blog Archive

Developer Daniel Treadwell has created a public blog using the Google+ API. What’s neat about Daniel’s test is that the content is available on the blog as real, raw cotent and HTML – it’s not just a Javascript include.

You can view Daniel’s blog here. The blog correctly links to a Google+ profile when Daniel has tagged a person.

This will eventually mark the fork in the road between Google+ and Facebook.

You can change the ID on Daniel’s blog if you want to see what your stream would look like as a blog. Here’s mine as an example – you can find your ID in the URL on your Google Plus profile page. Of course should this test go live, we probably want to make sure that someone can’t just hack the URL and make a person’s blog look very different – you can imagine the potentially evil possibilities there.

I could see blogger Robert Scoble replacing his WordPress blog with his public Google+ stream once this application is completed. (confirmed: Scoble notes, “I would love to use this on my own blog, which is based on WordPress.”) He goes on to say that he would pay $50-100 for a WordPress extension that has the same functionality.

Perhaps the right solution is similar to how Disqus handles comments – when you use the Disqus comment plugin on a WordPress blog, Disqus saves the comment to Disqus but also back to the source blog so you can remove Disqus and keep all of the comments left on your blog. The Google+ plugin could work the same way allowing you to remove the plugin but keep the content created on Google+.

In addition, considering the amount of resharing that takes place on Google+, I wonder if this type of API usage could become a competitor to Tumblr?

Last night sure was interesting — everyone on Twitter was bitching about the Groupon ads, cheering for the Chrysler ad, and there was very little actual football chatter from what I could tell. Then at 9:01 Pacific time, the conversation on Twitter changed in the tech sector. Kara Swisher and the NYT posted that the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL. Congrats to everyone involved – looks like this was a very large acquisition for the content network that recently acquired a number of blogs and technology providers.

What I immediately thought was, “wow, this fits perfectly with the AOL Way where they want to generate massive pageviews with little work”. Last week I put a URL into my bookmarks for later usage on a story about content scraping. The URL was from a post on HuffPo about some topless photos of actress Olivia Wilde. Apparently Wilde did a shoot (she was covered) in FHM magazine. The reason the link was interesting to me is that FHM magazine goes after any outlet that posts their images online. So could the HuffingtonPost really have posted these images? NOPE! What do you get when you land on the page titled, “Olivia Wilde Goes TOPLESS In FHM France (PHOTOS)”? You get one tiny paragraph of content and a link to another website. But you also get thousands of pixels in other non-related “stuff”.

When you put something in parens (Photos, Video, etc.) in a story title, you expect that the thing is actually located within the post.

So what did AOL pay for when they acquired HuffingtonPost for $315 million? Did they get one of the biggest SEO plays out there? Today on the investor call, Ariana Huffington said something about how they create quality content at cost-effective prices. I am not a regular reader of the HuffingtonPost – mainly because every link I follow ends up being a scrape or a let down in quality or quantity of content.

I am certain that most of the content on HuffPo is probably of good length and quality — but is it these types of articles that drive the pageviews to let them create the other quality content?

Continue reading “Just What Did AOL Get for Their $315 Million?” »

Blogging service Zemanta has announced a new integration today with the hosted version of blogging platform WordPress. Zemanta’s blogging tool has been available since the early days of the company for the self-hosted version of WordPress (like we use here at CN) and now anyone using the hosted version of WordPress can also benefit from Zemanta’s service.

From the announcement, “Currently, Zemanta works on English-language blogs and can only be used in the visual editor mode. It’s not available on private blogs. Photos recommended by Zemanta are copyright-cleared, but we urge you to check out the photo’s license if you have any doubts (you can do that by hovering over the photo).”

Zemanta’s goal is to bring together relevant databases and help enhance content across the Web and in email. They use a variety of databases including Amazon, IMDB and Wikipedia. Zemanta uses “entity extraction” to determine what terms and phrases they should offer suggestions for.

Zemanta CEO and co-founder Boštjan Špetič forwarded the announcement to us (along with probably every other tech blog) and notes that in the first three hours since the integration went live, over 800 WordPress hosted bloggers have activated the plugin. Boštjan also notes that Zemanta is now available for use by over 30% of all blogs worldwide.

If you are new to the Zemanta service, checkout our interview with the founders to learn more about how Zemanta works and their business model.

As of 9:00pm Eastern Time, it appears that WordPress.com hosted blogs aren’t loading. Twitter search is showing many reports coming in every minute showing that the blogs are down.

The last outage for WordPress hosted blogs was back in February of this year. The outage affects major sites including Failbooking and other Cheezburger sites, major tech blogs Techcrunch and GigaOm and somewhere between “thousands” and “millions” of other blogs hosted by WordPress.

The message is the same on all WordPress hosted blogs, “WordPress.com will be back in a minute!” Well it’s been longer than a minute :)

In case you are not familiar with how the WordPress blogging software works, here’s a basic overview. You can choose to host the software on your own server which is called “self-hosted” or you can have WordPress host your blog using their servers. Some of the larger blogs pay WordPress a fee to be part of their “VIP” hosting program. Somehow I am sure all of the VIP customers are calling their WordPress representatives to find out why the service is down. There are pros and cons of both the self-hosted and hosted versions of WordPress.

Update 9:45pm: WordPress is back, here’s the latest from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, “The vast majority of blogs are back up, bringing up the rest over the next few minutes after we verify them.”

As always please report in if your WordPress.com blog is down or you are unable to access the blogs you enjoy reading.

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.

Continue reading “WordPress Adds Blog Subscription By Email Option” »

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.

Continue reading “Follow-Up To The WordPress Exploit and Tips to Protect Your Blog” »

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.