Here in the United States, the most important part of the year is upon us. In fact, the most important part of the year is not Christmas (well not for Christmas’ sake, anyway). It’s not the Fourth of July. It’s not Thanksgiving Day (Again, it partially is because of typical post-banquet festivities which include pigskins and gridirons). No, the most important time of the year in the United States is the beginning of football season.

Training camps started for most of the NFL teams this past week and bloggers are covering their team camps nicely. Here are some links from around the league:
read more

WordPress 2.0.4 has been released and it addresses a number of issues that were in previous 2.x releases. Recommend immediate download and upgrade.

Design shop The Blog Studio has posted an outstanding list of blog resources from their recent appearance on Tech TV.

Included are podcasting resources, blog templates, analytics & stats sites, and many other great tools.

For those of you in political blogging circles, you may know Paul from the popular conservative (non-U.S. readers read: right-wing) political blog Wizbang. Wizbang began with humble beginnings in April of 2003 and has been somewhat of a force since then.

Paul is “hanging up his cleats” as they say in the sports world due to blogging burnout, and the viciousness of readers – especially in politics:
read more

Those Bastards! have named Mike Arrington, of TechCrunch fame, the 9th Bastard of the Blogs.

The last thing Web 2.0 needs is a cheerleader, but it has one. in Mike Arrington, our ninth bastard of the blogs. A shout out goes to Blogebrity, who also thought that we should see Mike’s legs in a cheerleader uniform.

Darren over at Blog Republic sits down for an interview with Aaron Brazell, of Blog Herald and b5media.

Been traveling the last few days down in the Southeastern United States for a client and having a love-hate relationship with the 100+ degree heet combined with the glorious 100% humidity. But at least there’s Chick-Fil-A.

Couple interesting discussions going on out there:

• Six Apart’s Anil Dash examines the Digg v. Netscape economy
• On that same note, a blogger posts the emails from Jason Calacanis and others who were trying to woo him over to Netscape for the $1,000/monthly dealio.
• Chitika releases a WordPress plugin for their popular eMiniMall concept. Feedbuzzard has the scoop.
• BlogHer starts this weekend.
• David Krug unleashes the Popcrunch show teaser, a new videolog coming from his team at Popcrunch. Should be interesting to watch.

More later tonight when I get a chance to get back to the keyboard…

MovableType officially launched MT 3.3 today (somehow I thought they had already done this but perhaps it was a beta release), and the enhancements are rather underwhelming from my reading of it. I feel like this is a browser war all over again, but really, MT is not offering anything “new” to the blogging world with this release. In fact, WordPress has had the capability of these announced changes for quite some time now:
read more

We’ve twice reported about Jason Calacanis’s offer to social website contributors (Digg, etc) for $1,000 to post stories at Netscape.

Now the fray has expanded as Digg’s Kevin Rose has a few things to say over at his blog read more

We took a few minutes tonight to interview Meme of Spoke Media, purveyor of fine smut like Girlspoke.com, Boyspoke, and their latest blog – Dirtyspoke.com. You can read their inaugural Dirtyspoke post here. Here’s the dish from Meme:

Tell us what’s been happing with Spoke Media – you’ve been off the radar a bit lately?

We took ourselves off the radar because we were watching the implosion of other networks and felt we needed to focus on cultivating quality writers and promoting a more organic growth.

read more