Mesiab Labs have launched Retweet.com, its TweetMeme competitor that looks more and more like a clone. Judge for yourself.

Here’s Retweet.com:

Looking familiar? read more

Google SEO expert Matt Cutts spoke at WordCamp San Francisco 2009, and the video i available over at the WordPress Publishing Blog. Why would they publish it? Well, it might have something to do with this:

WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Great praise indeed, and true at that. Launching a site using WordPress (or any other SEO friendly platform for that matter) is a good idea if you want to rank well in the search engines. If you’re interested you might want to check out Matt Cutts’ slides from the presentation as well.

Bloggers are freelancers. They are also publishers, marketers, and sometimes even designers. If they are successful, they master most of these skills. That’s why I’m not the least reluctant to drop the link to Smashing Magazine’s excellent post about six simple ways for freelancers to increase productivity. If you’re serious about your blogging it is a must read, and even if you’re not, you might pick something up.

In statistics which hardly surprise, given the number of problems employees have caused for themselves on Facebook and Twitter recently, employees are cracking down on the use of social networks in the workplace.

ScanSafe’s latest analysis of over a billion web sites discovered that over three-quarters of companies now block social networking sites — up 20% in the last six months.

As well as the supposed benefit in productivity from blocking non-work sites that can sap employee time (though a blanket ban may be counter-productive and a restricted hours policy might be better for morale) there’s also the reduced risk of malware creeping into a company’s systems, as well as saved bandwidth. read more

Thanks for everyone that sent this in, from the Disqus 3 teaser site, embedded below for your viewing pleasure:

Disqus is obviously one of those comment hosts that can take care of your site’s comments. A lot of sites swear by it, and we are considering switching to it here on the Blog Herald as well.

Picking the right URL shortener for your links is obviously important, especially now that the fact that they might not be around for as long as you might like has dawned on people. Naturally you should roll your own, but failing that, it might be interesting to know that Bit.ly and Ow.ly are the most reliable ones. At least according to a reliability report from Pingdom. I must say, I was a bit surprised to see Ow.ly up on top, it has had some downtime in the past but have obviously got its act together. In fact, it was the only one with 100% uptime.

Be sure to read the whole thing. It is pretty interesting after all.

It looks like the boys and girls at Blogger (aka Blog*Spot) are at it again! With their 10th birthday about five days away, the Blogger team hinted that they would be rolling out some new features for Blogspot fans (one of which I can not publicly disclose here). read more

Two weekends ago, the New York Post disclosed a rather lavish USD $20,000 dinner by Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in ‘Le Cirque’ as part of her state visit to the United States. The bill was escalated due to the purchase of an assortment of fine wines. A series of events quickly unfolded, maiming the head of state for her rather lavish choice in dining, given the context of the global economic recession.
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If you believe blogging is free, then you’re probably living in a dream world. Unless you’re a total freeloader who still gets a weekly allowance from his parents, then one way or another you’re paying for your blogging activities. Sure, WordPress.com and Blogger.com are free tools. And even if you pay for your own hosting, software like WordPress, plugins, and other tools are free, right?

Not necessarily. Blogging does have its costs. And these can sometimes be attributed to you, while it can sometimes be carried by someone else. Offhand, one could think of several costs that you can directly attribute to blogging. For instance, here are a few costs that I think I’ve been incurring through the years. read more

Janet Street-Parker, Editor-at-Large for The Independent, has hit out at the popular microblogging platform Twitter calling every person using the 140-character platform Twat in the same breath. Street-Porter who hit the headlines earlier this year with her controversial statements about Ian Tomlinson’s death seemed on a mission, using the flawed ‘Teenagers don’t use Twitter’ survey, and included both Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah in her vendetta, trying to remind everyone of the mindlessness of the platform.

…all twittering really delivers is the ultimate in mini-munchie banality. Instead of real emotion, in-depth opinion, considered arguments about why the NHS works, or the many reasons for not eating veal, what we get is breathless trivia. It certainly says bugger-all about what really happens at home with the Browns – which is why, presumably, Sarah, a former PR, loves it.

Twitter works for the middle class, the middle-aged and for work-weary wannabe trendies because it lets them feel they’re part of a big happening club, when in fact all they are doing is exchanging mindlessness. read more