Yesterday we reported how Facebook helped nab a criminal ring who used Facebook to find users status’ to determine when they wouldn’t be home, today we have another report of a Facebook based arrest, this time involving a 27-year-old man in Pennsylvania and his 14-year-old girlfriend.

According to ABCNews, the man, Robert Nickson Jr. (pictured) and his underage girlfriend changed their relationship status messages to “engaged” which tipped off police to their unlawful relationship.

Nickson told police in Delaware County, Pa. that he and the unnamed girl started dating in July after having met through a mutual friend, he said he bought her an engagement ring just one month later.

Police are also reporting that Nickson has admitted he knew she was underage and that he had sex with her on at least 4 occasions at his fathers home.

According to the police report:

“[The girl] stated that her [sic] and Nickson have had various conversations about how it was against the law, but ‘didn’t think they would get caught.” read more

This is a guest post by Shell Harris, founder of Big Oak Studios, a SEO Company located in Richmond, VA. Other recent creative outlets include Bizarre Bytes which features unusual stories from around the web.

Landing pages are heavily used to attract customers to where you want them on your website: the sales payment page being the ultimate objective for most ebusinesses. Like everything else in life, there are right ways to go about creating a landing page and a million wrong ways. Creating a good landing page is vital because this is what many first time users are going to see of your web presence, and you cannot afford for it to be the last they see of you!

Here is our simple, 7 –step program to creating a landing page that works. read more

After releasing a social plugin to the WordPress masses, it looks like the boys and girls at Automattic (the creators of WordPress) have unveiled another feature that might appeal to group bloggers everywhere.

Have you ever read one of your old posts and thought something was different? Maybe a few words were changed, the formatting was different, or an entire paragraph was missing. You poured your heart and soul into the post and didn’t know someone changed it after you hit publish. If this sounds familiar, you probably have a multi-author blog. :-)

Today we’re launching a feature called Email Post Changes to help blogs with multiple authors collaborate better on the same posts and pages. If you turn it on, we’ll instantly notify you by email whenever a change is made to a post on your site. You’ll recognize the format of the email is the same as post revisions, making it easy to see exactly what has changed. (Official WordPress Blog)

This collaboration tool is very useful for group blogs (especially those with a lead editor), as contributers can be alerted to necessary changes to posts (i.e. grammar, spelling, etc.) which will hopefully improve future content upon the site.

It can also be used as a tool to alert you of “mysterious affiliate links” appearing in your posts if a hacker gains access to your blog.

Email Post Changes is currently live for WP.com users, although Automattic has created a WordPress plugin for those of you who choose to host your WP blog upon your own server.

Capturing a “day in the life” of a military person can be hard work, after all you can’t really walk around taking notes all the time, especially when you’re in a warzone, however a British army commander is about to take a novel approach, sending Tweets about his six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan directly to his Twitter account.

Lieutenant Colonel Dougie Graham is in command of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, a battalion with 450 soldiers.

Currently Graham is working with his countries military intelligence officers to determine what he can and can’t Tweet, for security purposes.

Graham believes he can show people that it’s “not all about fighting and bombs” by offering a bit of 140 character insight into other day-to-day activities and time off that military personnel enjoy.

The move towards social networking has recently begun to move forward for military personnel around the world, even U.S. soldiers have watched as the restrictions placed against their social media accounts have been slowly lifted, allowing them to better stay connected to friends and families through sites such as Facebook and Twitter. read more

This isn’t the first warning about what should and shouldn’t be posted on Facebook, but I find it important to remind Facebook users from time to time that leaving information about what you’re doing as “public status updates” can be dangerous on the social network.

Police in the town of Nashua, N.H. are reporting that 50 homes were targeted in August by a group of criminals who would check the social networking site to find out when people would be away from home, they would then target those homes at specific times. read more

With Apple’s new iTunes-based social network Ping skyrocketing past 1 million users in its first two days, it was perhaps inevitable that it come strongly across the radar of hackers, spammers, and scammers. In fact, it took less than 24 hours for the first wave to spam to appear. Now the same problems that have long plagued other popular networks like Facebook and Twitter have taken root in Ping.

The million dollar question is: how effectively, and quickly, can Apple not only eradicate existing spam, but prevent future spam from occurring?

According to eSecurity Planet, Bradley Anstis of M86 Security suggests Apple could begin by effectively disabling links in comments, since comments are the offending medium. “It would be too much to manage comment approvals, but implementing some form of automation to strip out links from comments is a good starting point,” he said. read more

Transparency in reporting of major social network performance recently received a shot in the arm courtesy of WatchMouse. Using their Public Status Pages, WatchMouse now tracks 20 giant social networks’ uptime and other performance metrics at Social.DownorNot.com.

Specifically, users can view the performance speed and uptime of home pages, login pages, and APIs from Classmates, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Friendster, Gowalla, Hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Orkut, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Xanga, Xing, Yelp, and YouTube. If upon automatic checking any site returns errors or takes longer than 8 seconds to respond, it’s marked as error and unavailable. The uptime percentage has its basis in the number of errors reported by such checks. read more

After borrowing Tumblr’s reblog feature, like feature and launching audio blogging to the masses, it looks like Automattic’s goal is to transform the WP.com community into a larger version of Tumblr.

At least it did today after WordPress announced their latest feature, dubbed “subscriptions.”

[T]oday we’re introducing a new subscriptions feature to WordPress.com. Subscriptions are an easy way to track and read posts across multiple blogs, all in once place. [...]

Let’s say you’re reading a blog on WordPress.com that you really enjoy — so much so you want to be notified when new posts are published so you remember to read them. You can subscribe to this blog really easily by using the “Subscribe” menu in the admin bar. By going up to your admin bar, and clicking “Subscribe to blog”, you’ll be instantly subscribed and all current and future posts will be added to the subscriptions tab on your WordPress.com home screen. (Official WordPress Blog) read more

After popularizing online feed readers, it looks as if IAC (owners of Ask.com) are permanently shutting down Bloglines apparently due to lack of interest.

However what’s surprising is that it was not a rival like Google Reader who killed off Bloglines, but rather a Xoogler (aka ex-Googler) whose social network made Bloglines obsolete.

It’s finally happened. Bloglines,the troubled RSS feed reader owned by IAC, will officially be shut down, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The site has had a tumultuous history, so it’s unsurprising that IAC has finally put the platform out of its misery. [...]

Doug Leeds, President of Ask.com tells us that the reasoning behind closing Bloglines came down to the fact that the market for people who use Bloglines (and RSS readers, he adds) isn’t growing, and is actually shrinking as people shift to realtime news streams such as Twitter to consume content on the web. (via TechCrunch)

IAC plans on shutting down the server on October 1st, although they have yet to release an official announcement to their users (at least the ones who have not yet defected to Google Reader).

While it’s easy to blame Twitter for the death of their once glorious feed reader, the real killer is not Twitter but Google, whose entrance into the RSS reader market has disrupted the entire industry (as gReader is free of cost and ads).

With Bloglines calling it quits, RSS addicts will probably have very few options available outside of Google and the desktop (although the former will probably capitalize on Bloglines demise once IAC makes a formal announcement).

After holding a monopoly upon one of the most recognized symbols of blogging, Automattic has finally transferred ownership of the WordPress trademark to the the WordPress foundation.

We are pleased to announce that Automattichas made a remarkable and generous donation by transferring ownership of the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation. We’re honored to accept this donation, and to preserve and protect the trademark in the years ahead as a keystone part of the Foundation’s mission to ensure that WordPress is around and thrives for generations to come.

It is highly unusual (to say the least) for a company to give away a trademark worth millions, and this move by Automattic is extremely generous and community-minded. (WordPress Foundation)

Securing the WordPress trademark will help ease some of the fears many had about Automattic, and may also give the WordPress Foundation some much needed authority.

It will also make it easier to enforce the rules regarding use of the trademark which currently forbid for profit companies from using “WordPress” within their respective name (with the exception being Automattic who is Grandfathered in).

While this news will probably not affect most bloggers (at least those who are not into the technicalities or legalities of business), it will probably help secure WordPress’s founder (Matt Mullenweg) legacy for years to come.