September 5, 2008
WordCamps are popping up everywhere, in China, Japan, Australia, Israel, Utah, Toronto, Vancouver, Portland, and more. Are you tracking WordPress 2.7 development? Martha Stewart now does WordPress and windows. Super Cache updated. WordPressMU upgraded. Ozh wants your input on the next version of WordPress Theme Toolkit. And more WordPress news.
WordPress News
Tracking WordPress Development: Did you know you can track the development of WordPress and WordPress related applications? Here is a list:
Martha Does WordPress: Matt Mullenweg announced that Martha Stewart us upgraded from a TypePad blog to WordPress after careful research and the desire to “switch to a platform offering more programming options.”
WordPress 2.7 Development News: The following are some of the news items and information about WordPress 2.7 development which includes a new updated interface for the WordPress Administration Panels.
read more
Tags: wordpress news, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes, wordpress upgrade, wordpress versions
Nearly half of all US bloggers have written about a health-related topic at least once, and three in five of those write primarily on the subject, according to new research by Envision Solutions, a healthcare marketing communications consultant. According to my math, that’s almost one in three bloggers that claim health topics as a niche for their blog.
A few interesting statistics to come out of the report:
Numbers: Over 13 million Americans wrote at least one health-related post in the seven months between February and August 2008. Diversity: Nearly three in five health bloggers are female, and nearly two in five are either African-American or Hispanic. Age: Half of all health bloggers are aged between 18 and 34. Motivation: A third of those surveyed said that they blogged to educate others, while one in five did so primarily to market themselves or their services. 10% were trying to advance a cause, and 7% were using the blog as some kind of self-help for their medical condition.
There seemed to be an increase in the commercialization of blogs, with 46% of healthcare marketing professionals claiming to have been contacted by the PR company for a product or service, up from 29% in 2006, while over a third said they had placed ads on their site, up from just over a quarter two years ago. read more
Tags: Blogging, health, research, survey
I had to laugh when I saw Cracked round up their list of internet commenters. As well as being a cutting, humorous and spot-on characterisation of many personalities you meet online, it also serves to calm your temper knowing that some of these attacks are more about “them” than “you”.
One personality I have noted recently is the “Stumble Cynic” … read more
Brigitte Dale, a videoblogger who got her start with a regular show on PopCrunch, has landed a new gig with ABC Family.
TV Week has the official news:
ABC Family is bringing Internet personality Brigitte Dale’s video blog to its Web site. Ms. Dale’s blog, which covers news, pop culture and twenty-something issues, will be featured on ABCFamily.com starting this month.
Ms. Dale will continue to write, produce and edit the video blog, which will be produced in partnership with Stage 9 Digital Media.
Brigitte is a highly entertaining videoblogger who will likely bring a unique and interesting perspective in her new gig with ABC Family.
Tags: ABCFamily, AOL, Brigitte Dale, Online Video, Popcrunch, TV Squad, TV Week, Videoblogging, Videoblogs, weblogs inc
Lately, video and podcasting blogs are making a huge inroad in popularity. A common question I’m asked at workshops and speaker gigs is how long a podcast or blog video should be.
I thought I knew the answer: thirty minutes. That is what works for me. An hour long program means that I typically have to pay attention to it in two sections since I rarely have that much free time in one chunk. But that’s not the answer I got from those I talked to.
Most people have told me that they enjoy 45 to 60 minute shows on their favorite blogs with multimedia. They listen to them while driving, running, jogging, exercising, and working, and a few even while relaxing instead of spending time with television.
But what about you? How long is long enough for you for a podcast or blog video? Are you willing to listen to a podcast longer than watch a video? Or the reverse?
If you are a podcaster or video blogger, have you found some trends in time lengths that work best for you and your blog?
Tags: podcast, podcast length, podcast time, podcaster, Podcasting, Video, video blog, video blogging, video length, video time
September 4, 2008
One of my favorite blog networks Curbed, has launched Curbed Marketplace, according to this post by Lockhart Steel.
Curbed Marketplace is a unique real estate listing site — take a look at these two brief descriptions from their “Help” page:
It’s a place for sellers and brokers to post real estate listings, and for buyers to browse and search them. But unlike some other systems, we’ve designed the Marketplace to feature big, beautiful photographs and a blog-style layout of properties perfect for perusing. We’re hoping this makes discovering a property — and selling one! — a pleasure.
The idea behind the Marketplace isn’t to aggregate every listing from every random brokerage in the city. (We’re not crawling other sites for our data — it’s input by brokers or sellers themselves.) Rather, we’re aiming to create an exchange in which a lack of sheer volume is made up for in quality of the listings and the pleasure of the browsing experience.
Visually, the site is a pleasure to visit compared to most real estate sites — and where else can you browse a $7.3m Townhouse.
Tags: Curbed, Curbed Marketplace, Lockhart Steele, New York, New York City, NYC, Real Estate
Over at Problogger, Darren Rowse has an excellent two-part series on how to make money with affiliate programs.
Part One:
1. Relevancy between Audience, Product and Content
One key to high conversion when promoting affiliate products is to align as much as possible the needs of your audience, with the product that you are promoting and the content being produced on your blog.
Part Two:
2. Track What Your Readers Respond to
Yesterday I mentioned that instead of just promoting an affiliate product once that it can be worth running a series of different types of posts to promote it over time. The beauty in doing this is that you begin to see what your readership responds to. You might find that few people sign up for a product when you first announce it but when you write a review that sales increase. Alternatively you might find that when you offer a bonus they sign up more or even that they respond to you doing an interview with the person behind the product. The key is to try different things but then to watch how they convert.
Excellent advice all around…
Tags: Affiliate Programs, Darren Rowse, Making Money Online, Problogger, Professional Blogging
Om Malik made the announcement earlier this week that his company, Giga Omni Media, has hired a new CEO:
Today it gives me great pleasure to announce that Paul [Walborsky] has been promoted to chief executive officer. As CEO, he will lead us through our next phase, in which we will go from being a small network of niche blogs to being a new media company with much bigger horizons.
Bringing on board Paul — a veteran of Wall Street, a founder of (two) startups and most importantly, a trusted friend — was perhaps the single most important decision I’ve ever made in terms of shaping the future of our company.
While the first two years have been devoted to laying the groundwork befitting our future, the next few years are going to be about executing our game plan. And Paul over the past 12 months has proved that he can execute.
Tags: CEO, Giga Omni Media, Gigom, Om Malik, Paul Walborsky
The Martha Blog, the official blog of Martha Stewart, has announced a blog upgrade.. and they’re moving to WordPress!
The new blog, now live, is hosted at The Martha Blog - at www.themarthablog.com.
Martha writes:
In order to have a blog, you need to enlist a blogging platform, which supplies all the necessary tools for getting your photos and text onto the Internet. As my blog has grown in popularity, we realized we were ready to switch to a platform offering more programming options. After careful research, that new platform will be WordPress, which we hope to launch tomorrow with an exciting photo gallery from my most recent trip to Mexico. With this new program, you will notice additions, such as a search engine within my blog and more robust photo galleries.
Prior to this change, Martha Stewart was using Typepad.
Tags: Martha Stewart, Six Apart, The Martha Blog, TypePad, WordPress
Wired is blogging the creation of a feature story from beginning to end.
It’s a fascinating look at how the process works from the very beginning - through storyboarding, the pitch, and the down and dirty logistics to actually making the feature happen.
The feature is about Charlie Kaufman and is scheduled in run in the November 2008 issue of Wired Magazine.
Tags: Charlie Kaufman, Storyboard, Wired, Wired Magazine, Workflow
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogherald.com%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Ftdhblogherald%2Fimg%2Fblogherald-beta.gif "The Blog Herald")
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogherald.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2008%2F08%2Fnewblogherald.gif "The New and Improved Blog Herald")
