We caught up with Lucien Burm, founder of Kimengi, which has created an interesting new tool for bloggers called feedforward (see demo). Here’s the interview.

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1. How do you explain what feedforward and Kimengi do to people who have never heard of them before?

The first thing I say is that we create a more lateral web, but most of times I need to explain two things first: recommendations and widgets.

Everyone knows about recommendations that webshops provide, such as ‘people bought this, also bought…’. So at first I explain to people that this is the functionality we provide. Then I talk about our widget as a very smart website within a website that can create the same kind of recommendations on your blog/title and even better. It is better because all widgets on all participating sites can work together creating cross-site recommendations. And then, the recommendations are not only based on what other people liked, we look into context too. read more

We realise that widgets are ten-a-penny these days, but nonetheless here’s some interesting news for those who blog about fashion or celebrity news: UK-based The Nod has launched its own widget that will allow publishers to syndicate its content on their own sites.

As you’d expect, all you have to do is paste some code into the blog or social network template, with individual celebrity widgets available on each fan page.

As with most widgets, there’s an advantage on both sides. Smaller publishers get fresh content every day, while The Nod gets links to its site and merchandise. read more

(Hat Tip: Jake Gold)

It looks like WordPress has submitted their new iPhone App–called WordPress 2–to the app store and are currently awaiting Apple’s approval before the app goes live.

(WordPress for iPhone) The result of months of effort by a team of designers, developers, and everyday WordPress users serving as testers, WordPress 2.0 for iPhone and iPod touch is a remarkable leap for those who blog with their mobile device. Sure, we’ve got a great new UI and some handy new features. But we’ve also made the app work with more setups than ever before, eliminating dreaded errors for many of you who might have had trouble before.

It will be interesting to see what features they have added since their initial release (note: this sneak peak may provide some clues), although hopefully they have considered adding video to the app, a feature lacking in the iBlogosphere.

No matter how hard a bunch of fat cat solicitors representing a globally polluting oil company try to suppress traditional reporting of what happens in British parliament, they have no control over Twitter and the blogosphere.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

The Guardian may have been placed in a farcical position where not only could it not report on a certain question due to be asked in Parliament this week because of an injunction, but it couldn’t even report what the injunction was:

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

read more

After purchasing an iPhone 3GS about a week ago, I was excited to see what new video blogging apps have emerged since the iPhone 3GS’s launch this summer.

While it seems like every twitter app from Twittelator Pro to Tweetie 2 is including video and/or audio (via third party hacks), a quick scan through the app store revealed a scarcity of video blogging apps–all of them by third party companies.

Thus far CellSpin and BlogPress are the only major video blogging apps out there, with the latter allowing you to post multiple video’s per post.

So my question is where are all of the video blogging apps? Can anyone explain?

Happy Monday, folks! The Movable Type 5 beta period continues. This week, beta 3 was released. Lots of changes in this version, with what seems to be an emphasis on UI improvements.

One thing that’s been getting a lot of attention is the upgrade of existing blogs to the new “website with blogs” structure. Some people are concerned that it will be too complicated for those that just want a blog. It’s a fair criticism, though I don’t see many people these days using MT as “just a blog.” Six Apart is paying attention, though, and has revised the process to try and strike a balance between features and simplicity. It will be interesting to see how they ultimately solve this issue.

Also this week, Byrne Reese announced that mod_perlite is available This is an Apache module designed to run Perl in much the same way that PHP runs on a web server. This would make MT and other Perl applications faster and less resource intensive. The developers now say they’ve got it running MT and hopefully someone will do some benchmarking soon so we can see the difference.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Rapidly the “Wild West” days of blogging are coming to an end legally. As blogging becomes more mainstream as a form of media, so does the legal issues that confronts it. No longer an outlier, blogs are actively competing with newspapers and even television in terms of journalism, audience and trendsetting.

But this has brought with it a slew of new legal headaches. Blogging has become the target for copyright holders, celebrities and even the FTC. There are very real and very serious legal risks associated with blogging and it is important to be aware of them.

So what are some steps you can take to avoid legal headaches with your blog? There are actually too many to list and much of it just comes down to operating in good faith. However, there are a handful of very simple things that you can do to improve your legal position and lessen the likelihood that you’ll be on the wrong end of a lawsuit and also strengthen your own rights.

Just some of the basics are below. read more

Perhaps you have noticed a new online trend: blogging farmers!

In decades past you would never picture a straw-chewing, overall wearing, up-at-the-crack-of-dawn agricultural guru sitting down in front of a computer to Tweet about a lack of lactating cows on this particular morning. But it happens. read more

Amidst rumours that the microblogging service could venture in to adding video upload for its users and immediate denial, the announcement that Twitter will finally expand and offer translations almost got lost. Similarily to Facebook the Californian startup will crowdsource the translations to its user base. Users interested to help Twitter with the most needed feature right now to continue its world wide growth will have to volunteer. It isn’t clear how volunteers will be selected or where to volunteer.

We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first. As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we’ll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well.

There is no ETA for the project nor is it clear if there are plans to translate in Mandarin or Portuguese. Twitter should have made this move a long time ago already, let’s just hooe we won’t have to cope with Pirate English.

Drew Carey, or @DrewFromTV on Twitter, wants more followers. He also wants to donate money to Lance Armstrong’s charity organization Livestrong. So why not do both at the same time? If Drew Carey gets 1 million followers by December 31st this year, he’ll donate $1 million to Livestrong. And if he gets less? Well, it’s a buck a follower, so it’ll be money for Livestrong no matter what. Right now @DrewFromTV is at 73,814 followers, but that’ll probably change. read more