Archive for the ‘Blogging News’ Category
by Darnell Clayton on April 14th, 2011
After watching rivals platforms receive official apps upon various smartphones, fans of Textpattern (which is a blog/CMS software similar to WordPress)Â have been demanding an app to use while on the go. [edit]
Now it appears a company has created an app for the Textpattern tribe, although fans might be disappointed over which platform was chosen.
Mobile Textpattern is your Textpattern client app. Create new articles, edit existing ones and store them on your device as draft. Ideal if you want to save your ideas for new articles or extend existing articles with more informations. (Mobile Textpattern for webOS)
Although webOS isn’t as popular as iOS or Android, the mobile platform has been neglected by most blog platforms (although that might change once WordPress releases their webOS app).
Mobile Textpattern is priced at $0.99 and seems to be limited to basic blog functions only (i.e. create and edit posts), with no mention of additional features such as uploading videos as well as images.
Hopefully Mobile Textpattern’s entrance will inspire developers to create third party apps upon other platforms in the near future, although for now webOS fans can acquire a taste of mobile blogging without logging in from their Palm Pre’s.
Categories: Blogging News
by Darnell Clayton on April 12th, 2011
After receiving criticism over their commenting system, Facebook has refreshed their commenting system in a bid to appeal to bloggers resistant to outsourcing their communities.
Aside from adding permalinks (via the timestamps) and making comments SEO friendly, Facebook is also launching one feature that may appeal to bloggers.
We are introducing a modified Comments Box News Feed story to feature more social context. Simply include the og:image, og:title, og:url, og:description, and og:site_name in the Open Graph meta tags on your site to generate the following larger story:
Optimizing the News Feed story increases the click-through-rate (CTR) back to your site and encourages people on Facebook to contribute to the discussion. To verify the image, title, and description Open Graph meta tags, visit the URL Linter. (Facebook Developers Blog)
As an additional bonus, Facebook is now allows bloggers to export their comment via the Facebook Graph API, which should help ease fears of having blog communities “locked in” without an exit strategy.
With Facebook comments boasting  social analytics and troll unfriendly technology, we may see even more bloggers and web domains outsource their communities to Facebook now that they have addressed most (if not all) of the objections.
Self hosting WordPress fans can install Facebook comments via a plugin while BlogSpot fans will need to dive into the code (or ask a geek to implement if for you).
For those of you who allow users to comment upon your sites, will you now consider outsourcing your comment section to Facebook? If not, why?
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Blog comments, Facebook
by Darnell Clayton on April 8th, 2011
If you look at the top 3 blog service platforms, you’ll notice that Tumblr is a distant third to WordPress.com and Blogger, the latter two who occupy second and first place, respectively.
However if you notice the stats between the platforms, you’ll realize that while Blogger and WordPress.com are growing at a healthy clip (especially WP.com who just passed 19 million blogs), Tumblr is growing much faster than its rivals.
Boasting approximately 16.5 million blogs (up from 15 million about a month ago), Tumblr is obviously doing something right, which might explain why every major blog service except Blogger.com has copied them.
Although Tumblr’s keep it simple approach might explain the site’s popularity (as Joshua Strebel of Page.ly fame explains upon WP Candy), there might be several other reasons why Tumblr is growing faster than their rivals. Read More
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Tumblr
by Darnell Clayton on April 6th, 2011
While Tumblr is used by millions of people ranging from fashion artists, news organizations and professional bloggers, this is the first time the platform has been embraced by the US Federal government.
“GSA negotiated the Tumblr terms of service, and we are the first federal agency using Tumblr,” said GSA spokesman Robert Lesino. [...]
“We chose Tumblr because it is a rapidly growing platform,†said Jessica Milcetich, USA.gov Blog manager. “It not only is for blogging, but it offers social features so people can share, comment and connect.” (Federal Computer Week)
It’s unclear what the GSA was using before (note: does anyone else know?), although they imported all of their posts upon Tumblr from their previous platform.
The agency is also using Disqus to power their comment section, and seems to enjoy writing lengthy posts (which isn’t exactly typical of the average Tumblr user).
While it’s not surprising to see the government adopt blog service platforms (after all, the “much loved” TSA uses Blogger), Tumblr’s embrace by the agency signals that the micro blogging service has gone mainstream (which should please their investors).
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Government, Tumblr
by Darnell Clayton on March 31st, 2011
Although I have been impressed with many features from Blogger.com (ranging from Live Stats to their theme creator), Google’s latest feature appeals to the inner photo blogger within me.
Dubbed Dynamic Views, the new layout lets readers view a stunning photo summary of your site by simply adding /view at the end of the blog (example: blog.blogspot.com/view). Read More
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Blogger, google
by Darnell Clayton on March 23rd, 2011
In an attempt to help broaden their appeal amongst bloggers and news organizations, Disqus has announced that they are now including the search engine giant as an ID option for commenters.
Nearly 13% of users choose to login through Twitter or Facebook when participating in Disqus communities. Today, we’re happy to introduce another recognizable choice: Google accounts. Millions upon millions of people are already logged into their Google accounts, and now they can easily use those accounts to jump into discussions all over the web. (Official Disqus Blog) Read More
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Blog comments, disqus, Facebook, google
by Darnell Clayton on March 22nd, 2011
Apparently bloggers implementing Facebook comments upon their blog may be hurting their site’s SEO (at least as far as Google is concerned).
Facebook Comments are served in an iframe.
This means that the comments are not going to be attributed to that page or site nor seen by search engines. In short, Facebook Comments reside in the walled garden. All your comments are belong to Facebook.
This differs from implementations like Disqus or IntenseDebate where the comments are ‘on the page’ or ‘in-line’. (Blind Five Year Old)
Note: Emphasis theirs.
Read More
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Blog Commenting, Facebook
by Darnell Clayton on March 16th, 2011
Tumblr has crossed the 15 million blog mark and is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
According to both Compete.com and Quantcast, Tumblr has witnessed explosive growth (as far as page views are concerned), and while the site does boast far fewer unique visitors than WP.com or Blogger, Tumblr’s community apparently is far more active.
While the site is popular amongst the youth (especially teenage girls), Tumblr is quickly gaining credibility as a professional tool as more businesses, celebrities, newspapers, and bloggers use Tumblr to either compliment their site or replace it entirely.
Tumblr’s growth has not come without pain however, as the site previously experienced over 24 hours of down time due to server issues, which hurt the companies uptime ratings when compared against rival services.
Currently Tumblr is the third largest blogging service online, with only WordPress.com (who recently passed 18 million blogs) and Blogger.com holding onto the silver and gold medals, respectively.
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Tumblr
by Darnell Clayton on March 15th, 2011
After boasting a perfect uptime record and announcing plans to court mobile devices (starting with Android), Blogger is intent upon maintain their postion as the leading blogging service online by the revelation a few upcoming features.
To start, we’re kicking things off at SXSW by giving folks a sneak peek at our next-generation user interface. The new design is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the latest in web technology.
We’ll also be showcasing our new content discovery feature that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading.  (Blogger Buzz)
The Blogger team also hinted a few upcoming features they can not yet mention (which they tease in the promo video below), although here are a few educated guesses on what Blogger may unveil later on in 2011. Read More
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Blogger
by Darnell Clayton on March 10th, 2011
From an analytical standpoint, Disqus latest update to their blog commenting system seems trivial, especially with competition heating up now that the 8oo lbs gorilla (i.e. Facebook comments) has entered the arena.
However once tried upon your site, bloggers may fall in love with this new feature (not to mention their readers as well).
With this new feature, Disqus generates preview thumbnails of any image URLs you’ve referenced in your comment. To view the original image, just click the preview thumbnail. We hope this will enhance the commenting experience by allowing commenters to express themselves visually.
Now,  old-school Disqus users might recognize that we’ve always done this. The difference is we now download and present these images to you as you’re typing your comment. This means you can preview your images before submitting, or remove them if they prove too embarrassing or career-ending. (Official Disqus Blog)
Currently the feature (known as Disqus Images) only supports .png, .gif, .jpg/.jpeg images under 2 mb, and the company is thinking about adding support for video platforms (like YouTube) in the future.
In order to activate this feature bloggers will need to select the Houdini theme within their Disqus admin panel.
While Disqus Images may not appeal to everyone (especially bloggers who loathe readers pasting images within comment), it may help the startup survive against rivals like Facebook, as well as IntenseDebate.
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: disqus
0 Comments
