A South African television writer named Sam Wilson thinks it is a great idea to scream the tweets he gets from a mountain, filming the whole thing. Just tweet @ScreamUrTweets and you might end up in one of his shouting videos posted on the I’ll Scream Your Tweets website. Ridiculous? No, rather funny actually, and I like the @TweetYourScreams spinoff too. I think you can guess what that one does…

Happy Monday, folks! Lots to cover this week, so let’s start with the release of Movable Type 4.32. This is a fairly minor release — no security issues, just a handful of changes. What’s remarkable about this release is the inclusion of the Zemanta plugin. If you’re not familiar with Zemanta, they help you find content on the web related to what you’re writing that you can include in your blog post. The Zemanta plugin has been around for a while, but now it’s being distributed with MT. I can’t recall Six Apart ever bundling a third-party plugin with MT before. Several times they’ve bought popular third-party plugins and made them part of the core — not really an option when the plugin is tied to a web service.

Clearly, this is the product of some kind of partnership between 6A and Zemanta. Since the plugin is open source, 6A can include it in MTOS with no licensing issues. Still, some users have complained. Since it’s tied to a commercial service it smells non-free, even though the plugin is GPL and it functions for free. There are those that feel this plugin should have been limited to the commercial verson of MT, rather than included in MTOS. So far, 6A shows no signs of changing things based on these complaints. read more

Sometime recently I gave up. After making RSS reading part of my nearly-daily routine for the past four years, I stopped logging in.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I had noticed getting through my Google Reader was taking longer and longer, becoming a serious time sink, and I even converted to using Fever to lessen the time needed to go through my feeds, but it wasn’t enough.

I started skipping days regularly and it eventually got to where there was often over a week of backlog waiting for me. Then, I just stopped going. Though Fever and Google Reader are both great apps, I just stopped.

I haven’t logged into an RSS reader for several weeks now and I don’t feel as if I’ve missed anything. I’ve used a hodgepodge of Twitter, Google News and following a few select sites closely to keep on top of everything and, for the most part, it has worked well.

However, I may not be rid of RSS for good, I may be coming back. But if I do it will be for a very different reason and with a very different approach in mind. read more

Alex Denning writes about WordPress themes, and the fact that free themes doesn’t get the recognition they deserver:

The future? It’s not looking good. The reason people made free themes was because they wanted to promote their blog. But that promotion just isn’t going to happen any more. So why bother? I believe some themes would do better if they were released as premium themes. And that’s not going to change. Free WordPress themes? Forget it. It’s over.

He paints a very bleak picture, and granted – premium themes take a lot of space and a lot of the free themes released are out there to promote a premium theme. That being said, they are still free even if they are promotional so I’m not sure that really means anything. read more

PeterD’s recent article, The Unexpected Success, reminded me of how marketing plans often need to be changed because of an unforeseen success.

He writes about companies who strayed from their original goals because better opportunities came up.  For example, Macy’s wanted to be known as a high-end clothing retailer.  But then, they unexpectedly got a lot of sales from appliances.  They realized there was an opportunity so they added more resources to promote their appliance brand and as a result, their business reached new heights.

Also, he brings up the famous example of old school business veterans: IBM.  He writes:

The original IBM computers were scientific instruments meant for arcane academic research purposes. However, businesses started to buy computers for more mundane, everyday functions, like payroll. IBM reoriented their company around business machines, and the rest is history. Had IBM not tuned into what was working, rather than what their business plan said should be working, they probably wouldn’t be here today.

In my experience, this kind of unexpected success happens all the time in SEO.  But you have to be flexible and ready enough to change your initial plans to take advantage of the success.

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You’re a “worthless piece of s**t” and a “lonely, jealous old man.”

Those are the words Mayor James D. Kalb of Portsmouth, Ohio directed at blogger Robert Forrey via e-mail.

What sparked the heated exchange? The blogger exercised the Freedom of Information Act to request records on the placement of a playground in a public park an d the involvement of the Kiwanis Club on the project. And the mayor lost his cool, firing off this e-mail at 1:47am.

Without diving into all of the facts of this otherwise boring case of small-town politics, we are curious to hear from you…

Clearly the blogger got under the skin of the politician. But does an elected official ever have the right to lay the smackdown on a blogger? Should the blogger have released the e-mail to the public?

The power of blogging continues to grow, as a basement blogger once again gets the attention of their blog’s subject, and in the process, score national headlines. No matter where you stand on this argument, blogging is a winner.

DonorsChoose.org managed to raise $275,000 for public schools in last year’s Social Media Challenge. This year’s edition is sponsored by HP, and up and running already.

For the competition, each competing blogger and twitterer creates a unique “Giving Page” at DonorsChoose.org filled with his or her favorite classroom projects. A “leaderboard” at http://www.donorschoose.org/social-media-challenge-2009 displays the Giving Pages and tracks the live competition progress by total amount donated.

Naturally they want to do even better this year, and you can participate with your own blog as well.

After a month of transition, the new 9rules network has announced a new round of blog submissions. They will be accepting blogs for the next 24 hours. If your blog philosophy falls meets the criteria of the 9 Rules, by all means, submit.

1. Love what you do.
2. Never stop learning.
3. Form works with function.
4. Simple is beautiful.
5. Work hard, play hard.
6. You get what you pay for.
7. When you talk, we listen.
8. Must constantly improve.
9. Respect your inspiration.

This is the first round of submissions under the helm of Splashpress Media. The Blog Herald is a member of the Splashpress Media network.