Well, why not I guess. Although I wouldn’t recommend the average blogger to jump at the opportunity to add a Google News box, displaying the latest news from a set category, or even various keywords. It might come in handy for niche blogs, product focused blogs, or completely different ones. read more

Michael Arrington is taking a month off after the spit incident and death threats, and probably due to a much needed vacation for the dedicated blogger. Author, blogger, and BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy is filling in for him, which caused Duncan Riley to post a poll on how long she’ll last.

So what is Lacy up against? Well, a snarky commenting crowd for one, and possibly a harsher treatment because of her sex. At least that’s Riley’s opinion, and he should know, being a former TechCrunch writer. On the other hand, I can’t say that Lacy strikes me as a particularly vulnerable person, and she thinks she’ll manage just fine, obviously. One thing’s for certain though, and that is that it’s never easy to step in and do someone else’s job, especially not when it is so focused on personal style and opinions as a blog is.

UpTake, a travel search and discovery engine , has launched its own travel blog network to provide travelers the ability to browse and search expert blogs across six key travel categories, namely: attractions, beaches, hotels, lodging, restaurants, and travel industry news.

With five lead editors and a team of twenty-nine contributors, each blog network post has been carefully researched or personally vetted by UpTake’s team of expert travel writers. Each blog has its own tone and style which is determined by its editors and offers insights and opinions on memorable day-trip excursions or longer vacation options in the writer’s local community.

With vacation becoming tight due to the economic situation, an expert’s opinion will surely matter for everyone.

There is a debate in social media and I would like to know where you draw the line.

Should you be all business, or mix it up? read more

The Envato network continues to grow. The latest launch is a Mac application blog called AppStorm. This from the launch post:

Hello, and a very warm welcome to AppStorm – a site dedicated to Mac application news, reviews, competitions and tips. If you’re a Mac user, I hope that the upcoming articles will open your eyes to a whole range of innovative new applications. If you’re not a Mac user, be careful; reading about the fantastic software offered for the platform may cause you to switch!

The site is edited by David Appleyard, known from The Apple Blog (which Giga Omni Media bought, remember?), and also features an original web comic by N.C. Winters.

Congratulations on the launch!

CEO Mark Zuckerberg hands out free thank you gifts on Facebook, and talks about how the social network is letting people participate online using their real identities, and feeling safe about it.

The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn’t consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.

He also links the Facebook retrospective, with screencaps of how the social network has evolved the last five years. Pretty interesting actually. Yes, those are the same images posted by TechCrunch and Inside Facebook to name a few. read more

I recently joined a social networking site called Twitter. The reason that I joined is simple. However the reason that I have stayed and made a conscious decision to become as Twitterer myself, is what has led me to this BLOG.

…After lurking for a while (not in a creepy context, simply observing) it occurred to me that I had encountered in Twitter a bona fide community of individuals bound together by common interests and occasionally, ideals….

I feel like I have found part of my tribe in my online community, my Tweeple, so to speak. It is my intention, in the days and weeks to come, to lean on my online tribe for the kind of support, advice, and good humor that any man can expect from one’s community…

For those seeking to understand the pull social media sites like Twitter has, the first blog post by LeVar Burton on his new blog summed it up. read more

You might remember the interview with the folks behind The Media is Dying Twitter account, tweeting away about layoffs and other nasty things that is hitting old an new media hard in today’s financial situation. Well, now they’re optimistic, and spins off their Twitter account with a new one, called The Media is Hirin’, which is a lot more positive than the previous one to say the least. I caught up with the anonymous gang for a quick Q&A about this new venture.

What’s the idea with the themediaishirin Twitter account?

TMIH is a resources that enables a person who has been laid off from the media industry to get back into it by creating a 140 character resume and post it up with their skills – we’ve had some amazingly creative entries.

read more

If you use Google Analytics to track visits to your blog, you might be surprised to know that you may be experiencing severely retarded (no pun intended) page load times, at least in Europe. That’s according to a recent study conducted by Royal Pingdom.

The folks at RP found that during peak hours of Web usage in Europe, the Google Analytics Javascript loaded nearly twice as slowly – 97% slower than usual, to be precise – as it did on average in Europe during all hours of use.

in general, GA actually loads slightly faster in Europe than in the US, but it also experiences a much greater percentage rate of slowdown in Europe during peak hours relative to its average performance.

As Royal Pingdom puts it: “[W]hile the European load times are significantly faster on average than the North American ones, the performance is much more uneven over the course of the day.”

The difference between the maximum and minimum load times for North America is 27%, but in Europe the difference is 97%.

See the Royal Pingdom post for several intriguing data graphs supporting their conclusions.

Update: I’ve clarified above that the figures above refer to load time during peak hours relative to average load time, and that GA actually loads slightly faster overall in Europe than in the US.

Do you think Google Analytics is worth the trouble? Why or why not?

Happy Monday, folks! Let’s start this week off with an installation tutorial. Gregory Tomlinson explains how to install Movable Type 4.23 on Mac OS X 10.5 It’s a short tutorial, but it gives you the information you need to get up and running.

Plugins

SlideShare — This plugin, created by Mixel Adm, makes it easy to embed SlideShare presentations in entries. For those that have used the WordPress version of this plugin, the syntax is the same.

Selective Export — Mike T. released this plugin, which adds an option to export one or more selected blog posts. I can see several uses for this, like spinning off a set of posts as a separate blog.

Russian Action Streams — Written by Andrey Serebryakov, this adds 24 Russian services to the Action Streams plugin. I don’t know Russian, so if anyone does and has tried this, please let us know about it in the comments.

Share — I mentioned Share — a plugin for adding an “email this” function to your entries — a few weeks ago. Since then, Dan Wolfgang has had an official launch and created Share Lite, a free version with many features from the original.

MT-Notifier 3.5.2 — Chad Everett released a small update to the 3.5.x version of MT-Notifier. I have to hand it to Chad — maintaining one version of a plugin is hard enough, but he’s consistently releasing updates for both the 3.5.x and 4.2.x versions of MT-Notifier. Thanks, Chad!

What have you done with Movable Type lately? Let us know in the comments.