: socialtagging, tagging…

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…

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…

OPML listing of my weblog entries

Dave Winer and Robert Scoble would like more blog outputs as OPML. I just put together a Movable Type template to output all of my entries in OPML format complete with top-level categories. I output the resulting file as my index.opml. Check out my OPML template if you would like to create a OPML output of your Movable Type install. I have not validated the OPML is perfect and valid (but I did e-mail Dave Winer), and I really should have full subcategory traversal. It’s a start. Update: Dave Winer verified the output is correct and works with his browser….

Running a reliable blog tool and ping service

Most people do not realize how ping notification services (“ping beacons”) can negatively affect user experience for a blog tool vendor. Blog authors usually welcome the publicity but are not sure who to blame when something goes wrong, if the user even knows what went wrong and where. Let’s start with some background on the process of a ping notification (“ping”). The blog author hits the “Post” button, publishing his or her blog entry to a publicly available website. The blog tool retrieves a listing of specified services that are either platform-defined defaults or user-specified preferences. The blog tool attempts…

Blogs as an e-mail replacement

While at a cafe on Friday afternoon I experienced a new use for TypePad. I was at Ritual Coffee Roasters in the Mission district of San Francisco Friday afternoon when I noticed a gentleman transferring notes from a notepad to entries on his TypePad blog. His girlfriend is currently in Africa as a humanitarian aid worker and he created a password-protected TypePad blog to keep in touch. Blogging had replaced e-mail as their most reliable form of communication. How do you communicate with someone when you are unsure when they will have access to the Internet in one form or…

Odeo receives venture capital funding

Odeo just announced a funding round led by Charles River Ventures and joined by Amicus Ventures and 14 individual investors. Individual investors Emanuele Angelidis Francesco Caio Ron Conway James Hong Don Hutchinson Mitch Kapor Josh Kopelman Joe Kraus Mike Maples Tim O’Reilly Dave Pell Ariel Poler Barbara Poggiali Ed Zschau No word yet on the total amount investor or who sits on the board. Tags: odeo, podcasting…

PodShow receives $8.85 million series A round

PodShow has received $8.85 million dollars in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers according to today’s Private Equity Week Wire. The board is currently comprised of John Doerr and Ray Lane from KPCB, Jerry Newman of Bear Stearns, and angel investor Ram Shriram. PodShow was created by Ron Bloom and Adam Curry last year. The PodShow strategy podcast from April provides more information on the company and how they plan to expand. (financing tip via Jeff Clavier) This investment is a big deal for podcasting and user-generated distributed media. I have not really been following…

News Corp buys MySpace parent company for $580 million

News Corporation announced it will acquire Intermix Media, Inc. for $12 a share, or approximately $580 million in cash. Intermix is the parent company of MySpace.com, a popular social networking and blogging service with over eighteen million members. News Corporation is an international media conglomerate and consisting of Fox, Sky, DirectTV, New York Post, and Harper Collins. Intermix Media recently settled a spyware suit with the State of New York for $7.5 million dollars. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter pending shareholder approval. MySpace.com is attracting 2 million new registered users every month according to chief…

Flickr adding ranking algorithms within the next month

Stewart Butterfield announced a new Flickr feature at tonight’s Tag Tuesday event. In the next few weeks Flickr will introduce the ability to algorithmically sort photographs using criteria such as the most commented posts, the most popular photo publishers, and the structure of a user’s social network. The new ranking system will allow for the most active pictures surrounding an event to rise to the top of the pile instead of treating an entire tagspace as a chronological flow.Tags: flickr…

del.icio.us tags by file type

Del.icio.us now allows users to browse tags by media types such as MP3 files or MPEG movies. RSS feeds now include enclosures for easy media subscription. The tag “system:media:audio” includes: *.mp3 as “system:filetype:mp3” *.wav as “system:filetype:wav” The tag “system:media:video” includes: *.mpg as “system:filetype:mpg” *.mpeg as “system:filetype:mpeg” *.avi as “system:filetype:avi” *.wmv as “system:filetype:wmv” *.mov as “system:filetype:mov” The tag “system:media:image” includes: *.jpg as “system:filetype:jpg” *.jpeg as “system:filetype:jpeg” *.gif as “system:filetype:gif” *.png as “system:filetype:png” The tag “system:media:document” includes: *.pdf as “system:filetype:pdf” *.doc as “system:filetype:doc”Tags: delicious, tagging…

Blogger enterprise edition?

IDG reports on some possible future product direction for Blogger. Nothing terribly exciting we could not have guessed on our own, but Google does confirm they are dedicating resources to a possibly entry into Blogger for corporations. Google is also weighing whether to develop an enterprise version of Blogger that would be tailored for workplace use, as opposed to individual consumer use, Stone said. It’s something we’re always thinking about, something we have a few people thinking about and looking into. It’s definitely being researched he said.

Yahoo! 360 nears public release

Yahoo! 360 will be released to the general public in the next few weeks according to an interview with Paul Brody, Yahoo!’s director of community products, in PC World. The public release of Yahoo! 360 will include more customization abilities and support for TrackBack….

Announcing hReview

Announcing hReview, a microformat for distributed review authorship and indexing.

Perseus blog study estimates 31.6 million hosted weblogs

Perseus Development Corporation surveyed ten thousand weblogs on twenty leading weblog hosting services. They conclude 31.6 million weblogs have been created on these top hosted services including 10 million weblogs created in the first three months of 2005.

Del.icio.us takes funding

Joshua Schachter announced del.icio.us just closed a funding round led by Union Square Ventures. Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young round out the investment group.

AOL launches Red blogs

AOL introduced a new weblog service with advanced privacy features aimed at teens.

Scuttle bookmarks manager

Last night I installed Scuttle, an open-source online social bookmarks manager written using PHP and a MySQL backend.

Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast

Tomorrow’s Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast to the outside world. No IRC, no audio, and no video stream will be published of the event.

Web Spam Squashing Summit

I have been busy this week organizing a Web Spam Squashing Summit to bring together key players involved in publishing and indexing content on the world wide web.

MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger

MSN Messenger now includes support for blogging to your MSN Spaces My Space page.

News.com announces Trackback and Pingback support

News.com officially announced support for TrackBank and Pingback links. Search engine optimizers are already excited by the prospect of “anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return” from the PageRank 8 site. CNET is also referencing TrackBack and PingBack URLs as link relations in the page header. I like the TrackBack button for readers CNET uses for readers to look at other related sources. I need to do some more reading on Pingback, still not sure what differentiates it from TrackBack….

Betting on Tools that Power Blogs

Olga Kharif of BusinessWeek wrote about the companies building weblog tools and the venture capital that follows. Ask David Sifry when his little San Francisco startup called Technorati will turn a profit, and he laughs contagiously. No, Technorati, which tracks Web logs, or blogs, and will soon offer blog searches, is a long way from turning a profit. But it has big-league venture-capital backers like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, and they’re willing to wait as blog entrepreneurs cast around for a good business model….

Evan Williams leaving Google

Evan Williams is leaving Google. Evan is the founder of Pyra Labs and creator of Blogger, which was sold to Google in 2003. Whatever Evan ends up doing it should be interesting. Good luck! I have enjoyed your pictures lately and I intend to stay tuned in many formats….

Why bloggers are good for profits

Paul Carr of The Guardian writes about how The Guardian and other media outlets have embraced bloggers and seen monetary results. Free content for partners equals more traffic, profit, and credibility for the paper. The trial came about when we modified our site to allow Google news users to access one free article from our paid archive before they hit our subscription wall. The system worked brilliantly, and we realised very quickly that it could be modified to allow single-page access to visitors from any site we chose. We emailed a few of our blog buddies inviting them to try…

Relief organization using weblog and RSS

Compassion International uses RSS to share stories on how the organization is making a difference in the lives of children in 23 developing countries. The organization posts their content to a private TypePad weblog and uses NewsGator to keep its staff informed around the world….

War Against Comment Spam

Mark Glaser wrote about the war against comment spam in Online Journalism Review. He does a good job of gathering various examples and viewpoints from well-known bloggers and publishers….

Chicago Sun Times on TypePad

Andy Innatko of the Chicago Sun Times reviewed Six Apart’s TypePad offering yesterday. The article seems to be a bit too slanted in Six Apart’s favor. The article makes many mentions of TypePad as a place for real publishing, away from the noise of LiveJournal or Blogger. A Blogger or LiveJournal blog limits you to basic, straightforward blogging and, worse, every Blogger or LiveJournal blog looks more or less alike. Blogger and TypePad both allow template selection. Both services allow you to select from a template library. Both allow for custom styles. Disseminating news and fostering discussion about the potential…

Neil Turner on Movable Type and WordPress

Neil Turner has a good post about his evaluation of Movable Type and WordPress. Matt Mullenweg (lead developer of WordPress) of addresses some of the points brought up by Neil in the comments section of the post. Neil Turner is one of the authors of the upcoming Hacking Movable Type book….

New York Times on classroom weblogs

Jeffrey Salingo of the New York Times writes about weblogs in the classroom in today’s issue. For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button. Parents are also able to follow along and they can see what is happening in their child’s classroom, and encourage the child…

Microsoft to launch weblog service in Japan

Microsoft will launch a trial weblog service in Japan on August 10 followed by an official launch later this year. The service will be powered by T.O.S Co., Ltd and Microsoft aims to have one million users in its first year. My guess is the weblog service will be an extension of the ASP-based home page software T.O.S already has: Maho no I-land….

The new Blogger interface

Blogger is new and improved, and I like it! You choose your feed and choose one of 31 template designed by Jeffery Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Todd Dominey, Dan Rubin, Dave Shea, and Doug Bowman….

AOL Journals update

AOL updated its AOL Journals service today. News.com has a report. Members will be able to add to their journals by sending instant messages or text messages from a mobile phone. AOL claims over 33 million subscribers, but only 220,000 journal creations. 0.7% of all subscribers start a journal? Seems discouraging, but maybe AOL is not marketing the service well enough….

Wired Magazine : The (Evil) Genius of Comment Spammers

Steven Johnson writes in this month’s Wired Magazine about the battle over content spam in weblogs. “[S]pammers weren’t trying to win the attention of the bloggers or their readerships. They were trying to win the attention of Google, like the high school bully beating up the class nerd to impress the homecoming queen. The nerd feels violated, but the truth is that it isn’t really about him at all.”…

Radio Userland 8

I am experienting with a weblog using Radio Userland 8. Check it out here. Full SOAP and XML-RPC support, but I haven’t taken advantage of the RSS aggregates yet….

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