Blogging Archive

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.

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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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 :)

I’ve flown on British Airways three times and all three flights went well. The last time on British Airways was in 2006 and was a short hop from Venice to London and I remember the crew making the trip smooth for someone who really doesn’t enjoy flying. So it was a shock to learn that an airline that has a good reputation is buying reviews and paid posts. I decided to take a look at two posts, one from former tech blogger Meghan Asha and the other from her NonSociety partner Jordan Reid.

You can read the posting on SocialSpark (that’s Izea’s posting service) where British Airlines outlines what they require to be included in the post. The paid post provides for $15 in earnings although I believe some Izea posters make more than what is listed.

It’s interesting that the posts from Jordan and Meghan basically follow the required script from British Airways exactly. Is that where the “real opinion” comes from? One requirement is that the post is more than 200 words; Meghan’s comes in below that at 186 words. Both bloggers provide a small button to note that the post is paid although it is at the bottom of the post. I know Izea founder Ted Murphy talks about the importance of disclosure is his network’s paid posts which is a good thing. One change I’d like to see is that the button is moved to the top and clear language is added to the top of every post noting that the post is paid. You may never even see the button on the two blogs because of the non-traditional layout that the NonSociety site employs.

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Last month, I was one of the startups that attended an event in NYC which offered a chance for startups to meet the tech press of NYC. While I was there I started to think about an idea that might help the startups by helping each other. I’d like to share a rough sketch of the concept and would ask for your feedback if the idea has any merit.

The concept is pretty simple…a startup blog exchange. Nearly every startup I visit either for CN coverage, requests for assistance or URL verification at my startup has a blog. Startup Ticker is a great place to find all of the blog posts in one place. We run the ST ticker on the right menu of CN.

Instead of an aggregator, what I am proposing is a blog exchange where each startup blog includes a post from another startup on their blog. To make it simple, let’s assume there were three blogs in the exchange – they might exchange a post once a month in the following fashion:

• Blog A guest posts on Blog C
• Blog B guest posts on Blog A
• Blog C guest posts on Blog B

For this concept to work, we would need enough blogs in the exchange network to make sure that there is a good variety. I guess we would need some sort of categorization system as well. My initial thought is that the guest posts must be non-promotional but they should include a note about the author and his or her startup.

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For over a decade I was responsible for posting financial documents either online or, before the Internet, to a variety of reporting sources. One thing was absolutely clear…post early and it won’t be pretty. Financial documents have associated post times and if the content was to be posted early (or late), it could affect the financial markets (e.g. stock trades, etc.). I can’t even count how many times I had to be up at midnight or later to make sure content went to the correct sources at the precise time. Not once did I enter a client document into any CMS system early because no matter how much we want to be careful, the content was just too sensitive to create a timed post.

It is amazing to read story after story about a blog that has broken an embargo or an agreed-to timed post because of “a problem with the clock in Wordpress.” I am not going to name any names because sadly the list would be pretty long. We’ve seen some bloggers make one mistake and use the “Wordpress” excuse while others have used the same excuse for nearly a week of “early” postings.

So bloggers…come really close to your monitor…I am going to teach you the secret, free of charge to make sure that your timed posts never go live ahead of time.

Most of the larger blogs have multiple team members and people working in multiple time zones. There is absolutely no excuse for pre-posting before the agreed to time, period. Some might say that a story is placed into the content management system so that it can be edited by the team. I say hogwash – use Google Docs or Zoho, etc. to edit the story. This is actually preferred as it’s easier to see the edits by each team member or blog editor.

If you are a single blog author or don’t have a teenager working for you, then stay awake to make the post live manually at the specified time. Unlike the financial documents I noted above, most tech news story embargoes are issued at a reasonable time.

Bottom line – never use CMS timed posts when an agreement is in place. See how simple that is? Remember, trust is earned.

And then ya’all can stop blaming Wordpress.

NY-based microblog service Tumblr has been busy over the past month. They’ve launched reader submissions and photoset functionality. Today they have announced the launch of  ”TumblUpon”.

TumblUpon may sound very similar to another service, StumbleUpon and from what I can tell the basic functionality is the same. As you “like” posts on Tumblr, it learns about your likes and when you use the TumblUpon option, Tumblr will recommend other posts you may like.

TumblUpon uses a frame (grr!) to move from one Tumblr page to another. It allowed me to jump around even though I have never used the like function on Tumblr.

This is an important move by Tumblr as it will help keep readers inside of their network and will help with discovery, something I believe in strongly.

Mashable has additional thoughts on TumblUpon and some metrics that Tumblr will release today.