Paul “Scrivs” Scrivens is perhaps best known for being one of the triad behind 9rules. If you thought that running the popular blog networks was all that the 9rulers did, you either didn’t pay attention, or you just don’t care. Either way, the guy known as Scrivs has plans, and they include an ebook on women as well as establishing brands online.

The ebook is called The Guidelines Vol. 1 and is released under the Forever : Pimp brand. While that might or might not excite you, the pre-ordering concept probably will. In true Radiohead manner, you pick your price. Or almost at least, you can pre-order the book, which will cost $29.95 on May 19, for as little as $5, or as much as $50 (which includes a t-shirt). I like this price structure, and naturally I got in touch with Scrivs to talk a little bit about his plans. read more

There is a vote underway on wether or not Wikimedia should adapt the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license or not. The reason is that there are some possible issues with the current GNU Free Documentation License, which would be retained as well. Naturally, Creative Commons are thrilled about the prospect:

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To vote you need to have at least 25 Wikipedia edits before March 15. The vote will be open until May 3, 2009.

Happy Monday, folks! This week, we have three new plugins to talk about, so let’s get right to it.

Reblog — A few years back there was a reblogging plugin that was part of the eyebeam reBlog software. That one was never updated to work with Movable Type 4. Now, Six Apart has released a brand new Reblog plugin. This one reads Atom and RSS feeds and creates entries for each one. This is particularly useful if you post to multiple blogs and want to pull all those entries to one site.

UnrecognizedTags — This is another Six Apart plugin. This plugin adds an option to the Tools menu that allows you to check all your templates for unrecognized template tags. This is something you’ll want to run after an upgrade, or when moving old templates to a new install. That way, you’ll know if your templates reference a tag from a plugin that’s not installed.

Custom CSS — And finally, another plugin from Byrne Reese. Custom CSS gives you a simpler way to edit the CSS for your blog. With this plugin you don’t have to change any templates or change your core CSS stylesheets just to change the style of your blog. Thanks, Byrne!

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

The recent controversy over the DiggBar has put the spotlight back onto Web site framing. Though the practice was first popular, and controversial, over ten years ago in the mid-to-late nineties, Digg has put the issue front and center of everyone’s consciousness again.

However, Digg was not the first recent site nor is it the largest site to widely use frames around other people’s sites. It is simply the first to get widespread attention from bloggers and Twitter users alike.

The comeback of framing didn’t start with Digg, but it may be kicked into high gear because of it. Still, it is worth taking a look at some of the other popular sites and services that use frames as part of their function, including more than a few familiar faces. read more

How did I miss this over the weekend? No one sent me a twit about this. I’m talking about the different worm attacks on Twitter that started Saturday and until Sunday.

Michael “Mikeyy” Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of StalkDaily, has admitted creating the worms that exploited a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the Twitter service to infect user profiles.

“At about 2 a.m. on Saturday, four accounts were created that began spreading a worm on Twitter,” co-founder Biz Stone announced in a blog post. “From 7:30 a.m. until 11 a.m. [Pacific time], our security team worked on eliminating the vectors that could identify this worm. At that time, about 90 accounts were compromised. We identified and secured these accounts.”

The company also said that they would review its coding practices. I suggest that they hire Michael “Mikeyy” Mooney.

Search experts may debate about a lot of things but most of them will agree that the title tag is the most important onpage SEO factor. In fact, in survey done by 37 search experts, the title tag was the number one search ranking factor. It trumped even anchor text and quality of links.

However, I find that many bloggers don’t take the few minutes (or even seconds) it takes to make sure their title tags have relevant keywords.

For example, I checked out some popular blogs from different niches and found these title tags on recent posts that could be optimized better. read more

It has been panned by site owners, but Digg are sticking to their DiggBar. This means we have to add workarounds to break out of their URL-stealing frameset.

Thankfully, this problem was fixed back in the 1990′s, the last time spammy sites tried to do this. Lots of code is out there but here are the two best approaches … read more

Tweetminster, the web service that tracks British politicians’ use of Twitter, has announced a beta version of its Adobe Air-based Tweetminster Wire desktop application.

The service is designed to make it easier to track conversations about UK politics, including live streams on MPs and PPCs (prospective parliamentary candidates) who use Twitter, tweets from all major parties, UK parliament and government tweets, relevant conversations, plus any posts including the #tmwire hashtag. read more

I’m one of those people who think that a recession should be viewed as an opportunity to build, rather than being dreaded and met with downsizing. When times are hard, build on a budget. I’m happy to learn that Instablogs are doing just that, and CEO Ankit Maheshwari is open about it in a blog post on how they’re dealing with the financial climate. You should read it, both for the insight into Instablogs, and to give you some ideas on what you can do to continue your momentum during hard times. They obviously have:

Today we have over 50,000 registered members, 600 Citizen Journalists, 75 bloggers, 15 country editors, full time staff of over 40 people in 15 different countries and readership of around 6 million pageviews per month.

Other tidbits from the post include increased pageviews, and how they’ve been able to use the recession to get more perks or save money when negotiating contracts.

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing a lot about cyber crime and security vulnerabilities, especially as it impacts social media and blogs. The April 1, 2009, expansion of the Conficker/Downadup Worm Infection worried many as the 1 in 16 ratio of infected computers increased dramatically around the globe and attacks were aimed at social media services like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

With the increase in cyber crime and security issues, and the growing profit found in cyber crimes, where do you go to report cyber crime if you find it or are a victim of it? read more