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?

Find more stories about: blog, Google, Google Plus, social media

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?

But let’s take a look at one example — last night Christina “Genie in a Bottle” Aguilera performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl. She messed up and missed some of the words. I wanted to see what the press was saying about her fumble so I headed over to Google and typed in her name (actually only part of her name, the rest was courtesy Google Instant).

On the first page of results is a blog entry from Huffington Post titled, “Christina Aguilera Nude Pictures Leak (PHOTOS)”. So I clicked it, not because I want to see Xtina naked, but because I just knew that it would be a dupe of the Wilde story above. And sure enough, I was unfortunately correct! Below is a graphic I made showing the page about Christina and as you can see – the blue box is content and the red is everything else. Oh and…the blue content is a scrape from another site! There is not one photo of Christina naked but there are about 100 “tags” – I wonder how long it took someone to enter all of the tags displayed below?

Wasn’t Google supposed to fix this issue?

I sure hope that this isn’t the type of content we will see coming soon from Engadget.

Here’s the Christina “nude pics” page (click to view the larger version):

Find more stories about: acquisitions, AOL, blog, Blogging, blogs, Huffington Post

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.

Find more stories about: blog, Bloggers, Blogging, wordpress, Zemanta

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.

Find more stories about: blog, Blogging, blogs, wordpress, WordPress down

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.

The only issue I have with the new email subscription option is that you must leave a comment to activate it. I’d prefer that a reader can opt-in for the emails even without leaving a comment.

While the social media experts tell us that email is dead (Twitter is the new email right?), the early adopters tell us that RSS is the way to go for subscriptions, email is still alive, well and might still be the best way to get people back to your blog.

In any case, I hope the next update to the self-hosted version of WordPress includes this email subscription option.

Find more stories about: blog, Blogging, blogs, wordpress

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.

I don’t want to publicly share all of the edits I’ve made to try to make sure someone can’t deface CN again but if you want more details, send me an email. I am not really sure why there aren’t more settings while installing and/or upgrading WordPress to help prevent more of these attacks. For example, why not allow an admin to completely disable the theme editor? I’ve never used it as I edit my themes locally and then upload them.

Here are a few posts that are worth checking out related to WordPress security:

• Tips to protect a WordPress blog by Googler Matt Cutts – Matt explains how to lock down the wp-admin folder to make sure only you can access it. Another option that should be an administrator setting on the install/upgrade
• How to check if you have any backdoors that the exploiters can use to get into your blog – Otto
• Ten tips to make your WordPress blog hack-proof – BlogCritics

It’s been a long time since I was a server admin but locking down your theme files might be one of the best options. While it will take a moment longer to unlock the files when you want to make changes to your theme, it also means that the files can’t be edited via the WordPress theme editor.

Lastly, if you run a WordPress blog, take a minute right now and verify that your blog hasn’t been exploited.

Find more stories about: blog, wordpress

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.

Find more stories about: blog, Bloggers, Blogging, Fox Business, Video, videos

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.

Find more stories about: blog, Bloggers, WetPaint, wiki

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:

Find more stories about: blog, Blogging, Etelos, Quick News

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.

Find more stories about: blog, blogs, comments, JS-Kit, Quick News

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.

Find more stories about: blog, Blogging, NYC, Quick News

Earlier today we posted the “State of the Word” presentation by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. After his presentation, Matt spent some time demonstrating the upcoming 2.7 release of WordPress. I’ve embedded the video below. WordPress 2.7 will be available in November.

Matt begins by explaining that eventually everything in WordPress will have an associated API for extending the service. The new interface looks awesome. The posting functionality of WordPress is one of the things I wish Drupal had. I find that Drupal can be extended further than WordPress but the posting usability is WAY better in WordPress than Drupal. The 2.7 admin interface appears to be even more usable than the current version.

Find more stories about: blog, Bloggers, blogs, NYC, Quick News, wordpress

Earlier this week Google Blogsearch relaunched with an aggregator of sorts. Immediately several sites including ReadWriteWeb claimed it was a "Techmeme killer". The truth is that Google Blogsearch won’t kill or injure Techmeme and I’ve created the video embedded below to outline the main reason why.

There are a variety of good posts on the Google Blogsearch/Techmeme killer topic including: Rob Diana, Steven Hodson, Duncan Riley, Josh Catone and Svetlana Gladkova. Sean Percival had a bit of fun with the topic noting that the only reason Techmeme will be killed is because Techcrunch didn’t make their lead payments on time.

Techmeme would be a much stronger asset to the community if there were topic pages (similar to Blogrunner) and the current hierarchy was removed. There would be a higher level of discovery and a nice dose of leveling would take place. I have been researching Techmeme for over six months and will eventually have a lengthy video about the overall news-aggregator topic and additional thoughts for improvement.

Find more stories about: blog, Bloggers, Quick News, TechMeme, Video

NY-based content ratings and recommendations provider Outbrain has announced a new distribution partnership with blog network b5media this morning. Under the terms of the partnership, b5media will install the ratings and recommendations widget on all 300+ blogs in the b5media network. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The Outbrain widget allows blog readers to rate the quality of the content and receive recommendations for other content based on their ratings. Recommendations can come from the individual site or a whitelist can be setup where sites can partner together and recommendations are shared across the listed network. 

The more sites that Outbrain can partner with, the stronger their recommendations network becomes. From my perspective that’s where the Outbrain value lies. The raw ratings are not worth a lot to me as I am never sure what it is that the person is ranking. It could be spelling, grammar, quality of the content, subject matter, etc.

Find more stories about: b5media, blog, blogs, NYC, Outbrain, Quick News

The Blogger King stopped by the CenterNetworks office today and asked me to setup the tripod and camera. Here’s his newest video on how to increase your blog traffic and drive more advertising dollars. Apparently he will be back this week with another "gem" as he called it.

Find more stories about: blog, Blogger King, Bloggers, Quick News, Video