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.

There are three types of anonymous commenters from what I can tell:

• those who write comments that should absolutely be deleted and ignored – racist, sexist, etc.
• those who just want to pick a silly fight – for example, when a blogger writes an “apple is great i love steve jobs” posts and the Google fans come out to just cause a silly fight or vice-versa
• those who provide commentary about why the post was clearly wrong or why the post author was wrong in his or her research or conclusion – it is this type that I think will be lost with the Facebook comment change

With regards to the last type of commenter, it’s pretty interesting to watch how different bloggers internalize feedback from anonymous commenters. I’ve noticed that one of the Techcrunch writers has seemingly been trained to believe that there is no way in hell that an anonymous commenter could be right. All you need to do is watch her Twitter stream or her replies on posts where there are a lot of anonymous comments and it’s easy to see the training she’s received. And she’s not alone – there are many others with the same type of response.

Another good example points to the SXSW Zuckerberg interview from a few years ago. It bombed, people commented on Twitter and blogs – most of the people on Twitter weren’t anonymous and yet the interviewer still told everyone to “f-off”. As if there is no way in hell she did a bad job, no way.

The real issue I see is that many bloggers don’t want feedback – there is no freaking way someone commenting on my post can be right. There’s no way my grammar could be crappy – or my research wrong. Imagine if each blogger spent some time looking at their comments and then decided if perhaps I should change how I do research or try a new style. My fear is that a move to Facebook comments will mean more “you are great” and less “here’s why you are wrong” comments.

Feel free to leave an anonymous comment below :)

Find more stories about: Bloggers, Blogging, blogs, comments, Robert Scoble, TechCrunch

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

WordPress 3.1 will most likely be released in the next few weeks, and it brings with it a few major changes. If you’re a regular WordPress user, you might not immediately notice many of the updates; but if you are a WordPress Multi Site user, or you are a plugin developer, the changes will most likely seem somewhat revolutionary.

The major change for WordPress Multi Site is the isolation of the Network Administration area. The Super Admin menu is going away, and being replaced with an entirely new admin dashboard for Super Admin users. Developers that initially made their plugins compatible with WordPress MU or WordPress Multi Site will need to make some minor modifications in order to make their plugins compatible with WordPress 3.1.

Instead of using the add_submenu_page() function to add your options page to the ms-options.php page, you’ll need to add your options page to the settings.php page. The key difference, though, is that you’ll need to hook into the network_admin_menu action rather than the admin_menu action. Therefore, the new code to set up an options page would look like:

add_action( 'network_admin_menu', 'pluginname_setup_admin' );
function pluginname_setup_admin() {
  /* Add the new options page to the Super Admin menu */
  add_submenu_page(
    /*$parent_slug = */'settings.php',
    /*$page_title = */'Plugin Settings',
    /*$menu_title = */'Plugin Name',
    /*$capability = */'delete_users',
    /*$menu_slug = */basename(__FILE__),
    /*$function = */'pluginname_display_admin_page'
  );
}

Another major change in WordPress – and most backend users will probably notice this – is the addition of the admin bar. If you’ve used BuddyPress in the past, you’re probably used to the admin bar showing up at the top of the screen. Quite simply, it’s a fixed menu bar that gives you access to some of the actions you use most often with the WordPress admin area.

Other changes have been made to the code within WordPress to optimize certain actions and generally make things happen more quickly and easily in the backend. You can read more about the changes on the WordPress Codex.

Find more stories about: Blogging, blogs, Curtiss Grymala, wordpress

As of 11:30pm Eastern Time, it appears that WordPress.com hosted blogs are down and aren’t loading. Twitter search is showing many reports coming in every minute showing that the blogs are down.

The WordPress Twitter account notes, “WordPress.com is currently experiencing a network outage. We’re working on getting things back up ASAP.”

And loading any WordPress blog returns the following message, “WordPress.com is temporarily unavailable. We’re working on the issue and things will be back up and running ASAP. Please check back in a few minutes.”

Popular technology blogs GigaOm and Techcrunch are also displaying the above message. Both sites are hosted on the WordPress VIP program.

Automattic, the parent of WordPress, has a full health service dashboard which the company notes provides real-time status on all of their products. The dashboard also notes that commenting service IntenseDebate is also currently down.

Update: 12:08am Eastern – sites are back! Go browse cat photos! I am wondering with all of the downtime this week across a number of major sites if we should just turn off the whole Internet this Sunday, go outside, be with people and come back fresh on Monday.

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: Blogging, blogs, wordpress, WordPress down

Blogging platform Posterous is currently down and out-of-service due to a DOS (denial-of-service) attack earlier today. The official Posterous Twitter account notes, “We’ve been targeted by a denial of service attack. We’re working as hard as we can to get it back up.”

Popular PR blogger Steve Rubel is one of the many Posterous customers currently down due to the DOS attack. Steve was promoting his Google Wave is dead article from last year and is now pointing to a Google Cache of the article.

Please report in as always if you are a Posterous user and are finding it difficult to connect to your Posterous blog. And remember that all Web services go down at some point and I am certain the Posterous team is working hard to get the service back up as quickly as possible.

Update: 5:49 Eastern – Posterous now reporting 25% back in service and 100% expected back within 45 minutes.

Update: Posterous officials have posted regarding the outage with some important steps if you are a custom domain user.

Find more stories about: Blogging, blogs, posterous

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.

When one writes about Apple, it nearly always appears to the reader that they are either a massive fanboy or a massive hater. There appears to be no middle ground when discussing Apple and their products. Even simple news reporting comes across in one of the two mentioned camps. Our research shows that most bloggers skew towards massive fanboy which helps drive pageviews even further. When the blogger posts his or her Apple story, it’s like an alarm goes off across the Web. If the story is deemed as a fanboy story, the haters swarm and leave comments regarding the author’s fanboy status. Naturally after the haters swarm, the fanboys must counter-attack the haters in the comments. This leads to even more pageviews because comments are where the pageviews multiply. Each comment leads to at least one additional pageview and typically the commenter will return multiple times to the blog post to see if anyone has replied to him or her. This “pageview compounding” is what makes Apple so wonderful to write about.

In the old days, Apple stories were also a quick-frontpage for some of the larger blogs on social services like Digg. I haven’t been to Digg lately so I am not sure if this still holds true, but overall Apple stories are still great for pumping traffic through the social services. Apple posts also get indexed by the Apple aggregators which I’ve found also send a nice amount of traffic.

Now you know the real reason why there were so many stories about the Apple antenna issue with the iPhone 4 and why bloggers are hoping for similar issues with Apple products in the future. Or maybe it’s just that Apple has superior products?

Find more stories about: Apple, Bloggers, Blogging, blogs

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.

Find more stories about: Bloggers, blogs, Google, Zemanta

London-based Skimlinks announced today the beta release of their latest service, Skimwords.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Skimwords is a bit different than the main Skimlinks product. The Skimwords service looks at the content on the page and creates links on-the-fly for products listed within the content. The goal is to drive additional affiliate sales through the newly-found product links. The service is similar to other in-text programs including Kontera and Intellitxt.

Skimlinks is looking for sites in the following categories to join their Skimwords beta: technology/electronics, sport/lifestyle, automotive and fashion.

Amazon ran a similar program several years ago — one line of Javascript allowed Amazon to automatically create affiliate product links from the text on a page. The Amazon service was closed about a year ago.

Check out our interview with Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro from earlier this year.

Find more stories about: affiliate revenue, blogs, Skimbit, Skimlinks

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

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.

Find more stories about: Bloggers, blogs, CenterNetworks

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.

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

For Edelman VP Steve Rubel, Posterous is the hottest thing out there today. Last summer Rubel talked about how Posterous changed how he looks at blogging.

Posterous is a simple way to create a blog by using email to create online content and store it for easy viewing and sharing. You send your photos, videos and text to Posterous and they make the posts on-the-fly for you. Your posts can then be shared on the social services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Your readers can also subscribe to content on your Posterous blog using RSS or email. Posterous co-founder Gary Tan was recently interviewed on the This Week in Startups show hosted by Jason Calacanis.

Yesterday WordPress announced that they have created a “Posterous Importer” for hosted customers. Similar to their other importer tools, this new one takes the content on a Posterous blog and imports it into a wordpress.com hosted blog. The Posterous importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

WordPress developer Brian Colinger also noted in the post that WordPress can handle “post via email” which is the core functionality of Posterous.

Compete shows Posterous at 1 million unique U.S. visitors in January and WordPress at 27 million for the same demographics and time period. Last week WordPress added a new email subscription option to hosted blogs.

Find more stories about: blogs, microblog, posterous, wordpress

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

Last year, top 100 tech blog Techcrunch added a “meta refresh” to their homepage which allowed your Internet browser to refresh the homepage at specific intervals of time without your instruction. This refresh serves two purposes:

• it allows readers who leave their browser open to the Techcrunch.com site to always view the latest stories when they return to the page
• it allows Techcrunch to add monetizable pageviews to their ad base

After what appears to be a bad hacking event last night (I feel for their staff as I know all too well about hacking over the past year), Techcrunch appears to have added an “interstitial” advertisement. Interstitial ads are basically ads that are placed on pages between the content. In this case, the ad displayed below is presented to a user upon the first load of techcrunch.com, but doesn’t appear again.

Technically, code on the techcrunch.com home page pushes users to the interstitial ad if they don’t have the cookie which tells the server that they have already seen the ad. Also, it appears the ad is running through Google Ad Manager and appears to be a custom campaign with Blackberry (congrats to their team on the ad sale).

With all the traffic from discussions about the hack, to the big Steve Jobs iTablet/slate/whatever event tomorrow, that Blackberry interstitial ad should provide for some very nice income for CEO Heather Harde and team.

As an aside, it also appears they are running the “very controversial” Comscore beacon tracking pixel. Comscore was at the center of last weekend’s bitchfest.

Find more stories about: advertisements, blogs, online advertising, TechCrunch

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 :)

Find more stories about: Bloggers, Blogging, blogs, IZEA, SocialSpark