At the Community Leadership Summit in San Jose a couple of weeks  ago I met  Jure Chualev. He’s the community manager for Zemanta who makes a handy authoring plugin for content creators. Zemanta provides a Firefox extension and plugins to popular blogging platforms to allow you to find related content.For example you can find a picture of a cow (or most anything) licensed under a permissive license like the Creative Commons to include in a blog post or find related links into a blog post.

I installed the Zemanta plugin for Wordpress which gave me an interface for finding images or related articles. The interface makes it easy to add these images by dragging and dropping them into your Wordpress editor, very similar to the Photo Dropper for Wordpress.  In addition you can create a list of related articles (See the list I generated below) by selecting them from a list of articles ordered by their publish date.

You can also include a “Reblog” badge in your posts to encourage people to quote and link to your content. Beyond that you can also by syndicate your content through their Triond, a service that publishes your content through a relevant network and share revenue generated by that content. Overall Zemanta is a pretty cool tool to help improve the content and quality of your blog and to find relevant content.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta – the Coolest Application for Bloggers I Have Seen (change-management-blog.com)
• testing zemanta (glemak.com)
• Cool Firefox Add-in (polynesianmedic.com)
• Zemanta makes blogging while drinking easier (freakthenet.wordpress.com)
• Make Your Blog Posts Better (lockergnome.com)

Technorati Tags: Add-on, Blog, Firefox, Plug-in, WordPress, Zemanta

I really wanted to attend the Citizen Journalism Academy presented by the Society of Professional Journalists in Greensboro, NC today but after a hectic spring travel schedule I thought better of it and stayed home to visit with my family. Luckily local social media maven, Wayne Sutton’s (@WayneSutton on Twitter) been sending tweets with the commentary from the program.

One thing that caught my eye was a link to Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230) part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some commentary on it. First the relevant part of the law:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: “[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.” The courts have repeatedly rejected attempts to limit the reach of Section 230 to “traditional” Internet service providers, instead treating many diverse entities as “interactive computer service providers.

What that means to bloggers:

Bloggers can be both a provider and a user of interactive computer services. Bloggers are users when they create and edit blogs through a service provider, and they are providers to the extent that they allow third parties to add comments or other material to their blogs.

Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. However, if you selected the third-party information yourself, no court has ruled whether this information would be considered “provided” to you. One court has limited Section 230 immunity to situations in which the originator “furnished it to the provider or user under circumstances in which a reasonable person…would conclude that the information was provided for publication on the Internet….”

So if you are actively going out and gathering data on your own, then republishing it on your blog, we cannot guarantee that Section 230 would shield you from liability. But we believe that Section 230 should cover information a blogger has selected from other blogs or elsewhere on the Internet, since the originator provided the information for publication to the world. However, no court has ruled on this.

There’s more commentary on the site but unlike some laws that deal with electronic communications their have been numerous court decisions that have established precedent.

I think it’s a good practice for the “new media” to understand the legalities of all media. I also think it’s a good idea to understand the ethics that good journalist practice and that our spelled out by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics that boils down to four main themes.

1. Seek Truth and Report It
2. Minimize Harm
3. Act Independently
4. Be Accountable

I believe that Citizen Journalism has gained increased popularity as a result of the accountability factor, remember the Killian documents from Rathergate.

Anyhow, I am sorry I missed the conference especially since I am sitting here blogging and my wife went for a pedicure, quality time bah…

Technorati Tags: Blogging, blogs, Publishing, Section 230, Title 47

I love Twitter but when I use my Linux laptop (Ubuntu running Hardy Heron) I don’t have many native options for Twitter clients. The preferred native client appears to be Twitux. Though the nascent client is a little primitive for me. Another popular choice is gTwitter though in my experience it’s only been marginally better.

On Mac OS X I prefer Twhirl which allows me to send tweets to separate accounts from individual windows. So I can send tweets for my @zenoss and @mrhinkle accounts. Twhirl is an Adobe Air application which now is available for Linux as an alpha. Thanks to Seth Yates I now have Twhirl running as an AIR application with Adobe Air running natively on Ubuntu. the only downside seems to be that the notification windows are a little “flutterly” I really don’t care for them anyhow so I turned them off and everything seems to run well.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Air, gTwitter, Linux, Twhirl, Twitter, Twitux

If you know what this picture is from then you are probably a Twitter user. There’s a lot of discussion on how their success might be killing them, at least they will have $15 million bucks from their investors to shore up their infrastructure. I suspect that Twitter doesn’t suffer from their user base as much as they do from their “openness”. You see they have a very good API for people to write applications to. Some of my favorites are Summize and a new one I found last night at the Triangle Tweetup, Twitter Movies.

I have to wonder if the reason Twitter suffers is from the number of services tapping into it’s API and not actually the people using it. Anyhow as I write this I am staring at the whale once again…

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Whale

Have you ever tried to embed a video in Wordpress and have the embed code get mangled or not render at all. That’s been a problem for me lately. That’s until I found VideoEmbedder Plugin for Wordpress. Video Embedder allows you to specify the video id enclosed by the tags for the video and you can embed a video in a web page.

You can see the list of video types in the Video Embedder Settings. Over 20 Types including the most popular like YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, BlipTV, Viddler, etc.

Technorati Tags: Embed, video, WordPress

Random Links from April web surfing.

• Stop leaving out the valuable breadcrumb trail – Breadcrumb trails are still a vital part of on page SEO. They provide backlinks to the homepage and help it’s authority status.
• Omni WordPress Theme | Premium Design Templates – A premium Wordpress theme with a web 2.0 feel.
• Best practices when moving your site from Google – Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results?
• Bookmarkit – The Social Bookmarks sidebar widget for WordPress allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar.
• Idealware: Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone – Open source content management systems can make creating and managing your website a lot easier – and there’s no licensing fee involved. But which should you use?  We look carefully at Joomla, Drupal, and Plone to compare their strengths and weaknesses.
• Psystar Corporation – Open Computer: The Smart Alternative to an Apple – Why spend $1999 to get the least expensive Apple computer with a decent video card when you can pay less than a fourth of that for an equivalent sleek and small form-factor desktop with the same hardware. This turned out to be a sketchy drama as documented here by Gizmodo.
• StumbleUpon Alerter – Blog – Adamant Solutions, Adelaide, South Australia – Web design, custom software development and website hosting – StumbleUpon Alerter is a small tool that sits in the system tray. It keeps an eye on all of your discoveries on StumbleUpon and plays a noise whenever someone reviews or gives your sites a thumbs up.
• Monochrome Pro | Graph Paper Press – Another WordPress theme I have been digging.
• Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang For Our Buck? @ ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE MAGAZINE – A number of emerging frameworks seek to tame the browser and make it a suitable platform for a rich client application. The biggest fish in this pond is currently Google Web Toolkit (or GWT)….
• How to write a press release – Nice how-to for those who don’t know the in’s and outs of wrting press releases.
• BitNami makes it easy for mom & semi-geeks to use OSS « rand($thoughts); – As OSS ISVs began to use BitRock’s InstallBuilder, they started hearing that customers didn’t just want the standalone ISV product. Customers wanted the whole stack that the ISV product runs on. In response, BitRock now offers ISVs Custom Stacks.
• What’s That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog] – Technorati is still seeing a steady flow of hacked blogs showing up in Technorati crawls. The ones that we can identify as symptomatic of the compromise aren’t getting their crawls processed. 2.5 is a way to clear up the problem but not the only solution.
• Unconfirmed: Lenovo’s Entire New ThinkPad Line Leaked, X300 Gets Siblings – Lenovo is rumored to be releasing a whole line of ultra-portable’s based on the small form factor X300. Maybe they will give Apple’s MacBook Air a run for their money.
• The Server Room – Forum Powered by eve community – The Server Room is Ars Technica’s forum for large scale IT.
• Jiffle – Scheduling Made Simple – Jiffle™ makes scheduling appointments and meetings quick and simple.
• How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words! – How does Google know how many people are subscribed to your feed? Answer: Google Reader, the most popular feedreader at the moment, with a (loosely) estimated 30%+ share or the newsreader market.
• Gartner Explains Why Windows Is Broken – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership – Interesting take on why t
• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text – TagCrowd creates a TagCloud from a URL, uploaded file, or text. [via Sam's blog]
• WPZOOM ›› WP Themes & Showcase, Blogging Tips & Hacks – Nice site about Wordpress themes and blogging tips.
• Forecast: IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide, 2007-2012 – IT operations management software market revenue will reach $18.1 billion in 2012, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 7.2% from 2007 through 2012
• 451 CAOS Theory » Qlusters waves goodbye to openQRM – And then there was three? Qlusters, the former(?) open source systems management vendor has handed the development of the openQRM project over to the open source community and announced that it will no longer be involved in the project.
• GapingVoid: How Does A Software Company Make Money, If All Software is Free – Hugh talks about software companies without business models, more on this later.
• James Governor’s Monkchips » Building a Social Media Platform and Community: Three Legs – The three-tiered architectures and developer communities. I think maybe the in more general terms you need an extensible application, a medium for collaboration, and a call to action. Then what do I know I’m not an analyst .
• LifeType | Open Source Blogging Platform – Open source blogging platform.
• My Essential Twitter Tools – If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client.
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times – A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times – Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures…
• 10 Open Source Education Tools | John M Willis ESM Blog – Interesting list of open source software Moodle, Edubuntu, FreeMind.
• Logic+Emotion – “Once upon a time, we were consumers. We consumed things. We took in the messages that were communicated to us. We didn’t really get to talk back. If we had a good or bad experience with a product or service—we told a friend.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Microsoft, SEO, Twitter

I have started using the term estantiate. It’s a made up word, my own personal derivative of instantiate:

instantiate (v) – To represent (an abstract concept) by a concrete or tangible example.

This my observed phenomenon in the blogosphere of validating a fact, concept, or other trend via hyperlink:

estantiate (v) – To validate a concept, idea, or fact by hyperlinking to a source on the internet.

It’s funny how much credibility bloggers have. They can come up with a theory and link to a couple sources and their idea instantly become validated. In this study from Chu and Kamal they document how likely people were to believe a blogger. It’s a good read on what factors seem to influence blogger credibility.

Technorati Tags: blogger, credibility, estantiate, instantiate

I was referred to the origins of the term Social Media Optimization(SMO) from an old ProBlogger article about Google’s treatment of blogs.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

While I think video and other tactics are important especially given Google’s inclusion of video in search results. One trend of growing importance is optimizing web pages by including microformats:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Examples of microformats are

• hCard – For people and organizations
• hCalendar – Calendars and Event
• XFN – Social Networks

A broader list of microformats can be on the microformats wiki.

I think the key thing to consider when optimizing your website for audience (Whether it be readers or search engines) it’s important to make it easier for the website to be be consumed. That means syndicating content, offering multimedia when and where appropriate. Now I have one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to throw around along with my geek-speak laden vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, optimization, SEO, Social Media

When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 I had to disable that plug-in. Stewart Mader posted the fix for using Alex King’s Popularity Contest with WordPress 2.5. Thanks to Stewart it’s back up and running.

In the WordPress admin area, choose Plugins, then scroll down to Popularity Contest, and click Edit. Scroll down until you see this bit of code:

if (!isset($wpdb)) {
require('../../wp-blog-header.php');
akpc_init();
}

Remove one of the ../ from:

require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

Also, Popularity Contest is what powers my Top Posts widget on the right hand side of the blog. Thanks to Dean Sykes at Tech Teapot for authoring that handy little widget.

Technorati Tags: 2.5, plugins, Popularity Contest, Top Posts, Widget, WordPress

I have been blogging for many years. During that time I have used many other platforms including hosted software from BlogCity. TypePad, and Blogger. I also used Moveable Type briefly and a highly customized version of Joomla! (before that MamboCMS). Last fall I switched to WordPress as my primary blog platform. Though I haven’t been bowled over by WordPress I have come to the conclusion that it is the best blogging platform for me because it’s easy-to-use, has the widest variety of features, extensible, and it’s open source (with a thriving community of developers– over 90 developers were credited with contributing to this release).

Yesterday the long awaited and somewhat delayed WordPress 2.5 was released. Today, I updated my installation today and though I had a few problems the upgrade to the new version was definitely worth it.

The Upgrade Process

I upgraded my instance of WordPress using the Keith Dsouza’s Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. The process took only a few minutes and I like using this plugin because not only is it easy to use but it makes a back-up before updating your installation in case you have to revert. Once I upgraded the next step was to reactivate plugins. Most of my plugins were still functioning except for Alex King’s 404 Notifier and Popularity Contest which is a shame because the Popularity Contest widget is how I display my most popular posts.

The Administrative Interface

The biggest difference between previous versions and this release is that the administrative interface is substantially redesigned. The dashboard is now a “widgetized” page that breaks out important data like Recent Comments and Incoming Links into separate boxes.

The menu organization is greatly improved. The new interface breaks up the left side with common authoring and tasks and the right side with less frequently used options like settings, plugins and user management.

My only complaint is that I think the dashboard should allow you to drag and drop these widgets in the arrangement that you prefer. For example, if you use WordPress stats you might want to make that box your top choice followed by other less relevant information.

Editing Environment

In WordPress 2.3 I had been using WysisygPro Plug-in for Wordpress as my editor but it didn’t work after I installed version 2.5. This wasn’t a big deal for me because WordPress now comes with Tiny MCE 3.0 for visual editing and it works quite well. The interface is easy to use and you have the option of tabbing between visual and HTML mode. There is also a media bar to add video and music.

I also like the removal of the “Save and Continue Editing” button which I thought was a waste. In previous WordPress versions the save button would return you to Manage Posts pages showing you all your drafts which I found annoying. In WordPress 2.5 the Save button keeps the post open and you can click on the Manage->Posts button if you want to go to look at all your posts.

Another new interesting feature is a auto-suggest for Tags that adds a drop-down of your currently used tags when you fill out the tags option.

One thing I don’t like is the redesigned interface is that the categories have been moved from the right column to below the editor. Ideally I would like a drag and drop interface that allows me to arrange my editing environment as I like. For example, I use All-In-One SEO Pack Plug-in and I would like the option of dragging it higher in the list than the trackbacks option.

Plug-In Management

One of the features I was looking forward to was the ability to automatically update plug-ins. In previous versions you were able to view your plug-in list and see which ones need to be upgraded but to do so required a tedious manual process. I tried to use this feature to upgrade Google Analytics for WordPress but while it removed the old version, installation of the newer version failed. Ilan reported that he has the same problem with another plug-in, Gregarious, but had no problem with Google Analytics. I was able to successfully update the Similiar Posts plugin without a problem though.

Conclusion

WordPress 2.5 deserves a big thumbs up. The administrative interface is a big improvement. In the past I had used the Steve Smith’s Tiger Administration plugin to improve the interface but the new design is such a big improvement that I am pleased to use the native administrative theme. Overall I think the changes in this version of WordPress could have merited a full version release (3.0 instead of 2.5) but it’s a considerable improvement and foreshadows many more improvements to come.

My only word of warning is that some of your previously installed plugins may not work in WordPress 2.5. For example, Gregarious and Popularity Contest. However, I suspect that their authors will update them at some point.

One thing that remains conspicously absent from WordPress is any commercial tie-in to Automattic, the venture-backed sponsor of Wordpress. The only commercial offering I see from them so far is consulting services for businesses that start at $2500/year. I would suspect a consumer or small-business option will be coming at some point. However, as of now their individual services for statistics and spam protection is free. Correction from Matt Mullenweg of Automattic:

Stats are indeed free for everyone, but Akismet is free for personal use and paid for commercial use:
http://akismet.com/commercial/

Technorati Tags: Blog, compatibility, Google Analytics, Gregarious, Joomla!, Open Source, plugins, Popularity Contest, review, Software, WordPress