Bloggers Archive

It seems like the big pre-SXSW bitchfest this past weekend was around whether anonymous commenters are good or bad, whether they are trolls and whether they are the scum of the earth and should be shot with a nerf gun until they give up who they really are. AOL tech blog Techcrunch switched from using the Y Combinated Disqus comments system over to using Facebook comments. Let me just say this as Allen not as anonymous commenter 2382389A, the move was made to get more traffic to Techcrunch. Period. (nothing wrong with wanting to make money)

Robert Scoble nearly died (I think his caps lock key got jammed too) after reading some post by Steve Cheney. There seems to be two main issues going on within the posts regarding Facebook comments and trolls stories:

1. Are anonymous comments bad or good
2. Should we be willing to let Facebook control how we use the Internet outside of the walls of Facebook.com (I will save this discussion for another day)

It seems whenever the discussion of “internet commenting trolls” comes up, I always get into an offline discussion about which came first on a blog – shitty content or the trolls? In most cases mice and rats don’t just show up – they come when you put food out there for them. The conversation usually ends up with everyone agreeing that the trolls show up when shitty content is placed out there for them.

Continue reading “Which Came First? Trolls or Crappy Content?” »

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.

One of the conversations I often have with CN readers and with people at events is why blogs cover certain topics or companies more than others. If we look at big companies, one of the most popular companies (if not the most popular) is Apple. Why do so many tech blogs write about Apple so often compared to say Microsoft or Sun?

Sure a lot of it has to do with Apple’s innovative products but that’s not the reason. One part of the reason is that bloggers appear to skew higher on income than non-bloggers which affords for Apple purchases and naturally it makes sense for them to write about the products they own and love.

But the real reason is that there is no other company that can drive massive pageviews like Apple can. Since we (sadly) still live in a pageview economy where most bloggers are rewarded on the traffic they can drive to their stories, Apple wins over all others in a landslide. Even so-called personal (non-commercial) bloggers are still interested in the traffic spikes.

Why is this? Why does a story about an Apple product or a post about Apple CEO Steve Jobs drive more pageviews relative to stories about their competitors or other technology companies?

If I write a story about Twitter and note that some feature they just launched is crap, I will get some comments either agreeing or disagreeing. But overall it would be hard to fire anyone up around the discussion of a Twitter feature. And we could easily replace Twitter with nearly any other technology company and receive the same reply.

Continue reading “Why They Write About Apple” »

Blogging service Zemanta has announced a new integration with Google’s Blogger blogging platform. Previously Blogger users had to install a browser plugin to use Zemanta. This new integration will allow any Blogger user to activate the Zemanta widget — the user can then use Zemanta without any browser installations.

After the content creator writes a few lines of content, Zemanta’s service will automatically show recommendations for both links and images.

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.

If you are a regular CN reader, you’ve seen a decline in the number of stories that are posted daily. As I shift my time into a variety of programs, it’s made it harder to post the large number of stories that I did in 2008/early 2009. At the same time, I am receiving more requests to guest post on CenterNetworks from a wide variety of people from journalists, entrepreneurs, etc.

I’d like to share details of the new Guest Post program on CenterNetworks that is launching today. The concept works basically just like all other guest post programs on other blogs with one twist. You can own the ad space on the stories you provide. Take a look at the image below of a standard CN story page. The areas in red are the advertising areas that you can provide ad code for. The ads can be for your startup, or any ad network. The ads you provide will live with the story even after it leaves the front page.

I see this program as a great way for you to get visibility for your stories and startup (if you have one) along with revenue from the ads you own.

The ad sizes are:

• 728×90 – Leaderboard
• 300×250 – Box
• 250×250 – Right side Box

You can participate anytime you would like. You can send topic ideas to the email address listed below and I will provide some guidance or you can send full posts for review. You can also submit stories from your own blog. I would just ask that the submitted stories are  not sales pitches for your startup. Stories can be submitted from anywhere in the world but must be in English. Each post will be reviewed and I can’t guarantee that all submissions will be accepted.

The goal would be to post 1-3 good quality stories each day from a variety of diverse perspectives.

To participate, send your stories (or a link to the story) to news-at-centernetworks-dot-com. I also welcome any additional ideas about the program – send those to the same email address. I look forward to the submissions and the feedback on the new guest post program.

As of 4:40pm 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.

Interestingly, this outage comes just 10 days after the technology blog Techcrunch moved to the WordPress VIP program. Top tech blog GigaOM, also hosted on the WordPress VIP program is also down. It also appears the network of blogs run by Cheezburger are also down (including Failblog and Failbooking).

WordPress.com is displaying the following message, “There was a small systems error. Please try refreshing the page and if the error is still there drop us a note and let us know.”

Update: shortly after the outage began, the official WordPress Twitter account noted, “WordPress.com is down, we’re working on restoring service now.” We will continue to update this post with more information as we learn more.

Update 2: As of 5:15PM Eastern, the sites are still unavailable. Must be something major over at WP HQ.

Update 3: WordPress is back – founder Matt Mullenweg notes, “We are back running at full capacity now. Closely monitoring services for any aftershocks.”

Final Update: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has provided a recap on the WP blog explaining what happened. The servers were down for just under two hours. Mullenweg notes, “We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.”

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

Yesterday we took a look at two paid posts from British Airways run through the Izea SocialSpark program. One of the comments I made was around how the paid disclosure is referenced. Izea required that the paid post badge be added to the bottom of the post. My suggestion for clarity was to add a clear notice that the post is paid/sponsored at the top of the post.

Last night I received an email from Izea founder Ted Murphy that basically addressed my suggestion. It was perfect timing as Izea launched their updated disclosure requirements earlier in the day. You can read their disclosure update announcement on the Izea blog. They are calling the update a “sandwich disclosure”. You can see their sandwich image below. Basically they now require their network of paid bloggers to disclose at the top and bottom of each post that the content is sponsored/paid. I am glad to see this change – let’s hope they can enforce it.

My only suggestion is around how they handle the disclosure technically. The required content is a block of HTML. Why not switch it to a simple Javascript include so that it can be changed/adapted at a global level going forward. If a change needs to be made, it can be handled in one Javascript include rather than on each individual post. I can’t wait to see this change rolled out on the paid blogger’s blogs.

Izea notes that their system checks for the disclosure messages and rejects any posts that don’t include the required notations.

– I wonder which part of the sandwich is the real opinion part :)