It is Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3, right now, and that means a ton of games news. That is not normally something we cover here at the Blog Herald, but this time there’s some sort of connection at the very least.

Microsoft announced both Facebook and Twitter apps coming to the Xbox 360, along with a great number of other things. These apps can be seen in action over at Gizmodo, with photos from their conference.

Also, Nintendo is going to tie the Nintendo DS follow-up, the DSi, closer to Facebook. Photos taken with the DSi’s crappy cameras will sync automatically and there’s an app for status updates and whatnot as well. Naturally, the DSi’s built-in Opera browser makes Facebook a reality there already should you want to use it from your handheld gaming machine. No word on Twitter for DSi though, and so far not much about these things from Sony. Then again, maybe they think that the web browsers do the job well enough?

Let’s be honest: sometimes the content just doesn’t come. Maybe you’ve been brainstorming for an hour. Or maybe you’ve been scavenging Google News and press release sites for something to talk about. Anything to talk about.

We’ve all been there, and now there’s a new resource that can help. BloggerLinkUp.com helps bloggers track down guest bloggers and get quality content for their Websites – without breaking their backs.

“I started BloggerLinkUp to solve a problem I had as a blogger, both looking for guest posts for my sites and offering guest posts to others. It shouldn’t be hard to give away quality content, should it?” says founder Cathy Stucker, aka the Idea Lady.

The way it works is that you subscribe to daily e-mails. When you find a match, you contact the other party directly. The service is entirely free.

The site can also be used to find products to review or to locate interview subjects.

Mobile phone manufacturer INQ is planning to launch a mass-market mobile phone with a built-in Twitter client, based on the increasingly mainstream interest in the microblogging service.

The pre-installed Twitter client would be Internet-based, rather than relying on SMS text messsaging to send and (restrictively) receive tweets.

INQ claims that, because the phone would cost operators less than $140, it will become the first mass-market phones to have such a client. Presumably the iPhone and other popular smartphones which can have one or more Twitter clients installed don’t count. read more

It seems as if China is blocking Twitter as well as Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. Other blocked sites is WordPress.com, YouTube, Flickr, Hotmail and several others. Ryan McLaughlin blogs from China and thinks the block is due to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4.

I can only predict the next few days will see more and more sites being blocked, hopefully with things returning to normal shortly after (though if past blocks are anything to go by, it could be weeks or months).

Hat tip: Mashable

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 this past weekend was a resounding success, but there is some major confusion coming from the presentation on the State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg about the “merger” of WordPress and WordPressMU.

In his presentation, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told the more than 700 attendees news about WordPress and its relatives under the Automattic umbrella, a form of stockholders report. He also announced that WordPress – the ORG part of WordPress – would be merged into WordPressMU.

Many, including Ozh of Planet Ozh, The Theme Lab, and Aaron Brazell were quick to announce their thoughts about the “merger of WordPress and WordPressMU,” misunderstanding the story they were getting across the live blogs and twit-stream from WordCamp San Francisco. read more

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 was this past weekend and brought together over 700 WordPress enthusiasts to the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. There were many speakers covering a wide variety of topics including Timothy Ferriss of the The 4-Hour Workweek, Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV on building an audience with video shows, Scott Porad of Pet Holdings, the parent company of I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org on crowd sourcing, Dave Moyer of the WordCast and Bitwire Media on podcasting production, Steve Souders formerly of Google and the author of High Performance Web Sites on site optimization, Ann Oyama, aka SuperAnn, a freelance WordPress developer and host of BayAnime.com on WordPress Theme code, functions, and customization, just to name a few of the awesome speakers.

People came from all around the world including England, Japan, China, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico, and from all over the United States including Ed Morita of Baker’s Hours, the first recipient of a permanent WordPress logo tattoo, surprised to be highlighted in Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation. read more

Happy Monday, folks! We’ve got lots to cover this week, including an interview with Anil Dash from Six Apart about the WordPress plugins they recently released. But let’s start off with new stuff for your Movable Type blog.

First, Byrne Reese posted a preview of a new theme he’s working on: Hybrid News. This is a port of the WordPress theme of the same name. Byrne will release the theme under an open source license when it’s ready, and promises lots of new, MT-only features when it comes out. read more

As someone who writes a blog that deals with many legal issues, it is clear that the vast majority of law-oriented blogs, or blawgs, are targeted not at consumers, but attorneys and legal scholars.

However Findlaw, a legal information site and attorney directory that is targeted at consumers, has decided to change that by announcing the opening of its new blog index, which includes nine different blogs by its own editors and authors, all of which are targeted at consumers and not attorneys.

Though many of these blogs have been going on for some time on separate corners of the mammoth site, this is the first time that they have been brought together for one easy-to-navigate resource. read more

I’ve been watching the BloodCopy debacle for some time. BloodCopy is a new blog in the Gawker Media blog network, about vampired. Problem is, it is a big ad in itself, the whole blog is a HBO promo for the TV series True Blood.

There’s disclosure, hidden away in the Gawker Media footer. There’s no “sponsored post” text or anything. The campaign is, at the very least, balancing along the edge of what is deemed OK within the blogosphere.

We’d better get used to it. read more

For those of you wondering how things went with the popular MTV Multiplayer blog, now that Stephen Totilo is on Kotaku and everything? Well, luckily (for them) they got things in order just in time for E3, and the new editor is Russ Frushtick. So far so good, but changing drivers is always a hard thing so we’ll have to wait and see if Frushtick can keep the brand’s high esteem up. That being said, having MTV backing you surely ensures weigh enough to make it happen.