blog Archive

While browsing some blogs today that are hosted on Wordpress.com (as opposed to the self-hosted Wordpress version), I noticed something new. Under the comment box, there is now an option to, “Notify me of new posts via email.” Seems like a small change and you might be wondering why I would even bother to make a post about such a minor change.

It’s because the change isn’t minor. Today’s change will offer bloggers more discovery and more traffic. Wordpress blogs have allowed you to subscribe to comments by email which basically means that each time a person posts a comment on a blog post that you have commented on, you will receive an email notification. I’ve long believed that these notifications are a big help in getting visitors back to a blog because many commenters are hit-and-run. The email alerts the commenter that another person has left a comment. The email recipient will then click on the link (providing another pageview) and then can continue to interact.

This new post email notification option is even more important because it provides a reader with an instant update each time a new blog post is added. FeedBurner offers an email subscription service (here’s our email subscription link) which creates a daily email from a blog’s RSS feed. It appears the Wordpress version sends an email for each new post. Another benefit of the local email subscription option is that you control the email list. With Feedburner the list is basically managed by Google.

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This weekend CN’s Wordpress core was exploited and spammy hidden links were added to the footer. We’ve had this happen several times since moving to Wordpress back in April. I’d like to share the details of what I’ve learned since the attack happened and some links and tips on how to make sure you don’t fall victim to the same issue as we did.

It appears that a person logged into the CN admin panel and manually edited the footer file to add all the link goodness.  The only reason I caught the links so quickly (24 hrs later) is because I manually do a view source on all of the CN blogs every day or two since the exploits began.  I cleaned out the links immediately but they had already made their way into Google.

Hats off to Rackspace for calling me at 11pm on a Friday night to try to help with the cleanup and also start an investigation into what happened. I pay Rackspace full price currently for my sites and it’s awesome that Rackspace has helped considering how small my sites and bill are in the grand scheme of their overall customer base. Over the weekend I spoke with several “Rackers” about the issue and finally they figured out what they believe happened.

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Apparently there has been a battle going on between gossip blogger Perez Hilton and Miss California Carrie Prejean. You can read about the battle on the Vancouver Sun website. I haven’t followed the battle so I don’t want to comment on it. However this morning on the Fox News channel former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was one of the guests on the Fox and Friends show.

I’ve posted a video below where Huckabee discusses his take on Perez Hilton as I thought it was worth sharing. He begins by saying that no one should care about Hilton’s opinion on anything because he hasn’t done anything significant in his life. While it appears that Hilton has used some very strong language with regards to Prejean, at the end of the day, he is a blogger.

Using Huckabee’s view, over 90% of bloggers, journalists and analysts should never share their thoughts and/or opinions on a topic.

Last week we reported on web creation service Jimdo working on a Geocities Lifeboat tool. Today they have announced that the Lifeboat service is live. Jimdo’s U.S. manager Powen Shiah noted, “This isn’t just GeoCities 2.0, and it’s not a static archive of the site: all the pages and content can be edited and managed using Jimdo’s WYSIWYG interface. There’s only one side-effect… the sites might not look exactly the same. Some might even be prettier. Sorry, we did all we could but some things just aren’t transferable!”

Today wiki provider Wetpaint has launched the Geocities Bailout.  From their announcement, “To solve this problem, we announced yesterday our effort to help those in need of new hosting services, in the form of a G.A.R.P., a Geocities Asset Recovery Plan.  The plan is a bailout for all the Geocities users who are seeing their properties being foreclosed by the fierce Yahoo! landlord and need a new place to keep their valuable content.”

Wetpaint has setup a dedicated site for the Geocities Bailout. They will be providing live chat all day to help users convert their sites and they are offering free domains as a bonus.

As I noted in the Jimdo post last week, these offerings are smart. It’s a bit shocking that all of the other webpage creation tools haven’t done the same thing. While it’s never cool to try to poach users, Geocities is closing so it makes sense to offer a replacement service.

Etelos has announced a new partnership this morning which will bring Six Apart’s Movable Type blogging product into a "cloud-hosted" environment using the Etelos platform suite. Basically Etelos sets up a virtual server instance which includes the Movable Type software already installed and configured.

It looks like the new Etelos/Movable Type combination would be considered a competitor to the hosted Wordpress.com offering. This is the concept behind the Etelos platform suite – software companies can create hosted versions of their software products which run as instances on the Etelos platform.

Pricing starts at $19.95/month for an single author blog and goes up to $99.95/month for a ten-author blog with more power on the virtual server side as well.

Here are the pricing plans:

Blog comment replacement service JS-Kit has announced a new partnership with Yahoo today that will bring the ability for blog readers to login to comment on a blog using their Yahoo userid. You can see how it works on Guy Kawasaki’s blog and I’ve embedded a screenshot below. The service uses the oAuth protocol (like in 24) so you aren’t sharing your password with JS-Kit unlike say many of the Twitter apps that require you to share your credentials with the local developer for the service to work.

I guess this is supposed to be like Facebook Connect. You can spam your friends all over the place with your updates. Just like when you post a blog comment, your friends on Facebook can see it. Chris Saad is the VP Product and Community Strategy for JS-Kit and also the Data Portability Chief notes that today’s announcement is a step forward for their data portability journey. Not sure that I see how today’s announcement has anything to do with data portability but I think it’s always great to offer readers more options to login because it leads to more conversation and usage.

To make the connection work, JS-Kit is utilizing both Yahoo!’s Profile API and Updates API. According to JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, "Eventually, each story a publisher sends to the Yahoo! Updates feed will benefit from referral traffic to Yahoo!’s most popular sites: Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, and more."

Last summer JS-Kit acquired Haloscan which added 500,000 blogs to their network which they now claim is over 600,000. They are also powering the comment system for event planning service Evite.

In this NYC Spotlight, we are highlighting a blog that says they are at the, "intersection of marketing and technology". The site is Marketing.FM and is edited by Eric Friedman. Marketing.FM has been publishing content since early 2006 and offers content in what looks like about 100 categories.

It appears the advertising content category is the most popular followed closely by Marketing 2.0. Marketing.FM is part of the 9Rules blog network. Eric works at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures during the day.

Check out our previous NYC blog spotlights: Girls in Tech and the NYC Game Industry website.