Macheads and Apple geeks already know this, but John Gruber’s blog Daring Fireball is a heavyweight. This sparked a post on Silicon Alley Insider about the “King of Apple Geeks”, which is basically a demonstration in how powerful a blog can be, using the Ninjawords app censorship report as a starting point.

It’s not so much of a news story over at SAI, but more of a success of a fellow blogger report, which is always nice to read. I especially like the raw data which is provided at the end of the story:

John, reached by e-mail, wouldn’t comment on how much money his site makes, but he says it provides his full-time income. He says the site has recently been close to averaging 2 million monthly pageviews and about 250,000 monthly unique visitors — including some very important ones at Apple headquarters. He also estimates about 150,000 subscribers to his RSS feed.

Say what you will, but a powerful and influential blog sure packs a punch. Even if it is minimalistic in its approach and uncluttered by ads.

URL shortener tr.im is throwing in the towel, and sends some blame to Twitter since they prefer competitor bit.ly. Fair enough, I’d say, and some players in the URL shortening field is bound to fall off in the coming months. Nambu’s tr.im just happen to be vocal about it in a blog post.

And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.

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An intriguing story hitting my inbox today is that members of Michael Jackson’s family paid USocial to buy and add 25,000 Twitter followers to the official “in memory of” Twitter account.

It’s not clear from the report I read exactly when this deal occurred, or how successful it was, but it’s surprising that the account only has around 30,000 followers. I’m surprised it didn’t have more organic adds, despite the fact that it’s only been online since 7th July this year.

Then again, three tweets in one month isn’t exactly scintillating stuff. It’s also worth noting that the account doesn’t have a Twitter “Verified” badge, but I suppose granting it one would be a rather special, and slightly macabre, case. read more

Following Wednesday’s Twitter outage (in which the site is still recovering from), it looks as if there was a connection between Twitter going down, as well as Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube experiencing problems. read more

The Twitter denial of service attack is still keeping some users from posting tweets, although most of the people I’ve spoken to seem to have no issues. The official blog has some more information on the subject, and the Status Blog is of course a bit more technical. So in other words, don’t freak out if you can’t send your breakfast tweets or whatever, it’s just some nasty person trying to bring Twitter down.

More: LiveJournal and Facebook also affected.

The UK is second only to the US in Twitter usage, with London topping the chart, according to Evan Williams, interviewed for BBC2′s Newsnight program.

Although official statistics aren’t available, the BBC’s research suggests that an estimated three million Brits joined Twitter in the past year, with as many signing up to follow friends as to keep tabs on their favorite celebrities.

Williams played down the accusation that Twitter could lead to the breakdown of community, saying that anyone who believed that obviously hadn’t used the service. read more

Cold-blooded murderer George Sodini, who executed a chilling plan to kill the lives of innocent strangers at an LA Fitness gym in Pittsburgh, apparently kept a blog. And boy is it fascinating.

I will try not to add anymore entries because this computer clicking distracts me.

Also, any of the “Practice Papers” left on my coffee table I used or the notes in my gym bag can be published freely. I will not be embarased (sic), because, well, I will be dead. Some people like to study that stuff. Maybe all this will shed insight on why some people just cannot make things happen in their life, which can potentially benefit others.

Read the full text here.

It’s unclear whether the blog was published on the Web or if the entries were private posts. The domain was purchased in 2000 and a simple WHOIS search reveals the killer’s address.

George Sodini
Sodini, George A
244 Orchard Spring Rd
Pittsburgh, PA 15220-1714
US
(412)276-6401
sgeorge7576-all@yahoo.com

Could this tragedy had been prevented if anyone stumbled across his blog?

And check this out. If you view the source code on the blog page, this hidden, “commented-out” message appears.

At the gym I saw a woman I like. I see her at the park and ride sometimes, so she isn’t a stranger. Occationaly (sic) she makes good eye contact and smiles, etc. She is maybe 40ish, and attractive to me. I made brief conversation to her and a younger woman she was with today. To get a friend like her (and for night time action) I would cancel this plan, or put on hold, at least for a while.

Rejected by 30 million woman? No sex since the early 80s? Dad was a useless sperm donor? What a sick, sick man.

Update: Reddit users have researched Sodini’s web history. [Franky]

That’s right, Twitter is down. I’m sure most of you already noticed, reloading those lists and resending tweets to the left and right. Hopefully the downtime will be short, but it’s over 30 minutes already which is bad enough.

Update: Twitter is fighting a denial of service attack.

Straight from the Unconfirmed Department comes the news Managing Director and Co-Founder Chris Price confirmed to us that Shiny Media will make a return to the blogging stage. Shiny Media went spectacularly in to administration little more than 2 weeks ago and the blogosphere quickly filled with good old fashioned blog drama.

Today Sheldon Daniels announced on Tech Digest that normal service will be resumed tomorrow morning. No announcement has been made so far on the Shiny Media news page at the moment of writing and we could not reach anyone at Shiny Media. A trustworthy little bird told us that Managing Director and Co-founder Chris Price back at the office is. read more

Today, micro- or ADHD- blog service, Tumblr founder David Karp published very promising statistics for the free platform. According to Karp’s announcement Tumblr had more than 50 million visitors in July, 255 million impressions and averaged 650.000 post per day.
Numbers are disputed by Techcrunch and Quantcast ranks the service at 13 million visitors for July. Tumblr averaged 5000 new members daily in July. read more