blogs Archive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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” »

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.

Continue reading “Everything Old Is New Again…Techcrunch Adds Interstitials” »