Earlier this month we noticed PRManna climbing up the Hacker News front page and reached out to the creator for an interview. Ryan Waggoner started PRManna in his spare time and was open in saying that the project was inspired by Peter Shankman's Help a Reporter Out. The difference between PRManna and HARO is that Waggoner's product was specifically meant for startup companies to answer blogger and journalist tech queries. Whereas, HARO is a general news service. The question is, are the sites far enough apart to be considered different products?
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In the Hacker News thread Waggoner acknowledges that in the time that he'd developed his site, Shankman's HARO had transitioned from a listserv to a more comprehensive tool saying, "Unfortunately, I took a look at HARO today and they've apparently launched something very similar, rather than just the old mailing list that I was competing against. So what do you think of this? Should I just drop it or should I add features to make it more valuable? Alternatively, is there something else I could use it for?"
As of today Waggoner may not have the opportunity to change tactics. The developer wrote a blog post detailing a cease and desist letter sent by Shankman's lawyer. As a community with your finger on the pulse of tech launches and entrepreneurial resources, we want to know whether or not you believe Shankman's takedown notice is warranted. Let us know in the comments below.
Is blogging for old people? Apparently so. Well, at least according to a new study from Pew Internet Project, that is. Today's youngest generation of online users are no longer interested in consuming long-form content like blogs, says the research. Instead, communication among teens tends to involve brief bursts of information, like a Facebook status update or a text message. Pew's findings state that only 14% of tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 now report that they blog, down from 25% only four years ago. They're also less interested in commenting on their friends' blogs, too, with only 52% reporting doing so, down from over three-quarters back in 2006.
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Social Networks Preferred to Blogging
In the new report, findings show that 73% of wired teens now use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, a big jump from the 55% who did so back in 2006. Young adults (18-29), too, choose social networking sites as a preferred method of communication. Among this group, 72% report using these sites. Meanwhile, only 40% of those 30 and older do the same.
But blogging? Passé, says the report. The medium once used for sharing either news and/or personal thoughts and feelings is no longer popular among teens. The why is simple: Facebook. With the ability to update your status on social networking sites, the need to communicate using long-form mechanisms like sentences and - ugh! - paragraphs is no longer necessary. Instead of summarizing a day's events via blog post for example, a teen may simply update Facebook multiple times throughout the day with the details as to what's happening in their life at the moment.
These shorter bursts of content, much like the ever-popular text messages sent between friends on cell phones, are easier-to-consume mini bits of information. They take only seconds to read, not minutes. And commenting on them takes only moments as well. Considering the hundreds of online friends people tend to accumulate on these social networking sites, those time savings really add up.
Why the Decline in Blogging?
Although it's obvious that the popularity of Facebook and its ilk have taken away from the teens' desire to blog, Pew doesn't go so far as to speculate why that is. One theory worth considering is that today's teens are overloaded with information and simply don't have the time to read long blog posts. They're already too busy keeping up with texts, multiple social networking sites, email, instant messages, and phone calls - practically drowning in communication tools, it seems. And when there's too much to consume, the easiest things to drop out of the mix would be those that take the most time: blogging, reading blogs, and commenting on blogs.
Another idea we haven't seen mentioned anywhere yet is that it's possible teens weren't ever really into blogging to begin with. In Pew's study, they count the blogs found within social networking sites along with what we would typically consider a blog - standalone websites like this one, The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, Dooce, etc. However, Facebook and many other social networking sites don't really have a blogging feature, but MySpace does. Coincidentally, MySpace's popularity has been on the decline for years now. As MySpace visits dropped off, so did the usage of its "blogs." In other words, if Pew counted MySpace blogs when asking teens if they commented on or wrote blogs themselves, there's going to be a drop-off.
Blogging, in and of itself, may or may not appeal to teens. It's hard to know considering how the survey questions were worded. If Facebook had a similar "blogs" feature as MySpace, the study may have read quite differently: "teen blogging soars!" To really determine how popular blogging is as an online activity, it may have been better to differentiate between the standalone sites and the long-form updates found within a social network. Failure to do so confuses the issue and leaves us without the answers a detailed study like this aims to deliver.
Do you use WordPress and want to blog from your Android phone? Doing that just got a lot easier. Wordpress for Android - an open-source app backed by WordPress.org - is now available in the Android Market. With this app, anybody who blogs on WordPress.com or a self-hosted WordPress blog can post and edit blog posts, as well as moderate and post comments. In addition, the app will display notifications whenever a reader comments on a blog post.
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Features
With WordPress for Android, you can also configure and manage multiple blogs, which is a great feature for those of us who post on more than one site.
Using the app is pretty straightforward. Simply enter your blog's URL and your credentials and you are ready to go. The actual editor is a pretty basic HTML editor, though unlike WordPress' early iPhone efforts, it's easy to add links and italicize or bold text. The app also makes it very easy to select and upload photos from the phone's photo gallery to a WordPress blog. While we were testing the app, however, selecting an image on the Nexus One regularly led to a crash.
Open Source App
Just like WordPress for iPhone and WordPress for BlackBerry, the Android app is an open source effort. Indeed, a large part of the code base for Wordpress for Android is based on the popular wpToGo application, which will now be discontinued in favor of the official WordPress app. Developers who are interested in helping out can find more information here.
Home and Garden TV just announced that it has signed Heather Armstrong, author of hyper-popular early blog Dooce.com, to collaborate on unspecified "convergence media" projects.
The millions of readers who have followed Armstrong on her nine-year journey as an ex-Mormon mom who got fired for the contents of her blog and then made that blog an international phenomenon will no doubt be excited to see what she does with the TV network. Armstrong is a designer by training.
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One of the earliest bloggers online, Armstrong is now 34 years old and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Generally referred to as a mommy-blogger, Armstrong writes about a wide variety of topics including her family. She's a very hip lady and can run circles around the internet. Can she bring her mix of style, poignancy, humor and brutal honesty to HGTV successfully? We'll see.
Armstrong's announcement is here. Old media, meet one of the Queens of New Media. Now let's see what y'all can do together.
As part of my role as Lifehack’s manager, I am responsible for moderating the comments queue. Lifehack’s back-end has a “Pending” queue for comments that our spam-catching software thinks might be spam, a “Spam” queue for comments labeled “spam” either by the software or by me, and another queue for comments that have been approved, again either by the software or by me. As a general rule, I check that “Pending” queue several times a day, the “Approved” queue every day or so, and the “Spam” queue every week or so.
I’ve been doing this for two years, and I’ve gotten pretty proficient at figuring out what is and is not spam – a tough call to make sometimes, since spammers get more and more sophisticated in lock-step with those of us charged with blocking them. I present my “formula” here for two reasons: one, to give less experienced bloggers and webmasters an idea of how to catch spam on their own site, and two, to give commenters an idea of the kind of thing to avoid so their comments don’t get accidentally thrown in the “Spam” bin.
I should say, a big part of catching spam is a “feel” – intuiting that some comment just doesn’t feel right. I’m not sure I can capture exactly what goes into that feel. Andy Warhol once said that to recognize a great painting, first you have to look at a thousand paintings, and catching spam is a bit like that – the experience of having looked at thousands of spam messages cannot be easily encapsulated. But I’ll try as well as I can.
What is spam?
What makes a message spam is relative and subjective. In a sense, spam is like a weed – a weed is not any particular kind of plant, but a plant that isn’t wanted where it’s at. (See, for example, Wikipidia’s definition of Weed as “a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance.”) For instance, Corn is delicious, but if it’s growing in your soybean field, it’s a weed. A message that, say, pimps a word processor might be perfectly welcome on a post that asks for product recommendations for writers, while on a post that just happens to mention writing, the same message could be considered spam.
Some messages are clearly spam; for example, anything delivered by a spambot programmed to leave its message wherever it can find an open form to submit through. But a message can be left by a living person, custom-written for the particular content it’s posted to, and still be spam. This list starts with the most obvious signs and moves to more vague and difficult-to-interpret signs. My guess is that a lot of people run into the ones further down the list because they post without thinking very clearly, so pay attention.
A comment is spam if it:
Contains links to websites that are unrelated to the content. For example, a comment might say “I think your baby is really cute!” but the word “baby” links to a site selling baby clothes or even a Forex trading site or other scam.
Is posted on more than one post. This is obvious, right? Real people don’t post the same comment over and over on different posts, no matter how relevant. most likely it’s a spambot responding to multiple posts on your blog that contain similar keywords.
Contains more than one link. While there are a few situations in which a legitimate comment could contain several links, they’re fairly rare. As a general rule, the likelihood of a comment being spam increases directly with the number of links; anything over three and it’s virtually guaranteed to be spam.
Is not directly related to the post. A lot of spambots (or even live spammers) crawl the web looking for posts with certain keywords and then insert a generic message loosely related to the topic on the hopes that it will slip past any human reader who is likely to just skim through their comments. Unless a comment addresses something specific about your post, it’s likely to be spam.
Is overly complimentary. Most spammers are fairly astute observers of basic human psychology – particularly our desire to believe good things about ourselves. So they butter us up, saying things like “Great post! In fact, I love this whole site – I’m definitely going to come back again and again!”.
Has keywords or a business name in the “Name” field. A basic search engine optimization strategy is to get your website’s address associated with specific keywords, and search engines look closely at the text associated with a link to determine the usefulness of the website linked to. Real people aren’t trying to game search engines, and frankly, we want to be recognized for our contribution, so we use our actual name, or a username. If you can’t imagine replying to a person by the name in their “Name” field, you’re dealing with a spammer. (For example, here’s one taken from our spam queue: “Having a good vocabulary not only gives a framework for thought. It also allows you to be concise and precise to make communication better.” This is relevant to the post, and thoughtful, but it was left by an entity named “dining room table”. It’s spam.)
Links to a spammy business. This is a tough call – sometimes I’ll see a thoughtful comment clearly written in direct response to the post it’s commenting on, under a real person’s name, and still mark it as spam because they link to a site whose legitimacy is questionable. Could be porn, WOW gold scams, Forex scams, get rich quick schemes, blogs with stolen content, or anything else that feels to me like someone left a comment more to get their link out than to add to the discussion.
Quotes the post without responding to the quote. This is a relatively sophisticated spam technique: pulling lines out of the post it’s responding to in order to make the language of the comment sound like real writing. Real people mark the quotes they’re commenting on (usually with quotation marks, but it could be by italicizing or bolding it, putting it in blockquotes, or some other means) and try to clearly separate their response form the post’s words.
Is posted on an old post. Old posts tend to attract a lot of spam. Real people generally recognize that if a post is a year or so old, the conversation there is pretty much over. Spambots do not realize that. It still sometimes happens that someone comments on an ancient post, but the age of the post is a big red flag.
Is in a different language from the site. If the point of a comment is to engage in discussion with the author of the post and his or her readers, it doesn’t make much sense to comment in a language that you’re not sure the author knows.
Is from a Russian .ru domain. I hate to stereotype an entire top-level domain like this. I’m sure there are Russians out there making thoughtful comments on blogs all the time. And yet I’ve never had a comment that wasn’t spam from a commentor with a .ru domain or email address.
Tells a long, personal story. This is experience talking – a lot of times you’ll see what appears to be a blog post in its own right in your moderation queue that starts off, at least, relevant, and is clearly written by a real person. This falls under the “Weed” heading – it might have been totally welcome except it’s out of place as a comment on your blog.
Asks for specific support. This is another “weed” situation: a comment on a post about, say, installing Windows 7 that asks for help with a specific problem. Unless the point of your site is to answer specific questions about computer problems, this comment is out of place. There are better and more likely places to get help than on your blog.
Feels wrong. Sometimes a comment just feels wrong – it is a little too smarmy, maybe, or it’s a little too formal and stiff. You click through the link and it’s a legitimate-enough site, maybe a little sketchy, but you can totally construct a case where this comment was written by a real person with something to say. The question, though, isn’t what was the intention of the writer, but what is the effect on the conversation on your site. If a comment doesn’t seem to quite fit, you’re well within your rights to “spam it”.
Anyone else have advice for would-be spam-catchers? Or for commenters who might be finding their comments relegated to the spam-heaps of history? Leave a thoughtful, non-spammy comment below!
Conversations around blog posts now often happen offsite on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Sadly, a lot of plugins that try to bring these conversation back to the blog end up being somewhat useless, as large numbers of retweets can easily overshadow the more interesting tweets. Twitter search engine BackType just launched a major update to its search engine and and a new WordPress plugin that aim to combat this problem. Starting today, BackType will filter out uninteresting tweets from its search results and its widgets.
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Widgets and Plugins
Last April, BackType released its first Wordpress plugin. Unlike the original plugin, which features comments from sources like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed,Reddit and other blogs, the new plugin only focuses on Twitter.
Installing the plugin is straightforward. If you use Wordpress, you can find the plugin and instructions for installing it here. If you use another blog engine, the widget can be found here. You don't need to register with BackType to use this service.
If nobody has tweeted anything interesting about your site yet, BackType will give your readers the option to send a tweet right from the widget. Sadly, BackType didn't integrate a re-tweet feature into the plugin, which would have made the service even more useful for publishers.
Here is the new BackType widget in action:
BackType is obviously working in a crowded market. As a search engine, it has to compete with successful startups like OneRiot, while it's plugin competes with more complete offerings from Disqus and JS-Kit. At the same time, though, the simplicity of the plugin is its greatest strength. If you don't want to replace your current comment system but would like to bring in more discussions from Twitter to your blog, the new BackType plugin is definitely worth a look.
According to a report released today [PDF] by Reporters Sans Frontières, the number of bloggers around the world arrested because of their online work jumped from 59 to 151 between 2008 and 2009, an increase of 155%. Additionally, one blogger died in prison and 61 were physically assaulted. The most infamous cases perhaps occurred during the violent unrest in Iran following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed reelection. But RSF said the number of overall arrests and attacks can actually be traced to crackdowns in at least 10 countries.
"The number of countries affected by online censorship has doubled from one year to the next - a disturbing tendency that shows an increase in control over new media as millions of netizens get active online," said Lucie Morillon, head of the group's Internet and Freedoms Desk.
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The report is a profoundly depressing read. As tech journalists writing from the soft comfort of our homes, it's easy to forget that in many places of the world, the simple act of posting something to a blog has lethal repercussions.
Elections, politics and the economy were the primary reasons bloggers ended up in jail. While China is the worst, Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan also frequently monitor or block websites and blogs.
From the report:
"Two Azerbaijani bloggers, who were sentenced to two years in prison for making a film mocking the political elite.The Turkmen Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in jail, while the famous Burmese comedian Zarganar still has 34 years of his prison sentence to serve. Victims of Internet policing also include such leading figures in the defence of online free expression as China's Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo and Vietnam's Nguyen Trung and Dieu Cay.
"In South Korea, a blogger was wrongfully detained for commenting on the country's disastrous economic situation. Around six netizens in Thailand were arrested or harassed just for making a connection between the king's health and a fall in the Bangkok stock exchange."
In March, Reporters Sans Frontières will launch what it's calling the Enemies of the Internet campaign to highlight the countries affected by online intimidation and censorship.
The new "artists" are curators of other people's created content, if sites such as Tumblr, Ffffound, WeHeartIt and newcomer Awsm.fm are any kind of zeitgeist.
Awsm.fm is a digital multimedia scrapbooking app that regards copyright issues with a gleeful abandon, allowing users to pick images and group them with text, tags and uploaded songs. But, licensing aside, the app does allow users to display their lovely and deeply sensitive tastes in pop music and evocative photography.
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The Awsm.fm user interface borrows liberally and haphazardly from a few sites we know and love, notably Vimeo. It's a very new product and is still buggy with a UX that's less than intuitive and occasionally frustrating.
Although there is an attempt to attribute the uploaded songs by incorporating existing track information and letting users edit the artist and track title, there is no standardized way to link back to the music creator or ensure any work on the site is licensed for this kind of sharing. Images do link back to their original source, which may but will not always satisfy the copyright holder.
Here's an example of an Awsm.fm post, featuring an image, some text, a few tags, a comment box and a song I uploaded:
You can check out this profile page to see more Awsm.fm posts we created.
As I've written in the past, users have been given more and more tools for grabbing, spreading and remixing content over the past 10 years since Napster's birth. Most of those tools have been free or nearly so, and many of them border on piracy or explicitly enable it.
The founder of Awsm.fm, who introduced himself to us as "Wan," wrote that he is "sad by the lost of imeem, muxtape" and "frustrated at not being able to listen to lala.com." A self-proclaimed indie music fan and programmer, Wan has created a tool that does something to help distribute independent music to listeners but nothing to help independent musicians track and profit from their music.
However, as legendary rock music producer Steve Albini wrote in a comment on the above-linked post, "Internet file sharing is profoundly beneficial to bands in that it serves to promote them to a worldwide audience at no cost... I saw it in action myself last year when my band conducted hugely profitable tours of both South America and Eastern Europe, including places like Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Turkey, where our music has virtually no formal distribution. People came to our shows, knew our music and bought anything we had to sell them. They were familiar with us because the Internet allowed them to hear our music for free, and they developed a taste for it."
While independent musicians may receive some ancillary benefit from users' getting to hear and distribute their music free of charge, other copyright-holding songwriters hold opinions very different from Albini's. We read about lawsuits over this kind of issue every year, and as a musician myself, I certainly wouldn't want a stranger scattering my songs to the four winds without my being able to track and monetize those listens, likes, shares and web traffic. There is, after all, something to be said for putting Ramen on the table of every starving artist.
Note: For demo purposes, I've uploaded images that belong to me and close friends and music from bands I support and/or went to college with. Because I'm using their content and they deserve the plug, check out Chris Merritt if you're into indie-type pop rock and Year Long Disaster if you're of a more head-banging persuasion.
For revenue, the site seems to plan on sponsored posts and advertising. If Wan has any idea about the cost of hosting and playing copyrighted music, he might consult imeem (sold at a huge loss because licensing fees were overwhelming the company) or Pandora (just now beginning to see profitability as a possibility), he must have some radically profitable alternatives up his sleeve.
What do our musician/music startup friends have to say about Awsm.fm? Is it, as the name would imply, simply and clearly awesome - both for users and for the musicians they want to promote or share? Or is it just more 2.0 content theft? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This morning in her address to LeWeb conference attendees, her majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan asked the audience, "Did Michael Jackson change the fate of the green revolution?" While CNN was slow to report on this year's Iranian election protests, Twitter became a powerful news vehicle. Nevertheless, after a week of "Tehran" as Twitter's top trending topics, Michael Jackson's sudden death quickly replaced it.
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Interested in the power of activism and social change, Queen Rania tweeted the question, "Can the real-time web change the world?" Inundated with answers, the Queen was surprised to find that 60% of those who replied answered no.
As one way to rally netizens to participate in life-changing social action, Rania called upon today's attendees to join in her mission of universal education for children. In participation with the 1Goal project, the Queen appealed to bloggers for their help. As part of her campaign to collect more than 300 million signatures in support of universal childhood education, she is asking bloggers to devote one day of tweeting and blogging to the 1Goal project.
Said Rania, "The classroom can be a chrysalis for change... We can be lifestreaming and life changing."
For more information on how you can participate visit join1goal.org.
"We live in public" isn't just the name of a film; it's an Internet truism.
For the past ten years, more and more of us have been using blogging platforms to share the details of our personal and professional lives. With the advent of microblogging, the sharing has escalated to include the most intimate, immediate, and even mundane details of one's daily grind. When pressures abound, venting online is second nature; but oversharing can bear disastrous consequences. The cure? Penzu's private-by-design, sharable-by-choice blogging software.
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Unlike most modern CMSs (and actually somewhat reminiscent of dotcom-era systems such as Livejournal), Penzu focuses on personal journaling and privacy. The company, a small Canadian outfit which launched last summer, says its posts are private by default.
An in spite of its focus on privacy, the system is hardly antisocial. Flickr photos can be imported, and each entry comes with an optional URL for sharing on other networks.
The new Penzu Pro features, available for the relatively low price of $19 a year,are pretty useful, as well. With the free version, users can create, save, search and share journal entries. The paid version of the software allows users to also import entires from just about any kind of blog (in case oversharing has been a problem in your past) and export Penzu entries, as well as giving users a slew of customization options, offsite backups and military-grade 256-bit AES encryption for maximum data protection.
And just in time for the holidays, Penzu Pro is giftable for the oversharer in your network.
We gave Penzu a spin and were impressed by the interface and the entire concept of private blogging. The company has taken something old, given it a beautifully modern UI, added beneficial features and made a useful product that addresses a common problem.
Certainly, WordPress, Blogger, and other CMSs allow for locked posts. But the idea of having a separate destination for one's innermost thoughts gives the end user a little more comfort to express himself freely. Give it a spin, and let us know in the comments how the experience feels to you.
Earlier this month we noticed PRManna climbing up the Hacker News front page and reached out to the creator for an interview. Ryan Waggoner started PRManna in his spare time and was open in saying that the project was inspired by Peter Shankman's Help a Reporter Out. The difference between PRManna and HARO is that Waggoner's product was specifically meant for startup companies to answer blogger and journalist tech queries. Whereas, HARO is a general news service. The question is, are the sites far enough apart to be considered different products? 
Is blogging for old people? Apparently so. Well, at least according to 
Do you use WordPress and want to blog from your Android phone? Doing that just got a lot easier. Wordpress for Android - an open-source app backed by 
Home and Garden TV 
Conversations around blog posts now often happen offsite on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Sadly, a lot of plugins that try to bring these conversation back to the blog end up being somewhat useless, as large numbers of retweets can easily overshadow the more interesting tweets. Twitter search engine 
According to a 
The new "artists" are curators of other people's created content, if sites such as 
This morning in her address to LeWeb conference attendees, her majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan asked the audience, "Did Michael Jackson change the fate of the green revolution?" While CNN was slow to report on this year's Iranian election protests, 
Interested in the power of activism and social change, Queen Rania tweeted the question, "Can the real-time web change the world?" Inundated with answers, the Queen was surprised to find that 60% of those who replied answered no. 
"We live in public" isn't just the name of a film; it's an Internet truism.