“The UK advertising industry sucks £18bn ($29bn) annually from firms to make ads that are increasingly being ignored and deliver no value.”

That’s according to Tim Hunt, MD of UK-based marketing company Flexile.

At a time when companies need to save money, Hunt reckons that they should dump TV, magazine and junk mail advertising and instead embrace the Internet “where buyers now flock to find products and services”.

He has harsh words for ad agencies, claiming that they perpetuate the myth that the Internet is an immature environment. read more

Matt Mullenweg has, in an attempt to clear the confusion with themes and the GPL license they might or might not inherit from WordPress, contacted the Software Freedom Law Center, who was instrumental in creating the GPL version 3 license. The reply, which is presented as a whole in the wordpress.org blog, basically says that while CSS and images might not be “tainted” by the GPL license, the template files surely are since they load WordPress functions and rely on them to work. read more

Are you an “an adventurous spirit” with a “keen sense of observation” and has the ability to write with “style and imagination”? Then you can apply for a free trip to Antarctica, where you’ll be the in-house blogger, in 2010. And guess what, you don’t need any blogging experience at all, which means that there’ll be a ton of applicants to the position, which is really a free trip for two. Still, pretty cool, so you might want to give it a go.

Hat tip: Quick Online Tips

Ever wanted to share your World of Warcraft gaming with the blogosphere, using Twitter? Well, you could do that by just tweeting the regular way (from your phone, a client, or whatever), or you could do it from inside the World of Warcraft game. read more

It’s here, the WordPress of forum software! I’m happy to report that bbPress 1.0 is out, featuring a user friendly interface and a lot of the things we’d expect from something this closely related to WordPress. This from the announcement post:

This release offers many usability improvements, based on making bbPress more approachable for adopters who are accustomed to WordPress. To that end bbPress 1.0 now has a similar administration interface to WordPress and uses similar descriptions and names where appropriate. bbPress also behaves more like WordPress when it comes to things like automatically generating your .htaccess file when setting up permalinks.

BbPress has been stable for quite some time, actually, but in desperate need of polishing for most users. The 1.0 release is said to bring that, along with great support for integration with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8. Naturally, you can download it from bbpress.org.

Did you know that you are for sale on Twitter already? read more

Earlier this week the news that Sam Sethi is suing TechCrunch hit, and as was expected Michael Arrington posted the legal documents, just as he has done before. The responses to the law firm’s letter to TechCrunch and Arrington have also been reposted, so if you want to dig into what has been said thus far, this is the only place I know of. The TechCrunch stance is obvious, of course:

Needless to say, we think these claims have no merit, otherwise we would not have written the posts in the first place, or would have retracted.

I did an email interview with Sethi, after he got in touch with me and wanted me to correct or retract the news story (which I didn’t do, obviously). I figured an interview would be the best way to get Sethi’s side of the story. read more

Duncan Riley has announced the addition of Paul Montgomery as the in-house sports writer on The Inquisitr. Montgomery is a journalist by trade, and with the addition the site now features a dedicated sports category.

Riley also announced a syndication deal with BANG Showbiz, which means that The Inquisitr can run up to ten stories from their celebrity content stock, as an addition to the regular celebrity coverage. Finally, Riley also announced a deal with GumGum for celebrity photography. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, especially the syndication deal.

As for traffic, Riley reports that pageviews are down in June, 2.7 million to 2.55. He calls it a comfortable level.

There is a page on wordpress.org that promotes a select few premium theme marketplaces, as we reported yesterday. The only criteria is that the themes need to be GPL and provide professional support a well as give a professional impression.

I caught up with Matt Mullenweg for some quick questions about this via email. This is what he had to say. read more

While Google may be looking into making Twitter searchable, Microsoft has already started implementing its own real-time search into Bing.

At present it’s a fairly limited offering, indexing “some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres”.

It seems that you can only search for the latest tweets from certain people who have been indexed, using syntax such as “[name] Twitter” or “[name] Tweets” or “@[name]”.

As a concept, it’s a good start though I’m not interested in using any search engine to find anyone’s latest tweets — I use Twitter or one of its desktop clients for that. read more