It seems as if Twitter hit one of those famous big steps in traffic, the increase has halted to a mere 1% up, says Compete, who also thinks that this means that Twitter clocks in at 19.7 million visitors. That’s a whole lotta twittering going on. I wonder when we’ll get some stats on how many users are actually using Twitter, since these things only track the web visitors, and I rarely load up twitter.com myself, preferring Tweetie and similar stand alone applications.

If you like to give a little to charity without actually giving anything, you can install the new SocialVibe widget on your WordPress.com blog. What it does is that it lets you pick one of the available causes, and then a sponsor will pay every time the SocialVibe widget is loaded, of course showing the sponsor message to cover the bills. Doesn’t cost you anything other than screen real-estate, which it might very well be worth. More details on how it works in the WordPress.com Support area.

Self-hosted WordPress users can nab the plugin, and everyone else can find a suitable solution on the SocialVibe website.

Twitter is one, if not the, information source and communication tool for what is happening in Iran right now, post-election. While some blogs, like Sheherazade in Blue Jeans, do their best to cover what is happening, others are not so lucky. According to Reuters, Iran has banned foreign media journalist from leaving their offices, stopping the from covering the protests on the streets of Tehran.

The Culture Ministry said journalists could continue to work from their offices but that it was cancelling press accreditation for all foreign media.

“No journalist has permission to report or film or take pictures in the city,” a Culture Ministry official told Reuters.

And now Twitter’s provider, NTT America, has rescheduled downtime to ensure that the service isn’t unavailable when needed. A very appealing move, no matter what reasons the cynics might think of.

Follow the #iranelection hashtag on Twitter for more.

The b5media blog network has been busy, mashing all their blogs into supersites, like Splendicity which we’ve talked about before. That doesn’t stop them from launching new blogs, although it has been a while. The latest one is called TwilightGroupie.com and features everything Twilight, of course. I can’t tell if it is good or bad, I just know that I’m not the target audience here…

We’ve been wanting to start this site for a long time and are very excited to be launching new blogs once again! TwilightGroupie.com is written by b5media veteran writer Nikki Katz, who you may know from JuniorCelebs.com.

That’s from the Inside b5media blog post. It’ll probably do fine given the topic.

After receiving a lot of feedback two weeks ago regarding the need for new blog*spot template designs, the boys and girls at Google are seeking help for new template designs for Blogger.

(Message via @Blogger)

Google should have very little trouble finding web designers for Blogger/Blog*Spot, as there are plenty of talent out there pumping out blogger templates for free. read more

The results of last month’s Blogging for a Cause are in (in fact, they were in last week but I was on vacation so missed the announcement).

Though it was a fairly small online campaign by some standards, it generated over 400 blog posts in support of around 60 charities and not-for-profit organizations. read more

Happy Monday, folks! The big news from the past week is the release of Movable Type 4.26. This is a performance release — it improves search performance and reliability of the job queue. It also includes a handful of other bug fixes, and some new configuration directives that help you tweak performance.

However, you may choose to hold off on this upgrade. People on the MT mailing lists noticed that it did not seem to be performing a full upgrade. Turns out the schema version was not updated, so the intended changes to the database are not made. Six Apart has assured everyone that has already upgraded that the problem will not cause anything to break. The schema changes were only to increase performance, so they are not required for the code changes. A fix is expected this week. read more

I logged into my PollDaddy account this morning and was pleasantly surprised when I found a new feature waiting for me: rating widgets.

The free tool is currently in early beta, but it gives blog owners the ability to add “rate this post” functionality with minimal work. The sweetest part is that you can use your own images, meaning that whatever widget you create, can match the look and feel of your site.

There are two widget options:

- Star rating. Gives the reader a scale of 1-5 to rate your content. It will also display the number of votes received.

- Nero rating. Gives just 2 options to the reader and would be used like a simple positive/negative scale. For example, thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Just add a snippet of code to WordPress or your blog platform and you’re in business.

Read more on the Polldaddy blog.

Over the past week, two very important events in one’s online identity took place.

First, and most memorable, Facebook began offering usernames, creating a landrush, and second, Twitter began verifying user accounts.

But what if the username you wanted is no longer available? What if your name, your business name or some other element of your identity is gone. This happened to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and, most likely thousands of others.
If this happened to you, the good news is that you may have rights you can protect, especially if you are facing an obvious namesquatter, but it may be very difficult enforcing those rights on either site due to the nature of the law and the nature of Facebook and Twitter as companies.

Still, it may be worth a shot. read more

The New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell shares some tidbits about his upcoming essay for the magazine, which is all about the craft of news reporting. He should know, I guess, but it is always fun to pull stuff out of context. Like the Gawker piece nabbed from E&P Pub, which features this lovely little quote:

You can’t start blogging at 23 and call yourself a journalist.

Agreed! You’re a blogger, which you can call yourself right away then. Anyone can do it (which isn’t to say that anyone can do it well, but that’s often forgotten). read more