I can’t see any other reason than Twitter wanting to open the partner floodgates with this blog post, profiling the recently hired business manager Kevin Thau. Sure, a welcome post is nice and all, but doesn’t this scream “please get in touch with your brilliant monetizing ideas so that we can make a few bucks!!!” to you?

For now, Kevin is assessing all opportunities, picking up ongoing threads, and also actively working on our mobile business strategy. If you send email to our partner address or to kevin (at) twitter.com then you will be corresponding with the intrepid Mr. Thau.

Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think they have any solid ideas on how to monetize Twitter, other than the obvious ad solutions. Hopefully they’ll prove me wrong and do something funky with the mobile carriers?

The b5media WordPress mastermind, Mark Jaquith, has a great tip on merging multiple WordPress blogs.

Here’s my tip: do not select an existing blog user to “own” the imported content! Instead, create a new temporary user just for that content. Here is why: the imported posts may need some manual cleanup, like integration into the new blog’s category structure, or adding/removing tags.

Why? Check out his post for an answer to that. Wise words, take it from someone who’s merged 7 blogs into 1 successfully…

Mike Stelzner is running a Social Media Survey and I am really looking forward to the results. If you take part you can get the results too. Take the survey here.

I really hope you will take part as I think this stuff is going to be super important as we go deeper into 2009. read more

Earlier today BH had an entry on CoverItLive, software that allows you to add more dimensions to live blogging, such as polls, videos, pictures, etc.

I understand that ‘live blogging’ is a growing phenomenon, but something about it leaves me flat.

Every blog I am visiting these days seems to say “Live Blogging the Obama Inauguration.”

Even though I consider myself pretty well versed in new media, I prefer to watch historic events the old fashioned way: on TV. Heck, I’ll even pick up a newspaper. I’m not suggesting that blogs don’t do a nice job covering these events. I think it’s a great way to fill in the gaps of major media coverage. It’s also a way to get some unique perspective from different ‘storytellers.’ However, when it comes to BIG events (new president, SuperBowl, etc.) I can’t see opting for live blogging coverage if other alternatives are available. I can see it being an option for things of a smaller scale (new iPhone release, press conferences, and so on).

Don’t hate me, I’m just being honest. And I ask the same from you. What are your thoughts on live blogging? If you know of a great archived example, include the link below for me to check out. I’d love to be ‘sold’ on the concept.

Do you pay attention to ‘live blogging’ events?

It looks as if Jaiku, a microblogging tool purchased by Google last year now has a serious iPhone App thanks to the efforts of mJaiku (a third party company).

While FriendFeed and Twitter fans have two or more options available to them on the iPhone, Jaiku junkies seem to be stuck with mJaiku, whose app will set one back a cup of coffee at McDonalds (or 99 pennies in USD).

Since government bailouts are few and far between for most bloggers, here is a “brief” review of this mJaiku, revealing the good, the bad, and the buggy. read more

In November 2008, three bloggers filed a lawsuit against New York City after being denied press credentials from the New York Police Department in 2007, due to the fact that they weren’t traditional media. Now they have gotten their credentials as NYPD have relented. This according to the blogger’s lawyer, Norman Siegel.

“This step recognizes that bloggers are 21st-century journalists,” Mr. Siegel, a noted civil liberties lawyer who has announced plans to run for public advocate next year, said in a phone interview. “It’s an important first step, but only a first step, because we still need to address the constitutional problem of who gets press credentials in New York City. The Police Department should not be in the business of determining who’s a journalist.”

In other words, they are going ahead with the lawsuit to force “further reforms”. Good news for NYC bloggers I’m sure. Read more about this at the City Room Blog over at NY Times.

Advertising Age published an email exchange with mastermind Seth Godin regarding him starting to post daily. And since it is Seth Godin, the blogosphere listens. Among other things, Godin said this on why going daily:

My goals in blogging are:
To spread ideas
To put my ideas out there and get them out of the way of the next idea
To encourage people to add alacrity to their diet
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

Hence, the compromise on daily.

Read the whole thing for more Godin goodness.

How often do you post on your blog?

Happy Monday, folks! For this week’s Movable Type news, let’s start out with some benchmarking. Alwyn Botha tested 2,200 websites to compare load times of various CMS applications. There’s a lot of data to sift through there, but overall Movable Type did very well, averaging the fastest load time of the systems tested. Alwyn attributes this to the static publishing system that is commonly used by MT sites.

Does fast page loading convince you to switch over to MT? If so, check out the blog conversion tools found by Technology Bites. They provide conversion between several popular blogging applications. You can download these open source tools, or use them from one of the Google App Engine sites that host them. read more

Yesterday, a friend of mine on Twitter sent me a DM to alert me about a what she said “looks like aTwitter scraping tool”. I clicked the link expecting to find a social aggregator gone awry or a spam blog. However, instead, the link instead pointed to Joost de Valk’s new Tweetback plugin.

The plugin, as well as Dan Zarella’s plugin by the same name, searches Twitter to for tweets that link back to posts on the blog and displays those tweets on the site under their respective entries, much like a trackback, but with Twitter (hence the name).

These plugins do, by their very nature, copy and paste tweets, displaying them on the user’s Web site, all without the explicit permission to of the author. Where trackbacks are sent from the linking site and comments are left intentionally by the visitor, these plugins are different in that they activelhy go out in search of these “tweetbacks” (including parsing URL shortening services), even though the creator has taken no steps to ensure they appear on the site.

This, in turn, raises serious issues about copyright, scraping and more that have to be at least looked at. Is it legal to copy and publish tweets from others without permission, simply because they link back to your site? The answers are not as simple as one might initially think. read more

Or companies rather, since they manage the brands that are active… 10 different brands, from ComCast to Zappos, are featured in the BusinessWeek article, which is a good thing for Twitter of course. Yet another stamp of approval for the microblogging service. Hat tip to Jesse Haynes, who tweeted it first.