It seems as if Darren Rowse have finally found something he wants to do on the problogger.com domain, which he got to complement his ProBlogger brand. The result will be a community, and you can sign up for access already. It’ll be interesting to see what he’s got up his sleeve for this one. A simple forum, or more?

The Automattic has announced the launch of wp.me shorturls for WordPress.com hosted blogs. According to Matt Mullenweg the wp.me shorturl is different from other services such as tiny.url or tr.im who had their 5 minutes of fame last week.

• WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world
• Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now
• These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink
• It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones
• The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around
• WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com

Other than the restriction of only being available to WP.com users, WP.me sounds like pretty much any other shorturl service to me. Most bloggers will not care about the rel="shortlink" code in the header nor will most users bother thinking long term if their links will still work in a year. But all credits to the Automattic team to cover most angles for their users and keep adding services to their platform, making WP.com better and better on an almost daily base.

Seeing on a Saturday morning an entry titled Most Secure Browser: Internet Explorer 8 in my feedreader certainly did not help my hangover and having read the entry 3 times now I think I still am living a vivid Friday night session. Bloggers love Firefox and many of us will never change because of the flexibility and extensions available for Firefox. You need to know it though: the safest browser out there is Internet Explorer 8!

I am sure you now all have fired up IE8 of course. Nor did I, but that’s mainly because I’m on a Mac and have not touched Windows at all anymore since I switched two years ago. Still it is a fact now and Microsoft Evangelist Giorgio Sardo published the results of a security poll, conducted by NSS Labs among the 5 top browsers and Internet Explorer 8 came out on top. read more

I can think of a few ways.

1. Decide going in to the blog content creation effort that you will get something “done” in a certain amount of time.
2. Remove/destroy distractions, or remove yourself from their presence.
3. Emphasize focus and the task at hand – getting a great article or content chunk done ASAP.
4. Think about for whom you are writing or producing the content.
5. Think about what specific problem you will be solving through the content, or what question you will be answering. read more

A whitepaper published by Pear Analytics (found via Mashable) says that 40.55% of all tweets are pointless babble. While that probably won’t get any raised eyebrows, it is worth to know how the good folks at PA got this conclusion:

So we took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

Get the whole thing from the PA blog post.

So 40.55% of the tweets are pointless babble. That will throw kindling on the Twitter is just nonsense fires out there for sure. Now with numbers!

read more

@ev announced today on the Twitter blog that the microblogging company works at implementing an Phase 1 of the official Retweet project. Although details haven’t been finalized yet, Evan Williams showed a sketch of the possible future integration, all while admitting that the users and the Twitter community basically decide what Twitter becomes.

Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com. read more

If you missed out on the dream job to document online the amazing Great Barrier Reef, you could be one of four lucky people to scoop a role as an assistant.

Reports suggest that Ben Southall has been so busy that he’s not had enough time to document his experience, hence the need for help.

From August 26, Tourism Queensland will begin accepting applications for “The Best Experience in the World”. read more

Pat Quin, Governour of the State of Illinois, has signed a bill in to law banning all registered sex offenders in the state of Illinois from using social networks. This becomes interesting when keeping in mind the broad spectrum covered by the definition of social networks: any site where someone has to sign up and can create a profile can be considered a social network.

“Social networking website” means an Internet website containing profile web pages of the members of the website that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs placed on the profile web pages by such members, or any other personal or personally identifying information about such members and links to other profile web pages on social networking websites of friends or associates of such members that can be accessed by other members or visitors to the website. A social networking website provides members of or visitors to such website the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile web page and may also include a form of electronic mail for members of the social networking website.

Maybe it would be easier to ban sex offenders from using the internet for a determined period. This period should be decided by a Judge and not by a politician.

Thord recently gave his views on what Automattic should do with the domain wp.com. Now the WordPress Hacks site discovered the not yet launched get.wp.com subdomain, a landing page promoting and comparing both WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Right now the WP.com domain still redirects to wordpress.com. It will be interesting to see if this will become the new wp.com domain or will be ran as a promotion campaign, similar to GetFirefox.

Via WordPress Philippines.

23andme, the biotech company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki AKA Sergey Brin’s wife, has given the topic sponsored tweets a new spin. According to Techcrunch the company has agreed to pay $1 for the first 500 tweets with both the hashtags #blamedrewscancer and #23andme.

#Blamedrewscancer is a Twitter campaign which went viral very quickly after Drew Olanof was diagnosticized with cancer earlier this year. Ever since then Drew started blaming his cancer for everything, also via Twitter. On 09.09.09 Drew organizes a 24hour Blame-A-Thon which is also sponsored by 23andme. All proceeds of the Twitter publicity stunt and the Blame-A-Thon will go to the Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong Foundation.