The Blog Herald » Lorelle VanFossen

WordPress and WordPressMU Merged: Whoa!

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:26:55 +0000

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 this past weekend was a resounding success, but there is some major confusion coming from the presentation on the State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg about the “merger” of WordPress and WordPressMU.

In his presentation, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told the more than 700 attendees news about WordPress and its relatives under the Automattic umbrella, a form of stockholders report. He also announced that WordPress – the ORG part of WordPress – would be merged into WordPressMU.

Many, including Ozh of Planet Ozh, The Theme Lab, and Aaron Brazell were quick to announce their thoughts about the “merger of WordPress and WordPressMU,” misunderstanding the story they were getting across the live blogs and twit-stream from WordCamp San Francisco.

While I’m waiting confirmation, my understanding from Matt’s announcement is that the long time home of all things WordPress, known by many as the WordPress dot org site, will become a WordPressMU site, with nothing impacting the downloadable versions of WordPress.

With the site’s move to WordPressMU, combining the WordPress driven informational site with the bbPress driven WordPress Support Forums, the site will also incorporate the hot new BuddyPress kit, a combination of WordPressMU specific Plugins that turn a site into a social media community platform, often called “Facebook in a box.”

This is a huge undertaking, with possibly million of registered users, testing WordPressMU, BuddyPress, bbPress, and the WordPress Community as the site undergoes the changes.

Building a Real WordPress Community

In the earliest days of WordPress.com, I really looked forward to the community part of WordPress.com bloggers rising up out of the multiple blogs hosted by WordPress.com. Global tags brought some people together, but individually, not by common interest.

With the move of the WordPress.org site to include the profiles and group “friends” and “followers,” I see that dream of a WordPress Community coming true.

Jane Wells has been working on building a stronger WordPress Community set of volunteers and contributors, moving beyond coders and hackers to every day WordPress fans to help contribute to the development of WordPress in a variety of non-technical ways, from translations to simply their opinion and feedback. Imagine having access through the BuddyPress profiles on WordPress.org to information on the talents, abilities, and interests of all the WordPress users! The WordPress development team could directly consult with those expressing an interest in a specific area of WordPress.

What about WordPress Plugin authors all interested in the Google Maps API. Imagine them working together to create some new mapping feature for WordPress. Or WordPress members living in a region or community wanting to get together to create a WordPress Meetup or Users Group, or maybe a WordCamp.

I’ve found that people who use WordPress want to work with people who use WordPress. They also want to play with them. Think of the possibilities of creating a special interest group on car racing, a sport, knitting, book reading, or whatever interest you have and/or blog about. Why not? I’d love to connect with people interested in what I’m interested in, learning from and with each other by a common bond.

This is what I believe is the intention of converting the official WordPress.org site to WordPressMU and adding BuddyPress. It serves as a fantastic testing ground for BuddyPress, just as WordPress.com does for WordPress and WordPressMU, and will help unite WordPress users in new and exciting ways. With BuddyPress interaction, this may also change WordPress support in some very interesting ways as people may be able to reach out for support directly from the WordPress Community, and not just through the WordPress Support Forums.

I also see WordPress.com embracing BuddyPress as well, hopefully. That would really make my dream come true for the community I so long for from among my millions of brothers and sisters on WordPress.com. It is such a vibrant and mixed community, I’d love to really get to know who they are and what their interest are beyond the Google or WordPress.com search or tags.

In the future, it will be easier to install WordPressMU or “flip a switch,” as many are calling it, between the single self-hosted version of WordPress and WordPressMU, but for now, I believe Matt’s intention was to announce the WordPress.org site going WordPressMU and BuddyPress.

It’s exciting times for the WordPress Community!

Possibly Related Posts

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 Rocks the WordPress Community

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:18:07 +0000

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 was this past weekend and brought together over 700 WordPress enthusiasts to the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. There were many speakers covering a wide variety of topics including Timothy Ferriss of the The 4-Hour Workweek, Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV on building an audience with video shows, Scott Porad of Pet Holdings, the parent company of I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org on crowd sourcing, Dave Moyer of the WordCast and Bitwire Media on podcasting production, Steve Souders formerly of Google and the author of High Performance Web Sites on site optimization, Ann Oyama, aka SuperAnn, a freelance WordPress developer and host of BayAnime.com on WordPress Theme code, functions, and customization, just to name a few of the awesome speakers.

People came from all around the world including England, Japan, China, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico, and from all over the United States including Ed Morita of Baker’s Hours, the first recipient of a permanent WordPress logo tattoo, surprised to be highlighted in Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation.

I helped Patrick Havens of the WordCamp Report live blog the sessions. He took the upstairs “main” conference hall and I took the downstairs, ducking out when I could to help with the WordPress Genius Bar.

The collection of live blog posts on The WordCamp Report from WordCamp San Francisco 2009 include:

Many were twittering and live blogging the WordPress event of the year, as well as having their say on the information coming out of WordCamp San Francisco. Some include:

Expect a lot more news and coverage of WordCamp San Francisco 2009 to come out over the next few days, along with a ton of pictures of the event and participants.

The WordPress Genius Bar: Helping WordPress Users Use WordPress

The WordPress Genius Bar is on its second year, run by the amazing Lloyd Budd. This year, a ton of WordPress experts, developers, and customer support folks volunteered their time to help people with their WordPress issues. A common question was about transferring their WordPress blog to another WordPress blog, such as moving from WordPress.com to a self-hosted version of WordPress, moving domains, and moving between web hosts. Other popular questions involved SEO issues, permalinks, Plugin issues, images and file uploading and management, redirects, and comment spam.

There were also some really basic questions on how to blog that we loved, especially as many of the volunteers got a chance to learn more about the attendees and what their blogging ideas and goals were. One person told me how much they loved their “interrogation” as they were leaving the Genius Bar. “They were asking me more questions than I was – but I learned so much about how I’m going to start my blog because I answered my own questions!”

One person came in with a double sided, single spaced, typed list of questions for the WordPress Genius volunteers, but found when his first two questions were answered, all of his questions were answered, disappointing a couple of us ready to dig into his WordPress issues. We all laughed and sent him on his way thrilled that this was so easy.

I really recommend that WordCamps include similar helper areas. It’s a great way to learn more about WordPress and give back, but also a great place to get to know people and learn of all the myriad ways people use WordPress. Lloyd Budd does such a great job organizing these, I’m sure he’ll write some tips or offer suggestions to help those interested in adding a Genius Bar to their WordPress events.

Day Two: WordPress Developer Day

The offices of Automattic were packed with a lot of people hungry for more WordPress on Sunday.

The day was more informally structured in the Barcamp style, with three rooms open for different presentations and discussions. Several WordPress Plugin and Theme developers presented their wares and concepts, which I will cover more on soon. It was exciting to see where some are taking WordPress, changing the face and content of blogging in the future.

There were a lot of sessions in the day including discussions and code hacking advice and tips on WordPress documentation, bbPress, BuddyPress, WordPress Plugins, localization and internationalization efforts, Subversion and Trac, and more.

An interesting discussion was lead by Barry Abrahamson, the WordPress server wrangler, about how WordPress pushes their servers to the hilt to maximize WordPress.com blogs and offer tips to others to optimize their server, especially those running high load systems. Barry put the questions and a summary of the answers in the Server Q&A — WordCamp Dev Day blog on WordPress.com using the P2 WordPress Theme.

WordCamp 2009 Summary

As a huge WordCamp fan, and having attended and presented at many WordCamps, the annual WordCamp in San Francisco is a major event, and a unique one. At over 700 attendees, I believe that this year’s event is the world’s largest WordCamp, outdoing WordCamps in Hawaii and Israel by only a few, by my unofficial score.

Matt Mullenweg personally selects the WordCamp presenters for this special WordCamp, people who have influenced his own work and blogging efforts recently or over the years. He believes that if they can change his life, they can change yours. And he’s right.

Each year, through the live presentations and now the video versions hosted on WordPress.tv, WordPress fans from around the world can learn from the best of the best in WordPress, SEO, community building, crowd sourcing, content building, site optimization, and the business of blogging.

With WordPress and Automattic grown now to over 50 employees, most were in attendance from around the world, giving fellow employees and WordPress fans a chance to personally thank and get to know those who make WordPress run and improve. During the breaks, especially around the WordPress Genius Bar, it was exciting to hear WordPress tips and tricks flying around the huge open lobby and halls of the Mission Bay Conference Center.

While WordCamp San Francisco 2009 is over, there are many WordCamps coming up around the world. Upcoming WordCamps include:

Possibly Related Posts

Nothing to Blog About: Backlogitis

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:19:16 +0000

We all have it. The email inbox reaches 1,000 unread messages like some virtual red flashing light indicator of procrastination. You’ve got 600 tweets to read and 45 DMs to respond to. Your WordPress blog is still version 2.5 and your WordPress Theme only works with WordPress 2.1. The To Do pile on your desk resembles the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You’ve got Netflix movies stacked upon Blockbuster videos past due to return. And your blog is begging for a blog post.

The symptoms are all there.

You have backlogitis.

Also known as procrastination syndrome, Backlogitis is when the backlog of things to do saps the energy required to do the things you need to do, like the creative process of blog writing. When the shadow of things undone hovers over your psyche, it’s hard to be creative and inspiring.

When it comes to finding inspiration to blog, you find yourself with nothing to blog about.

The Prevention and Treatment of Backlogitis

Don’t despair. There is hope for those suffering from backlogitis.

Begin by taking things one thing at a time, not 500 at a time. The pile, virtual, mental, and physical, grew one thing at a time. So does the treatment.

The first step is to avoid The List. The List is another symptom. We sit down and look at our backlogitis symptoms and make a list of all the things we have to do to treat and eliminate the symptoms. We start with the first item on the list, then the second, then…well, you’ve been there. The list was so exhausting to make, and intimidating to even look at, you toss the list on your backlogitis pile, adding to the misery rather than the solution.

Skip the list.

Ask yourself what is most important and choose three. Do them. Don’t list them, don’t think about them, just do them. Action speaks loudly against backlogitis.

Then do three more. Take it three steps at a time, never stopping the momentum.

Clean up your backlog. Dig into those emails and clear out the stuff so old, it’s turning into virtual petrified wood.

Get rid of all the emailed newsletters and reports you don’t read. Deal with it and stop them from entering your inbox in the future – forever. If you pick up a new skill on cleaning out the inbox, make a note of the lesson and idea in your idea file, but don’t stop cleaning up the inbox.

Update your WordPress Theme and upgrade WordPress to the latest version. Do the same with all your Plugins. If you aren’t Theme-savvy, get a new WordPress Theme. They are free and there are thousands of great customizable Themes to choose from in the WordPress Theme Directory. If, along the way, you come up with some interesting advice for others in the same spot, jot them down. Keep moving.

If you haven’t watched those movies, you won’t. Return them. Don’t get new ones to replace them.

Look at your blog. What’s undone that is driving you crazy? Then sit down and do them. Write your blog disclaimer and comments policy, along with your copyright policy so you are covered and your readers and abusers know where you stand. Clean up your blog categories and tags so they really represent your blog content.

Look at all the left over and undone things on your blog. Are they dragging your attitude down? Get cracking.

Action Begats Action

Like me, do you belong to Backlogitis Anonymous. Are you overwhelmed with your life and is your blog getting in the way, adding to the backlogitis pile? There is a solution.

The more I self medicate with action, the more action is taken, the more that is accomplished, and the more energy – creative energy – I have.

This blog post was inspired by cleaning out my email inbox, as was this whole series. You never know where an idea will come from. It came from my backlogitis.

Cheryl Richardson, author of Stand Up for Your Life, Take Time for Your Life, and Life Makeovers, explained that when you clean up and empty the junk around you, be it physically or mentally, you make room for new things to come into the space. Without the empty space, nothing can get in. This includes new ideas, motivation, inspiration, and energy.

If your blogging content ideas have dried up, maybe it’s just too cluttered and backlogged in there. Stop putting off today what you won’t get done tomorrow and catch up with yourself. You might find you’ve survived Backlogitis to blog another day.

Articles in the Nothing to Blog About Series

Possibly Related Posts

Nothing to Blog About: Not Every Blog Post Should See the Light of Publish

Lorelle VanFossen — Sun, 24 May 2009 22:56:11 +0000

As mentioned in the last article in Nothing to Blog About, not every idea is worth publishing. Not every blog post is publishable. Not every blog post should see the light of the public eye. And sometimes that type of blog post is stopping us from producing blog content.

I can’t tell you the many hours I’ve spent struggling over a blog post, determined it had value and needed to be published. I’d beat at it, thrash it, rip and tear it apart, only to decide it wasn’t ready, nor was I, to have this ever be published.

Has this happened to you? A blog post you want to publish sits in your drafts or stares at you from your blog screen screaming, “NO! NOT YET!”

Are you listening?

Not all ideas are good ones. We think they are at the time, but as we develop them, the spark in the idea melts away and we are left with a hollow sense of purpose. What happened?

We all start many things full of energy and enthusiasm, then figure out midway through that it’s just not right, expends too much energy, or it just runs out of steam. The passion is gone. It’s not as exciting as it once was. It’s boring.

When I review something I’ve written and get bored, I know my readers are going to get bored faster than I am. It’s time to spice this thing up, or let it sit and mellow until I can find a way to add some color or flavor to the recipe.

Other times, I’ll look at the article and think, “It’s not done.” It’s incomplete, missing something, or just lacking. Or I’ll realize it says too much. I don’t know how to cut it down, but there’s too many points and not enough clarity.

If you get an intuitive itching at your creative spirit that says don’t hit Publish, don’t. Trust it. Not every blog post must be published.

If you find yourself spending too much time and energy on a blog post without moving to out of the draft bin, stop. This post is not only sucking away valuable energy and passion, it is a black hole you might never pull away from. It is draining your energy from other more productive and entertaining writing and content generation projects, ideas that need that energy.

Keep it in draft or delete it. Either way, stop messing around with it. You can come back to it later, but walk away. Put your energy where it will do it’s best work.

Articles in the Nothing to Blog About Series

Possibly Related Posts

Nothing to Blog About: Hit the Ideas File

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:36:54 +0000

If people judged me by the number of ideas I generated in single day on the subject of WordPress and blogging, I’d be the Einstein of the blogosphere. If they took a peek into the all the various files, folders, virtual and physical, I have to store all of those ideas, they’d pack me up and send me to the mental institution.

I come up with ideas for things to blog about constantly, rarely running out of ideas. The problem is that few of these see the light of day, or I get so caught up in the ideas, I can’t get past the idea to the Publish button.

As part of this series called Nothing to Blog About, we’re talking about how to stir up your mental pot when the bloggy brain bogs down and content cannot be found. From among the various options suggested already, I’d like to resurrect the traditional idea file.

Ideas Came Drop By at Any Time

Ideas are elusive. When the well runneth over, the ideas come faster than you can jot them down. When the well dries up, you’re left scavaging around the dusty corners of your brain for something – anything to blog about.

Take advantage of when the ideas flow fast to jot down or type up all of your ideas. Whatever system you use, write out the full idea. Don’t be reliant upon a few keywords to trigger the memory when you return to your notes. It could be 5 minutes or 5 years later. What’s the likelihood that “mystery cat Enumclaw 78″ is really going to mean much to you after two or three years?

Write the full thought and idea, including all the keywords, phrases, resources, everything that triggered the idea. I call it a “mind dump,” getting it all down on paper so when I come back, the concept I wanted to convey is clear and I can pull a story from it.

You don’t have to publish every idea you come up with. Save them and let them mellow with time. Some actually improve.

Store Your Ideas in a Findable, Searchable Method

I’ve been keeping an Ideas and Drafts collection in various forms for years. I have bits and pieces of paper stuffed into a giant file folder or typed up in long lists in text files on my computer. There are a variety of systems, from sticky notes, scraps of paper, and napkins to word processing or text file documents. Some people use computer note taking or to do list and task programs, others simply pop it into an email and email it to themselves, then applying a filter tag or label to those types of emails and storing them in their email inbox.

When the don’t-wanna-blog anxiety hits me, I hit those ideas and drafts, so it is critical that it is in a form that is quickly accessible and easy to transport.

I plow through them, mentally tossing out this idea and that. I poke and pick at a few, thinking these might be good ideas, then shove them aside when they lose interest. If I lose interest in them, they aren’t ready for prime time.

Often I will stumble over a great unfinished article or idea that revs up my writing motor. Maybe it’s a combination of two ideas noted a year or two apart that come together to create a fresh new concept that lights my writing fire.

Aging also changes perspective, shedding new light and energy on an old subject and concept that now makes a lot more sense than when it did when it wasn’t a fully formed idea.

You never know what will inspire you back to your blog, so keep your idea list easily accessible and dig in on a regular basis.

Checked Your Bookmarks Lately?

In addition to your Ideas file, when when was the last time your really went through ALL of your bookmarks and feeds? I have over 1,000 feeds in my feed reader, accumulating published articles in thousands, though there are only about 300 that I track on a regular basis, 150 that I pour over faithfully on a weekly basis.

What are all those other blogs and websites up to? I subscribed to them for a reason, and usually that reason was quality, inspirational content. They are a living Ideas file, so why not check out what others are doing to find inspiration for what you should be doing on your blog.

Articles in the Nothing to Blog About Series

Possibly Related Posts

Nothing to Blog About: Are You Blogging What You Should Be Blogging?

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:14:38 +0000

In the last article in this new series called Nothing to Blog About, I asked you to go back to your roots, in a sense, to start over and find that “lovin’ feeling” you’ve lost about your blog subject matter to re-energize your creative blogging spirit.

What happens if you can’t find it? What happens if you’ve really lost that lovin’ feeling?

Are You Blogging What You Should Really Be Blogging?

In the early years of Lorelle on WordPress, I thought I should be writing only about WordPress. I felt limited and constrained by the subject matter, restricted to only WordPress subjects. As much as I am a WordPress fan, that got boring really fast. If I didn’t expand the subject matter, I felt that my blog would stagnate and so would I.

It wasn’t until I stopped and asked myself, “Are you blogging what you should be blogging?” that I realized that using WordPress wasn’t just about WordPress but the act of blogging. Web publishing. Community building. Having a voice and identity on the web.

Once I opened up the door to blogging topics in general, my writing energy flowed. I had a lot more things to write about. My site stays WordPress-centric, but I’ve been a blogger longer than WordPress has been around, so why restrict my expertise on that blog?

Teaching workshops and training programs on blogging and social media community building around the world, many participants walk through the door with a bloggy agenda in their heads. They know exactly what they want to blog about and why. Their goal is set.

As I take them through the step-by-step process of blog planning and creating a blog focus, it’s fascinating to watch them struggle with their blogging voice and identity, especially when challenged to come up with enough content for six months to a year of blogging. The concept that a blog isn’t a one night stand, fast publishing way to online marketing success often comes as a surprise. They soon realize they need to reassess their original goals and change their content intent.

If your goals are not realistic, fuzzy, and unclear when it comes to your blog content, then maybe you are blogging about the wrong subject, or at least from the wrong perspective on the subject.

It could be time to let that go and find your real passion in blogging.

A blog is not set in concrete. It is an ever evolving publishing platform that represents your ever evolving content intentions. You must grow with your blogging abilities and topics, or you, too, will stagnate and lock up without enough subject mater to blog about over the long haul not short run.

If you are struggling to find something to blog about, maybe you aren’t blogging about the right subject. Maybe it’s time to rethink your bloggy goals. There are no laws that say you have to finish your life blogging on the same subject you started with. Maybe blogger’s block is a sign that you need to change the subject.

Articles in the Nothing to Blog About Series

Possibly Related Posts

Nothing To Blog About: Go Back to Your Roots

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:42:01 +0000

In this new series called Nothing to Blog About, we’re looking at the various ways your blogging creativity can be temporarily dried up and plugged up, and how to break the dam. Today, my recommendation is to go back to your roots.

Go Back to the Beginning

I know all there is to know about blogging, right? I’ve been doing this longer than most people, in fact, before some tweeters and bloggers were even born (that’s a scary thought!). I’ve been through all the various blog struggles and hoops there are to blog through. I’ve survived all the names changes from website to online journal to weblog to blogging to microblogging and the belief that social media is a new concept. I’ve had my content stolen, been accused of stealing other people’s content, abused by trolls and comment spammers, survived changes in web technology and many upgrades, and lived to blog on another day. So I’ve been there, done it all, haven’t I?

Have I? What I’ve done is forgotten what is was like to start blogging. To be the new kid on the bloggy block.

I’ve forgotten the risky feeling of exposing my thoughts publicly, beyond the journal under my mattress. I’ve lost track of the emotions as I struggle to find the words, make my point, tell a story, and find the moral conclusions that helps others change their thinking. Today, the words come easily, it’s second nature to think “blogging” in my head. Maybe it’s time to relive those and find a fresh perspective rather than an old, dried out stance.

Have you gotten arrogant, too? Maybe it’s time for you to go back to your beginnings, wherever and whatever they are, and remember what it was like for you with your blog topic.

If you write about technology, do you remember how hard it was just to save a file when your only storage method was a 1.5 megabyte disk and you had a two megabyte file or program? If you blog about writing, do you remember when you kept the thesaurus near you so you wouldn’t repeat the same adjective in a paragraph?

Articles in the Nothing to Blog About Series

Possibly Related Posts

Nothing To Blog About: Leave, Quit, Stop

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:34:39 +0000

That’s right. Leave. Get out of here. If you got nothing to say to the world through your blog, leave, quit, stop. Get away from your desk, your computer, your office, your home, your life. Go away.

Not forever, just long enough to clear your head and mind and find your creative juices again.

As part of this new series called Nothing to Blog About, we’re looking at the various ways your blogging creativity can be temporarily dried up and plugged up, and how to break the dam. My first recommendation is for you to leave your blog for a vacation.

When I travel, leaving the “regular life” behind, I’m often besieged with blog ideas. Most of them don’t see the light of day, but they do see my Article Idea notebook, stuffed with scraps of paper, napkins, sticky notes, business cards, and whatever was available to jot down an idea or thought.

There is something about exposure to the “new” and “different” that seems to energize the brain. There are stories everywhere. So leave behind your normal day and get out, even if it is for a walk around a new block.

There are stories everywhere – even under rocks

There are stories everywhere. The problem is not the number of stories, or even finding them. The struggle is finding a story you can relate back to your blog.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter if they relate. Sometimes the mental games we play with story ideas is enough to stimulate the brain into blogging.

Bored with blogging over a year ago, I took my motor home between speaking gigs, hoping the adventure would help clear my head and make me more receptive to new ideas. I looked for stories everywhere, in everyone I met and everything I saw. I challenged things, I asked questions, both verbally and mentally.

I asked myself about why this road was built. Who was it built for? Who maintained the road I drove on? What lead someone to say, “Let’s build a road here!” and not over there? Why are the shops and malls here along the road? Why pick this out of the way place to put an outlet mall? Why not put it in the heart of a city where more people could visit and spend money instead of relying upon tourists and travelers to make your outlet mall a destination? How has moving stores beyond the bounds of the concentrated population centers changed the landscape of our country? For that matter, how has the automobile, and the motor home I’m driving, changed how we live and travel and where we decide to live and travel to?

The creative juices began to flow and ideas for new angles to talk about the worn out subject of blogging began to tickle the back of my head. A visit with one of my best friends led me to an idea to start podcasting on Lorelle on WordPress, interviewing people about their blogging tips and WordPress. To get started, I sat down with my friend, Jo, and asked her about blogging as the digital recorder caught our ever word.

And received a shocker. Jo didn’t know how to talk blogging.

All the years I’ve been blogging, she hasn’t got a clue. I even gave her a blog! She doesn’t consciously read blogs, and has no idea what to do with the blog I set up for her. While she reads my blogs once in a while, and listened politely when I talked blog, she had no idea what I was talking about. She’d just smile and be supportive, as a best friend should.

We didn’t have the jargon, a common language to talk when it came to my work. She didn’t understand terms like social media, Twitter, SEO, black hat, spam, splog, or scraper. Copyright is text found inside a book that reminds you to not photocopy it’s pages and sell them, not an part of her day to day experience and fight to protect what is hers.

Instead of being motivated to teach her and others more basics of blogging, I was depressed and frustrated. If I couldn’t get through to her after all these years, what the hell was I doing with my own work and life. A few hours later, Liz Strauss called me and literally kicked my ass.

The end result was the inspired and classic post, “10 Really Rad Righteous Blogging Tips” by my alter-evil, Lorraine. Done as a form of April Fool’s Joke on Christmas Day, unbelievably this post has become a great example of what not to do as well as examples of what people are really doing with their blogs.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, but it begins by leaving home. I had to leave the cocoon of my bloggy world where everyone speaks the same language, to discover I still had something relevant to say and contribute to the world of blogging.

So quit. Not forever, just long enough to walk away and find your bloggy spirit again. Then come back, recharged and revitalized, ready to blog again.

Possibly Related Posts

I Have No Idea What I’m Going to Blog About, But Here Goes

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:19:50 +0000

I’ve been at this blogging thing since before 1994 and faced many a time staring at my computer with dread. Not again. Honestly. Ain’t nothing left to say. It’s all been said before. And I said it. Tank’s empty. It’s boring. I’m bored.

A blog calls to you, begs you to feed it. Your readers want your words, and the need must be fed. What do you do when you can’t think of anything of value to add other than what you ate for lunch?

A couple years ago, when blogging was still in its infancy, a post title like this was fairly common, along with titles such as:

Nothing Happened Today
I Don’t Have Anything to Say
Not Much, You?
Been a While
Sorry, I Haven’t Been Around Much Lately
Distracted
What should I say next?
I have to write something here

Now, as an experienced blogger yourself, you know that these post titles are ineffective and time wasters since they give no information and have no keywords or search terms in them. You’ve also learned that people don’t care about your excuses and don’t want to read them, so stop making them. Just blog and get to the point.

But what do you do when you look at your computer screen and think, “I got nothing to say.”

It’s not writer’s block, or the more modern blogger’s block. That’s a more serious issue. It’s normal to confront your blog and feel compelled to write something, and yet have nothing to say.

I don’t know how it started, but blogging comes with an implied requirement: You must contribute something of value.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to offer some ideas that might compel you to move beyond the “I Have No Idea What I’m Going to Blog About” phase into the bloggable energy phase.

Along the way, I hope you add your suggestions for how to overcome the got-nothing-to-blog syndrome and help others overcome their temporary blog blocks. We all get them, and knowing you aren’t alone can be the first step in recovery.

What blocks your creative blogging flow and how do you get past it and back to blogging?

Possibly Related Posts

Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 3.0

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:52:44 +0000

There is no doubt in the WordPress Community. The best Plugin competition has started: The Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 (3.0).

If you are new to the WordPress Community, you may not even know that you are probably using a WordPress Plugin generated during a past WTC WordPress Plugin Competition. There have been some incredible great and innovative – not to mention useful – WordPress Plugins such as:

Where do you think Alex King got his start? The award for his very popular Popularity Contest WordPress Plugin helped put him on the map as a WordPress expert in the 2005 contest. Ozh of PlanetOzh has been in the past couple of contests with really innovative efforts, as well as Vladimir Prelovac who just published the leading book on writing and developing WordPress Plugins, “WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide.”

There are some changes in this version of the contest, which is why founder Mark Ghosh is calling it the 3.0 version.

For WordPress Plugin authors, the WordPress Plugin Competition is a chance to generate a lot of enthusiasm and exposure for their WordPress Plugins, and a chance to win great prizes. While there are thousands and thousands of Plugins out there, there are always needs not being met. I’ve still got a few on my own personal Plugins Wanted List.

For WordPress users, this is chance to see the brightest and best come up with the most innovative ideas and turn them into something we can use. We get to cheer them on and then take advantage of their brilliance on our WordPress blogs.

For sponsors, this is a chance for tremendous exposure to millions of WordPress users around the world. By contributing financial or material prizes, you are encouraging and investing in the creative, open source spirit that so defines the WordPress Community. WordPress users run the gamut from individual personal blogger to corporate blogger running huge publishing company or commercial sites around the globe.

Sponsors also help encourage students. Many Plugin authors are enthusiast students studying computer science, programming, design, and development. They are the future of the tech industry, and some day, you will want to hire them as they are helping to change how the web works, especially how blogging and social media work with WordPress.

I expect to see some WordPressMU and BuddyPress Plugins in addition to single hosted WordPress Plugins in the list this year.

I’ll be listing some of the entrants in my Blog Herald WordPress News and Lorelle on WordPress. Stay tuned for an exciting WordPress Plugin Competition and here’s to all the winners, both entrants, users, and sponsors.

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: BuddyPress News, WordPress 2.8 News, WordCamp Toronto & Virginia, WordPress.tv Feeds, and More

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:02:31 +0000

WordPress 2.8 News: The final stages of development, testing, and patching is underway for the release of WordPress 2.8. The latest news on the next version of WordPress includes:

Design Tweak Poll Results: The results of the Design Tweaks Poll are in and the Fluency-style was clearly the winner. The design team is looking at all the feedback and incorporating it into a final decision on how to clean up the style of the WordPress Administration Panels. For the most part, they will do very little to change the look and feel of the Administration Panels, other than some core clean up from the previous version.
Listing All Your WordPress Tags in WordPress 2.8: While not out, Justin Tadlock offers a tutorial on creating a page with all of your WordPress tags for category, post tags, and link categories in a cloud format for the upcoming WordPress 2.8.
WP Security Escaping Functions: Standardizing and shortening the WP security escaping functions should improve security and Plugin issues.
Accessibility Improvements for WordPress 2.8: Improvements in WordPress 2.7-2.8 for accessibility including improved functionality for screen readers.
Has-Patch Marathon Results: The results of the Has-Patch Marathon for WordPress 2.8 are in and 44 patches were committed to the core, with 20 new ones added, with a total of 102 tickets closed. Expect the release candidate for WordPress 2.8 to be out soon.
Widgets Redesigned Finally: The long awaited redesign of the WordPress Widgets are in the Appearance panel is done and undergoing testing. Some visual improvements are needed, but it is close to done. Widgets are now able to be added to WordPress by extending WP_Widget, which allows multiple instances of the same WordPress Widget in the sidebar. They note that all existing Widgets must be converted to this new system as previous API functions will be removed in WordPress 2.9.
Plugin Management Panel Updated: The Plugins Management Panel has been updated to match the other Administration Panels and now includes status filters for All, Active, Recently Active, Inactive, and Update Available, as well as a search and option for setting the number of Plugins to show per page.
New Favorite Actions: The new Favorite Actions feature is a drop down menu that allows you to set your most redundant actions on the Administration Panels. It recognizes what page you are viewing on the Administration Panels and helps you to navigate faster through them.

More Usability Testing: Jane Wells and her team are doing another round of usability testing to check how the new interface for WordPress 2.8 is holding up and where some improvements can be made. In Contributing to WordPress, Part III: Usability Testing, she explains the process of how the usability testing works, and how WordPress is going to tap into the WordPress Community for testing purposes and feedback participation. Stay tuned for more announcements on this as the usability department shapes up with WordPress.

BuddyPress News: There is a lot of news coming out about the hot BuddyPress Plugin and social media Theme framework for WordPressMU, and soon for single versions of WordPress. Here are some highlights:

BuddyPress 1.0 is out and people are using it on WordPressMU sites around the world.
You can now customizable pageview slugs in BuddyPress.
It’s slow, but there are now a few BuddyPress Themes coming out to style your BuddyPress community blogs.
There are also a few BuddyPress Plugins to extend the functionality of BuddyPress.
BuddyPress, bbPress Integration Plugin Bug calls attention to a bug in the Plugin by Michael Eagan, A bug in the WPMU Enable bbPress Capabilities, which doesn’t play nice with BuddyPress and bbPress.
Weblog Tools Collection now joins the ranks of BuddyPress users and communities on their blog.

Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition: The best Plugin competition has started. The Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 (3.0) in on and it is expected to rock the WordPress year this year, even more than the past 4 years. They’ve made a lot of changes and improvements so if you are a WordPress Plugin author, check out the new instructions. For WordPress Plugin fans, this is like eating candy. Non-stop awesome Plugins.

No Spam = SEO Winner: In “Eliminating spam is good SEO,” the folks from Akismet talk about how cleaning out your comment spam can tremendously boost your SEO value as well as improve your visitor’s experience. Comment spammers are getting smarter and smarter and it’s harder than ever for us to determine what is spam and what is legit, since “Nice post” and “Great blog” are the top of the charts in spam comments. Akismet learns, but it won’t learn unless we teach it. With millions of users, it is learning pretty darn fast, though. The article covers a great list of how leaving comment spam on your site can seriously hurt your site’s SEO and integrity.

Akismet Working for US: In the recent article on comment spam and SEO on the Akismet blog, they hinted that they are working on some new methods to help protect our blog from spam comments that put our blog, and our visitors, at risk from security issues.

WordPress.tv is Hiring: If you have some online video skills, WordPress.tv is hiring. For more job openings with the Automattic team, check out the Automattic jobs page.

Feed on WordPress.tv: Michael Pick has announced WordPress.tv feeds to bring WordPress.tv video tutorials right to your feed reader. Using Miro, you can download, watch, sort, and browse web video, video podcasts, and video files, or use the new iTunes feed version of WordPress.tv.

Consolidating the WordPress Subversion: Barry Abrahamson announced the WordPress Code Repository, a consolidated version of all the small projects previously released across multiple domains. They’ve set up a Trac instance for bug reports, too. If you are involved in the code side of WordPress and Automattic projects, check out the new lightweight subversion repository.

WordPress.com News

New Theme for WordPress.com Members: WordPress.com announced a new Spring styled Theme to their Theme collection called SpringLoaded.

WordPress 2.8 on WordPress.com? There have been some subtle changes and improvements to the WordPress.com interface, increasing usability and adding a few new minor functions. Are these tests? We’ll see when WordPress 2.8 comes out. Remember, WordPress.com is the testing ground for a lot of new features in WordPress. Your feedback helps WordPress grow and evolve.

WordPress on Your Calendar

WordCamp Toronto and WordCamp RVA in Virginia are this weekend, rocking the social media world with tons of WordCamp news, tips, information, and news.

Upcoming WordCamp and WordPress Events include:

May 2009

June 2009

Each week, the Blog Herald features WordPress News, a weekly column by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress featuring the news from around the WordPress Community. You can follow more WordPress news, WordCamp and WordPress Event information, WordPress tips and help, see Lorelle on WordPress and her Twitter account, @lorelleonwp, where she posts a WordPress Plugin and WordPress Tip daily. If you have a WordPress news item or tip to suggest, please contact her at: lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com

Possibly Related Posts

Glenda Watson Hyatt: Is Your Blog Disabled?

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:10:05 +0000

At the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) this weekend in Chicago, the famous Left Thumb Blogger, Glenda Watson Hyatt of the Do It Myself Blog rocked the attendees world with her powerful How POUR is Your Blog presentation, reminding us that if our blogs don’t meet web standards for accessibility, it could be disabled.

Glenda’s powerful presentation wasn’t the typical dry stuff of web accessibility. Dry? Boring? That’s not possible with Glenda around. She has a wicked sense of humor and used it in her PowerPoint presentation, accompanied by her voice program, Kate, which read her presentation out loud. I’ve never laughed so hard over such a serious subject as web accessibility.

Glenda has cerebral palsy. It restricts her movement and speech but it doesn’t impact her intelligence, though many have labeled her otherwise in the past. In her book, I’ll Do It Myself, she shared the trials and tribulations as well as the challenges of being a highly intellectual woman trapped in a body that just can’t keep up. I highlighted Glenda in How WordPress Changes Lives, showcasing how WordPress changed her life by giving her a voice that connects with people around the world through her blog.

One of the great points she made was on how to justify using ALT attributes in your blog images:

A good test to determine if a text equivalent is useful is to imagine reading your blog over the phone. What would you say when encountering the image to make the page understandable to your listener?

She also helped us understand what text should go in the ALT description. Not just a title but a description. It must describe what the reader is looking at, not a bunch of SEO keywords or poetic license. In her example from last year’s SOBCon photos, it read, “SOBCon08 Devoured; SOBCon09 in the Oven.” The crowd roared when she asked, “What is SOBCon? Food?”

These simple examples showed all of us there that web accessibility isn’t hard to do, nor expensive, but also makes a lot of sense.

She talked about how to correctly define acronyms and all the jargon we use that only the enlightened can understand. When we saw ADA up on the screen as an example of an acronym, most of us made some assumptions on what it meant. The crowd laughed when they found out that it could be Americans with Disabilities Act or American Dental Association? How many of us have made those same assumptions in our blog posts, expecting readers to also be able to read our minds.

What about GND? It is used on Twitter and Instant Messaging services and even in email. Do you know it? Most of us didn’t, though we’d seen it. GND means “Getting Nothing Done.”

Glenda spoke about formatting links and link and font colors, showing excellent examples of the abuse of bold, colors, and underlines, making it hard to tell when which is which and which one is the link. You have to move your mouse over all of them in order to figure that out. But what if you can’t use a traditional mouse? That’s a lot of work to find a link!

The presentation was entertaining, informative, educational, and took her over three months to painstakingly produce using only her left thumb. Glenda types about 10 words a minute with the help of keystroke assistance program. She uses a joystick which she whacks around to position the cursor on the screen. Pinpoint accuracy is nearly impossible, but the perfectionist in her fights on to move the cursor over the tiny link spots most blogs and websites feature today.

The audience was already eager for copies of her slides before she even finished, and as usual, Glenda did them one better. While giving her presentation, the blog post with a link to download an ebook version of her presentation was published simultaneously, giving everyone access to the information and resources.

On a personal note, I was fascinated to see the response to her presentation. People were smiling non-stop from the first slide. Glenda has that impact on people. She is so full of sunshine and laughter, you can’t help but smile and feel positive in her presence. She is the first one to laugh at anything and everything.

When she finished, we all felt that we’d learned how simple it is to make your blog more accessible – on many levels – and how helping these few steps are for everyone, not just a few. We also found someone who was very accessible and approachable. For the rest of the three days of the conference, people crowded around Glenda asking questions and sharing their stories and challenges. For someone once labeled non-verbal and recommended for institutionalization, our world were changed at SOBCon by the power of this young woman’s voice and spirit.

I’ve included a short video excerpt of her program. She explains some technical aspects of blog and content navigation, then spanks us with a great punchline at the end.

Defining the Untapped Market and Size of the Disabled

Glenda’s message was serious as well as highly entertaining, and she added to the statistics other presenters on the subject offered. In general, about 15-20% of the world’s population is disabled, though Glenda’s husband, Darrell Hyatt, wisely adds that everyone will be disabled at least twice in their life, when they are born and when they get injured or elderly (or need glasses, canes, etc.). The Ever-Shifting Internet Population reports that 38% of Americans with disabilities surf the web and almost 20% of them say that their disability makes web browsing challenging. There are a wide range of estimates, but at least one in four visitors to your blog are disabled.

That’s a huge customer base you might be missing and not serving.

Many think that the disabled are poor. Some statistics for the disabled report only about 30% of the disabled in the United States are at or below the poverty level, depending upon your definition of “disabled.” That leaves 70% above the poverty line. In an article on the issue of the legal and economic issues for the disabled in the Global Atlanta news, an expert claimed that if you compare the disposable income of the disabled in the US to the disposable income of teenagers, a huge target audience for retailers and advertisers, the disabled income is twice that of the teenagers, yet little is spent towards this ever-growing target market.

In 2008, the retail and online store, Target, agreed to pay about USD $6 million in compensation in a class action lawsuit to people who are blind in California for failure to have a accessible website. The Olympic Committee for Australia was also held responsible and lost in court when their site was found to not meet web standards for accessibility. Laws are found in most major countries that require at least government websites to be accessible, but more and more laws are in place that require all public sites to be accessible, too.

In an article from the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWD), the author states that it is important from a variety of perspectives, beyond the stats, on why you should make your site serve the disabled:

If web developers or designers ingrain in their coding acumen the basic fundamentals of web accessibility, such as proper title and alt tags in all images or not forgetting to list out your doc type or assign a language to your html tag, it’s not moving mountains or spending gobs of money to make your site easier for assistive technologies and disabilities browsers to get around.

It’s not only becoming more and more of a legal issue, it’s also an issue of ethics. It’s maybe hokey and Wilford Brimley-esque to say “It’s the right thing to do,” but really it is. Are you really willing to say that what you’re trying to sell or convey on the Internet isn’t important or relevant to would-be disabled visitors?

You can’t make a site 100% accessible to everybody — it’s just not realistic and somewhere you have to draw a line. But following basic standards will not only make your sites easier for blind, deaf, and physically-limited surfers to get around, but they’ll tend to be more standards-compliant and easier to navigate for -everybody-.

That’s an all-around win.

Glenda made the point better, showcasing her powerful presentation abilities with a very strong message. We work so hard to be inclusive on our blogs, while often excluding those most in need of inclusion.

It’s not just about excluding the disabled from reading and participating in your blog. What about those using mobile devices? Small or very large screen sizes? Those on dial up? Or with JavaScript or Flash disabled? Think about all the ways you might be disabling your blog.

Possibly Related Posts

Exploring Social Media: What’s in Your Bio?

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:13:15 +0000

In “Five Tips for Composing a More Effective Social Networking Bio” by Maria Langer of Maria’s Guides, she asks if your social media bio is really saying what you want it to say and makes a good point:

Your bio is your primary way to tell people who don’t know you what you’re all about. If they’re heard about you from someone else or stumbled upon one of your Twitter tweets or Facebook wall posts, they might be interested in learning more. They might even want to become your . . . wait for it . . . friend.

…Think of your bio as bait on a fishing line. Who will it attract? But, at the same time, how many people will ultimately be disappointed by the mismatch between what your bio says about you and who you really are?

She includes some basic tips for creating a virtual biography such as be brief, accurate, meaningful, careful with word choice, and avoiding really personal and private information, but let’s take the picture you paint of yourself online in these various sharing outlets a step farther.

What is most important for you to share publicly?

How Much of You Should You Share and Why?

When working with clients on structuring their virtual public profile, I ask them to list the key things people need to know about them, keeping the list as specific as possible to their goals and intent.

This last part is very important, so I’m going to repeat myself with emphasis. Your public profile must specifically reflect your goals and intentions.

What you share online is only important if you understand why you are sharing it. If you are a parent blogger, then sharing parental private issues is important to establishing your credentials online. It’s expected that you share on your Facebook page how cute (or not) the bowl of spaghetti on the baby’s head was, or what you used to clean up the mess. It’s part of your online job description to talk about diapers, baby bottles, first days of school, etc. It’s important your public profile and bio state the number of children, your child-raising experiences (and hair raising experiences), and the expertise that comes with parenthood such as PTA meetings and Little League support. It’s expected. If you are a political blogger, it isn’t – unless you have no intention of defining yourself as a professional political blogger.

If you are in the business world and your blog and online presence represents that business, your public profile and biography must represent your intentions as a blogger and business person, and clearly establish your goals. Maybe baby diaper stories will enhance your professional reputation – or hurt it. Only you can decide what to share depending upon what your goals and intentions are for your online identity.

What are your goals? Your intentions? Why are you exposing yourself online? Is it for the work you are doing now, or the position and job you want in the future? Just to create an online identity or use the web for professional purposes? Is it to establish your reputation, or support your current reputation? Is it to sell products or services? What do you want to achieve by participating publicly online in the various social media sites and networks?

Just as you should customize your resume for the job and position you are applying for, so you should customize your online profile to match your goals and intentions online. Once you have that list, you know what you can, and cannot, put in your online bio, and why.

Should You Customize Your Online Profile for Each Social Network?

A client recently asked if she should have a different online profile for LinkedIn than Facebook. Again, it depends upon your intentions and goals. Should they match? Do they have to?

The most important, and often overlooked in today’s social media culture, place to put the key information that defines who you are, what you do, and why you are active online is your blog and its about page. No matter where you go on the web, your blog should be your home base, your business card, resume, and billboard from which all else flows and reconnects. Networking services restrict what you can or can’t add to your bio or profile, but your blog is wide open for you to add whatever information you want or need to help people get to know you better.

LinkedIn is often thought of as an online professional resume service with some networking and social. It’s not really a highly interactive social network, though a few use it for that. It is mostly about making connections – professional connections. If your intentions are to use LinkedIn for professional business purposes, then let your LinkedIn profile reflect that. If your goal is to be found on LinkedIn for casual purposes, then use it accordingly.

Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are highly social and interactive, usually considered more informal than LinkedIn. If your goal in using Facebook, Twitter, etc., is to be purely social, and not for professional purposes, than let your bio reflect your personal side, with lists of hobbies and interests in addition to some professional expertise.

If your goal is to promote your business, highlighting hobbies and special interests is nice, but do it as you would on a resume. Keep it short and sweet and not

Twitter is a strange duck when it comes to defining yourself and your identity. It’s turned into a private conversation pit for public viewing, which helps to build and reinforce your online persona while offering you another way to communicate with others regardless. People are using Twitter like IM and email – sending messages back and forth with little regard for reputation.

While your Twitter profile is visible on your Twitter page, few ever visit. With the proliferation of easier and better to use third-party applications, when was the last time you visited a Twitter page? Profiles and avatars are pulled into Twitter apps without visiting the page. Make sure the information you provide is enough. Honestly, there isn’t much information you can provide, so make sure they can easily find your blog to learn more about who you are.

How do you define you online? Do you have the same information everywhere in your various online bios? Or do you customize it for the different services? How many do you need?

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to have one spot to put all your profile information (one personal, one professional) so you don’t have to keep filling in all the blanks on those forms?

Possibly Related Posts

TalkPress: The Forum Revisited and Revitalized

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:22:13 +0000

Recently, Sam Bauer announced TalkPress, the WordPress.com of bbPress.

With the power of the WordPress Community behind it, could TalkPress ignite the fire under forums?

WordPress.com has been an incredible success with millions of bloggers registering millions of blogs and having their chance to blog free, or for a small fee for some services. Blog topics range from personal and private to politics and raising social consciousness. Some WordPress.com blogs have become popular and even famous, such as Robert Scoble and icanhascheezburger.

As a hosting company, WordPress.com hosts some of the largest websites and blogs in the world including icanhascheezburger, CNN news sites including Political Ticker, the Dow Jones’ All Things D, GretaWire, Time’s The Page, People Magazine’s Style Watch, and more. These companies provide the revenue to keep the free blog hosting services rocking and prove that WordPress has the strength and capabilities to support serious demands from users and servers.

WordPress.com has many features and benefits including a free support forum, easy importing and exporting, multilingual versions for over 50 languages, multiple authors, design options, and more.

The lessons learned there for bloggers prepared them for the herculean task of launching TalkPress for forums. They will need international localization, flexibility, customer service staff, community building tools, and most of all, a stable and durable server system.

TalkPress is going to be the bbPress forum version of WordPress.com’s model, a hosted forum service. Imagine, having your own free forum. The user controls their individual forum and users.

There are a lot of challenges to creating TalkPress.

Can bbPress become the Next WordPress.com for Forums?

First and foremost is the ability, or lack thereof, to connect the blogs from WordPress.com, or possibly other WordPress or non-WordPress blogs, to TalkPress. Will the same login information work on WordPress.com as it does on TalkPress, or will they be two separate sites and services? Will these be stand-alone forums or easily integrated with blogs?

In the announcement, Bauer says that work is being done to handle the huge user tables of WordPress.com – but I believe this implies the quantity of users not connecting the two user databases.

bbPress is also still in development. Matt Mullenweg admitted that bbPress has long been the ignored sibling to WordPress. Sam Bauers took over the project and shook it to its knees, adding powerful code, strengthening its weaknesses, and improving a lot of functionality. There is a tremendous community around bbPress with loyal fans, haters, and code hackers. Still, bbPress has limitations, at least for those providing volunteer support on the WordPress Support Forums and WordPress.com Forums daily, as described by MichaelH’s recent review and recommendations on Weblog Tools Collection. Bauer has agreed to review all these recommendations, and the responses, to improve the functionality and usability of bbPress on those forums, which should bleed into bbPress in general.

I recently covered a lot of bbPress news, tips, and plugins, and I know bbPress is plenty powerful to handle such a task, but it will be interesting to see how much the world embraces the new forum fever.

Bringing Forums Back Into Vogue

In the earliest days of the web, the communities were called forums, places where like-minded individuals came together to network and connect. As websites developed, some took their forums with them, along with their communities, but the web became fragmented, little islands in the sea. As online social media developed, so did enthusiasm for bringing forums back into popularity.

With the development of a free hosted forum service, forums could once again rise in popularity as well as demand.

Many bloggers debate over whether or not their blog should have a forum, and many go with them. Sites and services are best served with a forum where there value a community or customer service.

Would you have a forum on your blog?

More importantly, would you get a free forum from TalkPress if they were available? What would you do with it?

What would such a free forum service have to do in order to get your attention and fulfill your online needs?

What I’m really waiting for is the BuddyPress version of bbPress – which would totally change the sense and structure of a forum, bringing back the old CompuServe format that was so incredibly successful.

Possibly Related Posts

Exploring Social Media: Twisasters

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:32:39 +0000

With the recent fears of a pandemic with the Mexico Swine Flu and an earthquake today in Mexico City, there is a lot to be nervous about. Add to it the continued spread of the conflickr/downadup virus online…with all the manmade and natural disasters and our obsessive interest in them, you would think that there would be an easy way to find out what there is to be worried about in the world.

Oh, wait. There is. Meet Twisaster.

Twisaster is a third-party app for Twitter that monitors disaster keywords on Twitter, including:

Accident
Bombs
Cyberwar
Earthquake
Flood
Hurricane
Murder
Terrorists
Volcano

Twisaster isn’t pretty and doesn’t have to be. It just gives you the core information you need. Created by Benedikt Koehler of Metaroll directory of German language blogs, Twisaster tracks the Twitter conversations for those keywords, giving disaster fans, educators, researchers, and the media a live perspective on the things that make us lose sleep in the night.

It’s not a perfect tracker but it is close. The scan doesn’t just look for those specific words, it looks for synonyms and similar words. Tweets such as “she calls me her volcanic god” or “his kiss was an earthquake” come up in the list, as would be expected.

In general, it does tell you a lot about the conversations on those subjects. In the volcano category, I found some interesting educational links and comments on volcanoes, volcanic glass, and active volcanoes around the world.

I’d like to see more categories associated with manmade and natural disasters tracked, such as disaster storms like tornadoes and tsunamis, and illnesses such as flu, virus, epidemic, and pandemic, becoming a CDC tracker in a way. This would make it very relevant today with the spread of the swine flu globally.

Working from this basic keyword tracking scheme, Benedikt created other apps for tracking a variety of themed keywords in German and English:

Twetter to track the “weather in Twitter County” for mentions of different types of weather.
EatFeed for Döner (Dinner), Pommes (fries/chips), Wurst (sausage), Sushi, Schnitzel, and Pasta.
DrinkFeed tracks the drinking and eating categories on Twitter such as coffee, wine, beer, tea, milk, vodka, cocktail, and soft drinks.
EcoFeed tracks Global Warming, Alternative Energy, Sustainability, Organic Food, Environmentalism, Endangered Species, Inconvenient Truth, and Urbanization.
GrapeFeed bringing the latest mentions of wine on Twitter, a tool Gary Vaynerchuk probably has in his arsenal of social media tools.

There are a lot of possibilities with such a Twitter app. Why not track restaurants and cafes to see what people recommend to eat, in addition to drink. Why not track software, hardware, or other core subjects?

I’d love to see this app turned into something user-driven. I’d want to create my own set of keywords with synonyms to track in this very simple format.

What would you like to track categorically on Twitter? What tools are you using to do so?

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: WordPressMU Updated, WordPress 2.8 News, WP.com, WordPress Events

Lorelle VanFossen — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:25:50 +0000

Some Administration Panel Redesigns in WordPress 2.8: While WordPress committed to no changes in the WordPress Administration Panels interface, there will be a few minor tweaks. In “Design Tweaks: Who’s In? (An idea in three acts),” Jane Wells explains that your help is wanted to redesign the header area of the interface. UX and design guidelines have been posted and you are welcome to have your input until Tuesday, April 27, 2009. The submissions will be offered for voting for only one day due to the pressure to get WordPress 2.8 released.

WordPress 2.8 News: The final stages of development, testing, and patching is underway for the release of WordPress 2.8. The latest news on the next version of WordPress includes:

Has-Patch Marathon Results: The results of the Has-Patch Marathon for WordPress 2.8 are in and 44 patches were committed to the core, with 20 new ones added, with a total of 102 tickets closed. Expect the release candidate for WordPress 2.8 to be out soon.
Widgets Redesigned Finally: The long awaited redesign of the WordPress Widgets are in the Appearance panel is done and undergoing testing. Some visual improvements are needed, but it is close to done. Widgets are now able to be added to WordPress by extending WP_Widget, which allows multiple instances of the same WordPress Widget in the sidebar. They note that all existing Widgets must be converted to this new system as previous API functions will be removed in WordPress 2.9.
Plugin Management Panel Updated: The Plugins Management Panel has been updated to match the other Administration Panels and now includes status filters for All, Active, Recently Active, Inactive, and Update Available, as well as a search and option for setting the number of Plugins to show per page.
New Favorite Actions: The new Favorite Actions feature is a drop down menu that allows you to set your most redundant actions on the Administration Panels. It recognizes what page you are viewing on the Administration Panels and helps you to navigate faster through them.

WordPress MU 2.7.1 Released: Donncha announced WordPress MU 2.7.1 has been released. The new features include a revamped WordPressMU Plugin system, a new “My Blogs” page to feature the user’s blogs and set the settings, and the ability to set a Global Dashboard blog for those without blogs. WordPressMU 2.7 now permits upgrading directly from inside the MU Administration Panels.

BuddyPress Release Candidate Out: The BuddyPress 1.0 RC-2 is out for serious testing as it moves towards final release. BuddyPress is a WordPressMU Plugin and design package that incorporates social networking features.

WordPress/Google Summer of Code Students Announced: The students participating in the Summer of Code Students have been announced along with the projects they will be working on. There are some exciting projects from which the majority of WordPress users will benefit from when completed.

WP Super Cache WordPress Plugin Updated: The popular WP Super Cache has been updated again. It is used to speed up the loading process and slow down the server load on your WordPress or WordPressMU blog site.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com is now WP.com, too: The WordPress team has now acquired the domain name for WP.com which currently redirects to WordPress.com. Matt’s debating about doing more with it, but that’s where it lands now.

WordPress on Your Calendar

Upcoming WordCamp and WordPress Events include:

April 2009

May 2009

Past WordPress News Reports

Possibly Related Posts

Year of Original Content: Make Money From Copyright Thieves

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:13:37 +0000

I and Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today have long been advocates of copyright protections and education, leading the way with projects such as “Ask First,” the “Year of Original Content,” “5 Content Theft Myths and Why They Are False,” and “The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft.”

It seems that the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that stolen content is big business. Within the past two years, there are a variety of services you can use to track where your online content has gone, report and stop it. A new project is underway called the Fair Syndication Consortium that might put a dollar amount on that stolen content, paying you for others abusing your content.

In an article called “Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.” on TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld talks about the Fair Syndication Consortium, a project by Attributor that also includes a consortium of media publishers such as Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, Politico, and others, to fight back against, and make money from, those who use other people’s content, specifically theirs.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

Erick talks about meeting with Attributor and the new Consortium and learning about the numbers behind the stealing of other people’s content. In one example, assuming a USD $0.25 CPM (Click Per Million) value, approximately $13 million could be earned by the ad revenues on splogs using publishers’ content.

That’s a lot of money going to those who benefit from the abuse of other people’s content. So why not get a cut? It’s your content. It’s your hard work. It’s your work!

In the past, we’ve tried attacking spam blogs by stopping the spread of their blog comments via tools like Akismet and demanding that services like Google’s Blogspot clean up the splog abuse on their services while profiting from the ads generated by the abusers. I’ve long been a proponent of stopping splogs at the source, but people don’t seem very responsive to that idea, allowing black hat bloggers to proliferate the web, and the sites that continue to host them to benefit as well. It appears that money talks louder than moral fiber.

The newest proposal by the Fair Syndication Consortium is to go after those who pay sploggers, the ad networks that permit ads to be put onto stolen content.

Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved. There is certainly precedent for this type of approach. Look at YouTube’s Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. Except this proposal would take money that would otherwise be distributed to the splog sites themselves, and give a portion of it to the publisher as an automatic syndication fee without the consent of the site owner.

Jonathan Bailey calls it “getting paid for being copied.” He says:

Content monitoring company Attributor, announced a new initiative yesterday, entitled the Fair Syndication Consortium, which it hopes will revolutionize the way publishers of all sizes deal with content reuse by turning copyright infringement and plagiarism into a profit center.

The consortium hopes that, by working with advertising companies, they can redirect a percentage of revenue from sites that use content without permission. This will, in theory, reduce the amount of DMCA notices filed and will content copying and redistribution rewarding for both content creators and for those performing the distribution.

Right now, this would benefit the big publishing companies as they can afford to support such services and the technology for tracking and invoicing the various agencies involved. However, Attributor offers FairShare a free service that helps bloggers and others track what content of theirs is being abused, and others are working on similar projects. What services would be available for regular bloggers to get money back from the advertisers who permit others to abuse your content…that’s the big question we all are waiting to be answered.

There are a lot of other questions that have to be considered before you could really benefit and see the money from those who use your content without your permission.

How Vague Can Your Copyright Policy Be?

There would have to be guidelines on copyright policies before compensation and participation in such programs could be implemented.

If your copyright policy is vague or licensed for free use of your content, then there isn’t much you can ask for if you aren’t specific up front. For example, your copyright license may say “no commercial usage” but what does that mean? Does that mean using your content on a site that pays their authors (but not you), on a site with ads (how many ads define commercial?), or just any site that someone uses to generate any income?

How much of their content could they use before crossing your copyright policy barrier to prevent the content use or generate compensation? I like the 10% or 400 words policy, but others are more flexible.

Since tracking copyright violations are done with machines, some parameters need to be established, possibly even customizable to the needs of the copyright holder’s desires, before you could participate. What would those look like?

What Kind of Compensation Do You Expect?

What would compensation look like? That’s another important question to consider.

Would a link back be enough? If all you want is credit to the source, you, then maybe a link back is enough compensation.

For others, it’s not. If money is being made, people want a piece of the pie. So how much compensation would you expect from such a program? And how much would you be willing to pay or give back as part of Attributor or other companies collecting fees?

The copyright tracking and invoicing companies are in this for the money. And there is a ton of money to be made. Participation in such a program would have to be financially beneficial to the member, but there is more to the process than that.

I participated in the early days testing of Attributor’s FairShare program and while it has drastically improved, it can be a time consuming to check and verify if the content is really being stolen and if the site meets my copyright policies for full or Fair Use usage. The more work involved in tracking, reporting, and identifying those who abuse our content, the more compensation I want in return.

The easier the process, especially if I as a user would have to do little or nothing other than sign up and set up a few criteria parameters, the more willing I would be to give up 5 – 25% of the income derived from such a service. Better yet, a flat fee based upon whatever criteria the service would offer, like USD $25 to $100 a year.

This is an evolving business model, helping writers, photographers, musicians, publishers, and bloggers get money back from the abuse of their content, and it is, indeed, big business. What do you think it will look like? What do you want out of it? What are you willing to put into such a program?

And would you even participate?

Possibly Related Posts

Blog Design: What You Don’t Know About Your Blog Audience Can Hurt

Lorelle VanFossen — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:02:36 +0000

I had an interesting discussion with a client last week about when and how to implement a new blog design. She wanted to warn her readers that a change was coming, and take a few months to implement the changes step by step.

We talked about the process and created a timeline for the slow unveiling of the site design, a smart decision for those with a large audience, especially when making dramatic changes to the site’s navigation and content handling. Some audiences can handle it, and love design changes, but some can’t. They just don’t respond well to change.

We talked a little more about her readership, covering some basic web analytics such as where her readers come from, how they access the site (through the front page, single pages, tags and categories, or through aggregators, email or feeds), and I stumbled upon some stunning facts that shifted the entire game plan.

While her site gets a steady stream of visitors, several thousand a day, only 10% return. Of those, only three percent return to the blog at least once week. Honestly, that’s about 9 people a week.

This changes everything.

Sure there’s something wrong with the blog with that low ROI on visitors, but there’s a bigger problem here that directly impacts the design development process.

If you are making your design decisions based upon the assumption that your reading audience doesn’t respond well to change, slowing down the design development process over time, and your web analytics tells you that this change would really only impact the small number of return visitors, that’s a big assumption to make – and I fear, the wrong one.

Designing For Your Audience Means Understanding Your Audience

With more investigation, I found out that it was the client that didn’t respond well to change, not her readers. She wanted to go through this process slowly. Nothing to upset her process of relearning how to navigate her own site.

Nothing wrong in that, but when you put your assumptions on your readers, something’s wrong.

Do you really understand your audience? Who are they? What are they really doing on your site? What are their needs? Are you really fulfilling them?

Where do you get your information? Your statistics? What numbers are you looking at? Which ones are influencing your decisions?

There are a lot of things we can know about our readership, but there are a lot of things we can’t assume because the numbers don’t tell us. What assumptions are you making? And how is that impacting what you do with your blog?

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: 2.8 Patch Marathon, TalkPress, and Commercializing WordPress Plugins

Lorelle VanFossen — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 05:01:05 +0000

WordPress 2.8 Has-Patch Marathon: Jane Wells announced The Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon to attack 500 active tickets on WordPress 2.8. The invitation included developers, hackers, and coders to dig into the code of WordPress and fix all kinds of things and test them from April 16-17. We’re awaiting results of the marathon.

TalkPress: Imagine combining the architecture behind WordPress.com with bbPress. The end result is TalkPress. In a recent announcement on the bbPress blog, Sam Bauers explained that TalkPress is going to be a hosted forum service using bbPress with the HyperDB extension for WordPress to create a WordPressMU style network of bbPress forums. It is currently being tested by corporations such as Time’s Health.com site.

Help Test Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin: Mark Jaquith is looking for beta testers for his popular Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin who are running the latest version of WordPress and have a large number of comment subscribers and are familiar with backups and restores of their WordPress database – in other words, willing to risk their blogs to test the Plugin.

Commercializing WordPress Plugins: In Adding Commercial Intent to WordPress Sites, A Solution For Plugin Developers? Vladimir Prelovac digs into the issue of how WordPress Plugin authors could fairly be compensated for the work and support they put into their WordPress Plugins without breaking the GPL. The idea of a free market for WordPress Plugins has been played with in the past, but he brings up some interesting new thoughts on how it could work to benefit everyone.

iPhones Community Forums: iPhone for WordPress now offers a forum called the WordPress for iPhone Community Forums.

WordPress.com News

Improving What You Find on WordPress.com: Instant Findability was announced by WordPress.com, part of the WordPress.com search engine. The improvements make the process faster and include content in the search results as soon as you publish.

March Stats and News for WordPress.com: The March Wrap-Up is out with some more impressive numbers. 389,819 blogs were created and 423,744 new users joined. There were 1,191,390,256 pageviews on WordPress.com, totally 2,309,498,060 total across all WordPress hosted and tracked blogs. Matt’s favorite stat is the word count and 1,456,062,555 words were published in March.

WordPress.com Gets TED: If you are a fan of TED, the entertainment and educational video network, you can now embed TED in WordPress.com (Video).

WordPress on Your Calendar

Past WordPress News Reports

Possibly Related Posts

What Changes Your Mind About Leaving a Blog Comment? Some Criteria

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:32:20 +0000

In my article, “What Changes Your Mind About Leaving a Blog Comment,” I talked about some of the issues around debating where and when to leave a blog comment on a blog that hosts information or opinions you don’t support, or is filled with blog clutter, a clue that something isn’t right. About how your comment may be seen to support the blog, and impact your reputation by association.

As I wrote that post, I looked back over all the WTF Blog Clutter articles in the series and realized that many of these issues are ones that impact my willingness to comment on a blog. Sure, they impact my ability to even read the blog, let alone return and tell others, but they also impact my willingness to endorse a blog with a comment.

I started thinking about all the blatant, subjective, and even unconscious reasons that prevent me from leaving a comment on a blog. Here are some of my self-discoveries, most of them associated with various aspects of blog clutter. I’m sure you have more you can add, but these are big clues that this is a blog that doesn’t deserve my participation.

Too Many Or Ugly Ads: If the ads outweigh the content, my perception is that they are in it for the money not the passion nor community. I’m gone, leaving no comment behind.
More Business than Personal: I’m finding myself avoiding purely business-oriented blogs, wanting the personal touch. If it screams old fashioned corporate, I’m not interested. I want the new personal and social corporate touch.
No Human: If the blog post byline reads “admin” and there is no human, real sounding name in the blog title or anywhere visible above the fold, I’m gone. If it is hidden in the post meta data at the end of the blog, maybe I’ll hang around, but it makes me doubt. I want to talk to a human, not a machine or anonymous.
No Original Content: If the content even has a hint of plagiarism, with little or no sign of original connect, I’m gone. If I find a blog post copied by someone else, even if it is within Fair Use, if there isn’t original commentary to accompany it, giving me something to respond to, I’ll comment at the source not the copy.
Spam-filled Comments: If there are spam comments in the comment queue, I’m gone. Clearly this blogger doesn’t care about their blog to keep it cleaned up.
Lots of Signed Comments: Like comment spam, if I see a lot of comments signed, especially signed with a lot of links, I think this is a blogger who either doesn’t care, doesn’t pay attention to details, or is into link spamming, thus allows abuse of their blog comments. Either way, they’ve lost my interest and respect.
Closed Comments on Old Posts: If I find that the blogger closes comments on old posts, leaving me no way to comment except through their contact form or new posts, I won’t be back nor comment in general. If I don’t know, and comments are open, I’ll comment, but if I do know, they lose my respect.
Ugly and Old Fashioned Designs: I can spot an “old website” or blog design in a second. Can’t you? One that screams pre-1999 table-based design or the Kubrick Default WordPress Theme. If they don’t care enough to update their blog design or Theme, then I’m suspicious. I won’t comment unless it is clear from the content they really don’t know what they are doing.
Different Fonts in Different Posts: We’ve all seen it. Post one has good looking, readable fonts. Post two has tiny, hard-to-read fonts. This is usually a sign of 1) a scrapper blog or 2) someone who copies and pastes – plagiarises – other people’s content. Sorry, that’s another clue that I’m not interested in participating on a blog without original content.
CAPTCHAs, Quizes, and Human-versus-machine Tests: Won’t do it. I’m so tired of jumping through hoops to leave a comment on sites using antiqued (or modern versions) of CAPTCHAs, Quizes, and other comment torture tests, I have to have a serious incentive to comment on blogs with those. Let nothing get in the way of your post and my comment.
Blogspot/Blogger Blogs: I apologize openly to all Blogspot/Blogger bloggers, including my friends who use their services. I HATE the old fashioned way comments are handled. While many are now using the new commenting system, if I have to jump through hoops to leave a comment, such as clicking a link that takes me to a page without the blog post on it, I won’t comment any more unless I’m desperate. I hate it that much.
Selling WordPress Stuff: I don’t mind bloggers who promote themselves legitimately as WordPress experts or offer WordPress Themes or Plugins for pay. I will not, however, participate on a blog that violates the WordPress trademark on the domain name or sells itself as the paid solution to all your WordPress needs. You know who you are.

Some of these reasons not to comment are biased and prejudice, but they cross my mind as I look at a blog and contemplate commenting. I don’t care about the mythology of nofllow and dofollow as an incentive to comment. I don’t comment for SEO link juice. I comment for purpose. I comment for conversation.

While I may sigh and whine about poorly designed comment boxes, I will still comment if the motivation is there, even if I’m given only two lines within the comment box textarea. I lose motivation the harder I have to work to comment, though.

There are a lot of reasons not to comment on a blog, and these are some of mine. What are yours? What stops you from leaving a comment on a blog?

Possibly Related Posts

What Changes Your Mind About Leaving a Blog Comment?

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:05:44 +0000

A few minutes ago I followed a trackback to a lovely blog post about one of my blog posts. It was quite complementary and made some good points. I was in the middle of composing a reply when I glanced over to the sidebar and saw the listing of the most recent blog posts featuring what were clearly pay-per-post or sponsored post titles. Ick!

That was my first response. Ick. Yuk. Oooey gooey, as one of my nephews would say.

We’ve talked about a lot of different design detail clutter and distractions in the ongoing series, “WTF Blog Design Clutter“, but we haven’t addressed the issue of perception when it comes to inspiring blog comments and conversation.

It’s true that a lot of people comment on blogs for link bait and Google juice. While that may be true, what is unsaid about the importance of a blog comment is probably the most important consideration when it comes to commenting on blogs: Association by commenting.

A blog comment says you want to participate in the conversation. It says you are interested in the topic. It says you are supportive of the blogger. It says you are who you say you are. It says that the link in your comment form takes the reader to your blog, which should speak well of you and match the quality of the blog you are commenting on. It says you want to be a valuable contributor to the blogosphere and the world of communication. Right?

No? Well, maybe it should.

Your Comment is Your Clutter on Their Blog. It Better Speak Well of You – and Them

When I leave a comment, it’s a mini resume. It’s a small representative of me, of what I stand for, what I believe in, and, in many cases, what I blog about. It points to me, exposed for all the world (and search engines) to see. It better speak well of me.

Therefore, by association, if I comment on a blog doing something or covering a topic I’m not in favor of, or on a blog stuffed with ads or comment spam – by leaving a comment am I encouraging them? Would someone seeing my comment on such a blog associate me with such practices? Will their poor content and bad blog decisions rub off on me and my reputation?

If the blogger is a hate monger, blogging dark and negative stuff, it’s easy to judge them and distance yourself from associating with them. “I’d never comment there!” is easy to say, but things get a little grayer when the line slips and slides in the sand of judgment.

If the blogger does the occasional pay-per-post, that’s not the end of the world. That person may be a great person, and be totally sincere in their blog writing on sponsored posts.

The first appears cut and dried. No matter how many wonderful things they may write about you and your blog, you may not want to participate on theirs when they are the opposite of what you believe. It gets more complicated when what they blog about, and what the put on their blog isn’t right for you, though it may be right for you. Some people’s clutter is another person’s art.

It’s something to consider.

Judging How We Judge Others

We are often judged by our friends, the relationships around us. I learned early on that much of who you are is determined by who you hang out with. Your friends’ behavior, attitude, fashion sense, and reputation say much about the choices you make.

At one of my first high school reunions, a fellow student told me I’d changed since high school. “I used to think that you were one of ‘those’ kids.” “Those” kids, by her definition, were the “popular” kids, the ones who got all the attention and fame.

I was stunned. The kids I hung out with were the outcasts and loners, the chess club, computer geeks, and the band. Yet, when she remembers me singing in the choir, messing with the band, and involved in the acting club. Around me were the “stars” of the school, so she assumed that these were my friends and judged me accordingly. So did many others, I learned when I started asking around, inquiring with others which groups they thought they belonged to in high school.

It was amazing to see how many perceived others belonging to a specific group by association rather than reality. That perception can carry more weight than the truth influences the public and professional decisions I make.

By leaving a comment on a blog that I would not normally condone or support, by association I fear my reputation. Do you? Does the message your comment sends mean that much to you?

Tomorrow, I want to look at some of the ways we judge other bloggers, and our desire to comment or not on a blog. Where do you draw the line when it comes to commenting, linking, or trackbacking?

Possibly Related Posts

Security and Hacking: Reporting Cyber Crime

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:48:09 +0000

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing a lot about cyber crime and security vulnerabilities, especially as it impacts social media and blogs. The April 1, 2009, expansion of the Conficker/Downadup Worm Infection worried many as the 1 in 16 ratio of infected computers increased dramatically around the globe and attacks were aimed at social media services like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

With the increase in cyber crime and security issues, and the growing profit found in cyber crimes, where do you go to report cyber crime if you find it or are a victim of it?

The first step is prevention. As a rule, don’t open email and delete all blog comments that look suspicious. Never click on a link that looks suspicious. Keep your web browser upgraded and patched to ensure your protection from attacks from malicious websites.

Pay close attention to detail. Never give out passwords, usernames, or private information. Never publish your email, phone, or contact information unless you want to invite a response from anyone and anything.

If you won’t do it in your offline life, don’t do it online.

These simple steps will help you prevent a lot of cyber crime, but what happens when you experience it?

How to Report Cyber Crime or Security Issues

In Security and Hacking: Protect Thyself and Thy WordPress Blog, I wrote about how to protect yourself and your WordPress blog and how to report security vulnerabilities and bugs to WordPress. Let’s look beyond WordPress to how to report cyber crime in general.

If you spot unusual behavior on your blog, on other blogs, on social media tools, or elsewhere on the web, report it to the blog owner/webmaster or company immediately. It could be a simple problem with their design, code, Plugin or Theme, or it could be something worse. Report it to the person most likely to respond and take action.

Take care reporting security issues to the world before reporting them to the proper authorities. Know the difference between a bug and a security vulnerability. For WordPress users, bugs in WordPress are to be reported via the WordPress Bug Report, but security issues are to be made to security@wordpress.org. The same applies to other online applications and programs. Know the difference and report it appropriately.

The United States is part of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime and other international agencies fighting against cybercrimes. To report a cyber crime, US citizens should read “How to Report Cyber and IP Crime” for information on cyber crime reporting within that country. In Canada, try the Reporting Economic Crime On-Line, and in London, the Metropolitan Police Service – Computer Crime Unit handles cyber crimes.

Other international organizations that track and help report cyber crimes include:

Internet Watch Foundation (UK)
INHOPE (European Internet Hotline Providers)
Safer Internet Action Plan (EU)
UNIRAS aka CPNI – Center for the Protection of National Infrastructure and the UK Government Computer Emergency Reponse Team
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (FTC Complaints, tips and complaint form)
United States Department of Justice (USDOJ)
EC Safer Internet Action Plan
CERT Coordination Center for Home Network Security.
CERT/CC (US)
US Government CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team)
EC Safer Internet Action Plan
InSafe – European Network of e-Safety Awareness Nodes (EU)
US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) – Current Activity on phishing, blog, and computer scams
UK Council for Child Internet Safety
US Better Business Bureau
Reporting Economic Crime On-Line (Canada)
Network Abuse Clearing House

There are just a few of the locations for English speakers I found for reporting cyber crimes. Find out where to report them in your area and language.

Remember, comment spam and content theft are generally not yet considered a cyber crime, nor is most spam email. These are handled differently.

Cyber-stalking is a cyber crime, as is harassment. Misleading, fraud, theft, worms, viruses, computer infections, hacking, and online criminal activity are cyber crimes. The odds are that if it is illegal to do it offline, it’s illegal online.

Articles on Hacking, Cyber Crime, and Security on the Web

Possibly Related Posts

Twitter is a Public Way to Have a Private Conversation

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:16:42 +0000

My husband was doing his best to explain Twitter to non-techy friends of ours. As the experienced web user and teacher, I was fascinated to hear how he would explain something he’s never used.

Twitter is a public way to have a private conversation.

He’s very right. In “Silly Out-of-Context Tweets — Can They Hurt?” Liz Strauss brings up the “elephant in the room” that describes much of what Twitter is, does, and can do, especially when Twitter meets search engine, exposing your tweets to the world.

Ever heard someone describe something you weren’t prepared to hear about? Ever had it happen online? Ever had one of your random “tweets” show up in a Google Search or a Google Alert?

…It can be weird. It can be funny. But the potential of words out of context doesn’t feel good. We know what we meant, but not everyone who see those out-of-context words would.

…Imagine how a random tweet might seem to folks who just dropped in to see who we are, to get reference, or to explore some social media topic our comment was in. It’s probably a good thing most clients or family wouldn’t start with Google Blog Search or a Google Alert.

Or do they? If someone is researching your credibility, reputation, and identity, especially if they want to do business with you, isn’t the first spot they hit usually Google? It used to be enough that they found your old college pranks and drunken episodes on YouTube or Flickr. What are they going to think if they find your tweets? Especially your tweets out of context.

As Liz goes on to say:

Can silly out-of-context Tweets hurt? The Internet has a long memory and no eraser.

Twitter is one big party, a giant social gathering you wander through, catching ear fulls of things you might just smile at, others ignore, and even more likely, over hear bits and pieces of a conversation that shock.

We’ve all done that. While some liken Twitter to the “Some Enchanted Evening” phenomenon where “you may see a stranger across a crowded room” – in this case, across a crowded room could mean a life long lover or a destroyed reputation.

Twitiquette

Here are a few tips and twitiquette to help you avoid that over-heard-misunderstood and out-of-context online statement.

Your Grandmother Will Read This: Pretend or assume that your grandparents, parents, or people whose trust and respect you desire will read what you tweet.
Your Boss or Client Will Read This: What if someone you depend upon for your income will read your tweet out of context. What will they think? What will they assume about you? How will they react? Is it worth your job?
Your Kids Will Read This: What you say today may haunt you forever. Online data is being preserved at a phenomenal rate and what you say today online may be found by your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and beyond. Think about what a historian or anthropologist finding your tweet 200 years from now will think. Tweet for posterity.
Does This Really Represent YOU: There are two ways to think about this. Does your tweet really represent you, the real you, or does it represent the you that you want the world to see? The professional you? The one who gets out of the sweats and into the business suit, ready to make the money roll in? Remember, there are different sides of ourselves we show the world. Which one do you want the virtual world to see in your tweets?
Will This Enhance My Reputation: If what you are about to submit to the world will enhance or build your credibility and reputation, then hit submit. If it will hurt, don’t.
Your Reputation is Based Upon You and Job Performance, Not Your Tweets: In the end, it’s what others say about you that makes or breaks your reputation, not just what you say online. Make sure your tweets are retweetable and you and your online content are worth tweeting about.
What You Say Can Be Held Against You: Libel and defamation from online conversations and public postings are making their way through the courts. What you say on Twitter or other social media sites can be held against you in a court of law if what you say breaks, or even just bends, the law. Tweet carefully and know the laws about freedom of speech and expression in your country and around the world. What you say in one country could be against the law in another. The Internet is breaking down those barriers, as is the international court system.
If In Doubt, DM: If you are ever worried about how something you tweet might be interpreted, or misinterpreted, direct message or email it. Keep it out of the public eye.

Remember, it’s okay to have fun. It’s okay to make jokes online. It’s even okay to play with satire. Just remember that you are writing words with only emoticons for emotional punch. Twitter and online social networks are no different from email, blog comments, and live chat. What you may think is funny can easily be interpreted by others to be mean.

Liz ends with the following that we also need to remember:

Twitter is more than 140 characters that float away on the stream.

Check out the rest of the posts in this series on Exploring Social Media on the Blog Herald.

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: Widget API, Bye-Bye Kubrick, Query_Posts Plugin, and Template Tag Plugin

Lorelle VanFossen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:03:50 +0000

New WordPress Widgets API Feedback Wanted: The WordPress developers are seeking testers and feedback on the new Widgets API which will be released with WordPress 2.8.

Time to Say Bye-Bye to Kubrick? Weblog Tools Collection asks if it is time for Kubrick to retire. Known as the Default WordPress Theme that comes with every installation of WordPress, many have been calling for a replacement.

Integrating bbPress with BuddyPress: While many are working with WordPressMU to integrate bbPress, Trent Adams writes about integrating bbPress with BuddyPress.

WordPress 2.8 News and Development: The WordPress Development team has confirmed that WordPress 2.8 will be released in April. Articles and features worth noting on WordPress 2.8 development include:

New Screen Options have been announced for posts, Pages, Categories, and other Administration Panel views.
WordPress 2.8 image header cropping will now use Jcrop from Deep Liquid.
Lester Chan covers the new WP_Widget Class for WordPress 2.8.
The new WordPress Widgets API will include converting all default WordPress Widgets to work with the new API.
Optimizing Script Loading improved with tips in part 2 and part 3.
Lester Chan has tips for using JavaScript in WordPress Plugins for WordPress 2.8.
Changes to WordPress Themes include new functions and body classes, automatic_feed_links, and more.
A new template tag, the_modified_author(), has been added.
Matt Mullenweg says that OpenID and OAuth will be in upcoming versions of WordPress, possibly WordPress 2.8.
Maggie is being replaced by SimplePie.

Query_Posts WordPress Plugin: Query_Posts WordPress Plugin by Justin Tadlock uses the query_posts template tag to generate a variety of post lists. There is now a video tutorial on WordPress.tv.

Template Tag Shortcodes in a Plugin: Justin Tadlock has created the Template Tag Shortcodes WordPress Plugin to insert WordPress template tags into blog posts and Pages so they will initiate the PHP or WordPress code function.

WordPress on Your Calendar

Austin, Texas – The Austin WordPress Meetup Group – April 7, 2009

Past WordPress News Reports

Possibly Related Posts

The Outing of a Blogger: The Fear of Being Found Out

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:27:04 +0000

In “The Outing of a Blogger: Social Transparency or Violation?” and “The Outing of a Blogger: Is it Legal to Reveal a Blogger?” I’ve covered some of the issues around the outing of an Alaskan blogger by a local politician and the legality of such actions.

There have been a variety of blogger outings lately, some with positive outcomes. Fake Steve Jobs Blogger, Daniel Lyons, admitted that he was stunned that it took so long to be uncovered, enjoying the attention. For Lyons, his blatant lampooning of Steve Jobs turned into a career booster. Lyons expected to be found out. Most anonymous bloggers worry they will be.

One of the greatest things about blogging is the freedom and ability to have your say, no matter what it is. One of the greatest fears is being found out.

Many bloggers live in fear of being found out, some at the risk of their lives. Others fear that their right to express themselves without persecution, even of the social kind, will be taken away by exposure. For those who blog anonymously, the law is one issue, but the social stigma is a bigger one.

Living in Fear of Being Found Out

Life in the NHS reported sadly on the outing of the Fat Doctor blog in 2007, a blog that continues to be updated in spite of the unwanted attention.

Some wicked person had found it, printed the whole thing out and shown it to her boss, now that is below the belt. For those of us who blog about work, and in particular those of us who have professional responsibilities to uphold we are always in a precarious position. Fat Doctor provided us with some wonderful insights into her life, yes her work life but also about her home and family life, her childcare arrangements and of course her illness. I know that those of us who read her recently will miss her and hope she will be back very soon.

The thought of being discovered and outed is on my mind a lot now, so I am becoming increasingly worried about blogging about work per say unless I am talking about things personal to just me or so general as to not really matter. It does tend to cause your creativity to suffer though. Why am I worried? Well I am now doing a job which is specific and only I do for the whole county. If anyone who knew me well were to find this blog it would take them just a few minutes to discover it was me and while I don’t think I have broken any codes of confidentiality, professional practice or indeed moral responsibilities to my employer it is still a consideration. Hopefully I don’t know anyone quite as mean as the person in Fat Doctor’s office, but you never know.

Before the unfortunate outing, The Fat Doctor shared her fears over the anxiety of being publicized on a major industry newsletter and being found out.

So why am I nervous? Because a lot of my colleagues, including those I’ve griped about in this venue, subscribe to ePocrates…what if Colleagues are more particular about their e-mail than I am? What then? They will no doubt recognize me, and that would be misfortunate to say the least. Will my boss force me to take the blog down? I’ve written my fears of this before. Time and again. If that were to happen, I’d be back with a new moniker.

This determination to “have her say” has kept her blog going, in spite of the exposure, though she continues to keep it as anonymous as possible. Her fan base has definitely grown as she’s not only set an example, but continues on with her passion in spite of the obstacles.

Reading through the many posts written in support of the Mudflats revelation by US state representative Mike Doogan of Alaska, the issue of anonymity came up but wasn’t that important. Most agreed that they didn’t care if the blog writer was a journalist, expert writer, or professional anything. They liked what they read and were drawn in by the sincerity. Some readers were also bloggers – including anonymous bloggers – so they understood with a profound empathy, and suffered at Mudflat’s exposure.

OmegaMom, a fellow anonymous blogger, wrote in support, saying:

I’ve been anonymously blogging for about three and a half years now. I was anonymous on boards and listservs before that. Oh, not anonymous anonymous–anyone who really wants to figure out who I am and where I live can probably do it. Part of it has been a general sense of “there are some Real Whackos out there, so it’s a good idea to keep the whackdom at arm’s length”, and since I started blogging the main reason for the anonymity is so that the dotter won’t find her name spread far and wide on the ‘net when she starts googling it. (Also so her friends and enemies in high school won’t find same and start the taunting circuitry a-jangling.)

….On the whole, my approach when reading a blog is to first check the quality of writing, then to check the quality of the thinking behind the writing, and then to see how well that first impression is maintained as time goes on. In other words, I judge a blogger by his or her output, not by whether the blogger posts using a pseudonym or a “real” name.

In The More Child, SwitchedonMom was also attracted to AKMuckraker because of the interest in Sara Palin, and soon became a fan. Now, she’s as concerned as the others are about this issue of anonymity because it is happening to her.

…one of the places I landed was a blog called Mudflats written under the pseudonym AKMudflats. I liked it. The writer was based in Alaska, and like me, was just a person, offering a perspective on things from where he/she sat (for quite awhile I had no idea of the writer’s gender), offering his/her reality. Speaking her (because it turns out it is a “her”) truth. (God, I know that sounds pretentious.)

The reason I am sharing this is because this morning I and other Mudflats readers received an e-mail from AKMuckraker with the subject line “AKMuckraker ‘outed’ by Alaskan Politician.” …the timing and the subject are a little uncanny. Because it seems I may have my own miniature AKMuckraker situation going on, although not with a government official, but “officials” nonetheless. In late February I received an e-mail to my personal IRL e-mail address, addressing me by my real name, warning me off for the content of one of my posts. The person clearly went through some effort to ascertain my identity…

In an newsletter written by members of The Mudflats Forum Moderator/Administrator staff published on W. Va. Fur and Root they claim this is the first known case of an anonymous blogger being cyber-stalked by a politician, though not substantiated.

Whether or not people support AKMuckrakers opinions, it seems most people support her right to remain anonymous. We feel it is a right that everyone on the internet is entitled to – people make the decision for their own reasons, some because they have been cyber stalked in the past, some to prevent being cyber-stalked in the future.

This may be the first known case of an anonymous blogger being cyber-stalked by a politician determined to find out their real identity and out them, though!

Their post goes on to list the many blog posts writing on the subject, as do many of the other concerned and supportive bloggers.

There is a lot of anxiety behind making the decision to blog anonymously, especially if you don’t want to be found out. It takes a lot of energy, too. Constantly taking care not to blog something too revealing while being revealing and open with your words. To not name names or respond in a way that might exposure who you are. Many think blogging anonymously is easy, but it’s not. It’s hard work.

In the next in this series on “The Outing of a Blogger,” I’ll highlight some of the backlash and support and reactions by many to the outing of the Mudflats blogger. Whether or not you believe bloggers should blog with total transparency or not, this hopefully will give you a new perspective on how bloggers stand up against such attacks, and what bloggers think about those who attack bloggers, and how they respond to those who out.

Article Series: The Outing of a Blogger

Possibly Related Posts

The Outing of a Blogger: Is it Legal to Reveal a Blogger?

Lorelle VanFossen — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:21:20 +0000

In “The Outing of a Blogger: Social Transparency or Violation?” I started this short series on the outing of a popular Alaska personal blogger, Mudflats (aka AKMuckraker or AKM), unveiled by a state politician.

The question I want to tackle in this article is the issue of the legality of blogger anonymity and what protects bloggers and not. This is a huge topic, so I’m only going to scratch the surface.

In many countries, there are no laws protecting freedom of speech nor journalists or bloggers. There may be protections for journalists, but none for bloggers. In countries where you would expect there to be such laws…it’s amazing how few there are and how flexible those laws can be.

Does a blogger have the right to privacy and anonymity? What rights do others have to expose them and why?

Is It Legal to Out a Blogger?

The UK Guardian reported in 2007 on several cases since 2001 where judges ordered blog and website hosting services to disclose the names in defamation and libel suits.

The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.

…Exposing the identity of those who post damaging lies in cyberspace is a growth area for libel lawyers.

Dan Tench, of Olswang, the law firm representing Gentoo, said: “This case illustrates an increasingly important legal issue: proving who is responsible for the publication of anonymous material on the internet. This is likely to be a significant issue in defamation cases in the future.”

The article stated that while the courts ordered some websites and services to reveal the site owners, “abusive fans” were permitted to remain anonymous as, “Their right to maintain their anonymity and express themselves freely was outweighed by the directors’ entitlement to take action to protect their reputation…”

These decisions included the publishers of content as well as those who respond to the content via comments and forums. Discussions in chat rooms, instant messaging services, Twitter, and other online communications that are preserved and “discoverable” are also at risk of legal action if the content crosses the line. Unfortunately, that “line” is still being drawn in the sands of the Internet.

In 2007, Buzzblog reported on a local newspaper’s attempt to uncover a blogger highly critical of a local politician:

The Record’s editor, Peter Ellis, tells me that his paper was merely calling to account “a political group hiding behind the name of a fictitious person, which is what happened.”

Ellis stands by that decision, as he should, although he does regret using the video…

The article reported that the editor felt that the blogger was not acting on their own behalf as a person with an opinion published freely, but as a member of an organized political group blogging with the intention of defamation.

The reaction was similar to the firestorm around Mudflats. “Some in the blogosphere have reacted so vehemently in opposition to the newspaper’s attempted outing that you would think the Record had formed a posse and shot the lonely pamphleteer of yore.”

Buzzblog claimed they had the right to take action to expose the blogger.

They were correct. While there may be a long-held and cherished right to publish anonymously in this country, it isn’t any more absolute than other First Amendment rights and should never be confused with a right to remain anonymous. After all, there was never anything stopping the lonely pamphleteer’s neighbors from saying, “Hey, that looks a lot like farmer Ben’s handwriting.”

They say that because the blogger made himself a “person of public interest” that made him “fair game for being identified,” similar to someone who becomes a celebrity opening the door to paparazzi invasion of privacy.

In my world, there needs to be a better definition of “person of public interest” because anyone who blogs could meet that vague qualification. And what about the politician. Aren’t they a person of public interest, too?

Video Blogger Goes to Jail

In 2006, Machine-Gun-Keyboard reported on a video blogger jailed for refusing to reveal sources for video he captured during a anti-globalism protect in San Francisco in 2005. As a blogger and journalist, he believed he had a right to protect his sources. The grand jury found otherwise. When he refused to identify the protesters he filmed and turn over the video “on the basis of protection of confidentiality of his news sources,” he was sent to jail. The article explained:

There are no federal shield laws in the US protecting a journalist’s right to conceal sources, though California has a shield law. Most US courts will, on the basis of tradition, grant an exception to allow journalists and publishers to maintain the confidentiality of their sources. If the courts wish to press the point, journalists can be imprisoned, as was Judith Miller of the New York Times for her role in the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press. Wolf is being held in contempt on a federal grand jury investigation, so the California shield law does not apply. Also, there’s no specific legal definition of a “journalist” in the US, though any person who collects information for publication in the public interest is normally considered to be a journalist.

The video blogger, Josh Wolf, turned his blog into Freedomedia, now dedicated to filming and reporting on civil disobedience and protests. Held in jail for 226 days, considered as of then the longest imprisoned journalist in US history for failing to comply with a subpoena, he shares the stories of his jail time in his Prison Diaries and the details of the case in US v. Wolf. For his resistance and the media attention, he received the 2006 Society of Professional Journalists Freedom of Information Award as Journalist of the Year and the 2007 James Madison Award for Online Free Speech.

Wolf is covered by the laws in place to protect journalists, and not, but these don’t yet apply to bloggers, and that distinction is growing thinner every day.

Bloggers Win and Lose Their Day in Court

Model Liskula Cohen, long associated with Giorgio Armani and Versace products, sought a court order to force Google and Blogger.com to identify a blogger as part of a defamation suit and won, exposing the blogger.

An Israeli court ordered Google to reveal the identity of a blogger who accused a Shaarei Tikva commitee member and politician of illegal acts, which they complied with. TechDirt’s response to this issue sided on both sides, but also brought up the issue of the confusion over libel and defamation.

There’s nothing wrong with a court requiring a service provider to cough up identifying information on someone who has broken the law — but it gets into very tricky territory when it comes to things like libel. We recently covered a number of similar cases in the UK where the results were the same — but a case in the US had the judge determine that the anonymous speech was protected and the person shouldn’t be revealed. It seems likely that we’re only going to see more of these cases over time — and questions about jurisdiction are only going to make them more confusing. What if the blogger in this case actually resides in the US, for example?

In TechDirt’s article, “The Ongoing Battle Between Anonymity And Libel Online,” they added:

…libel is increasingly a funny sort of crime in this world where everyone’s a publisher and everyone has an opinion. Accusing someone of libel in court can often backfire, as it only calls that much more attention to the actions that led to the original claims. It seems that it’s often better to simply respond to the false claims with proof that they’re not true, and then leave people to make their own decisions.

In the issue of Mudflats being exposed by state senator Mike Doogan, the issue of legality and responsibility are summed up by The Wandering Mind:

So I guess this is what elected officials do in Alaska, run down vindictive personal vendettas against anyone who opposes them. How Boss Tweed of him. AKM has only ever posted personal opinion and facts. But it seems this is a bad thing to do, in Mike Doogan’s eyes. He didn’t sue for slander, or libel, or defamation of character, or anything else. No, this was just to try to hurt AKM because apparently that’s the kind of guy he is. Forget freedom of the press, forget freedom of expression. Many, if not most, of the bloggers I’ve read are anonymous, and for good reason. Apart from cyber-stalking, there is real-world stalking. Let’s hope Rep. Doogan is still above anything like that, but frankly any integrity he may have had is demolished in my eyes.

They also bring up a very important point. While Mike Doogan thinks he was acting in the best interests of his constituents by revealing the identity behind Mudflats, many supporters of Mudflats think that Mike Doogan might have broken some laws, though they haven’t found any yet. Many are investigating legal action possibilities, which could result in some core changes to the laws protecting anonymous bloggers and bloggers in general, if pursued.

What are the legal ramifications of outing someone? Is that an invasion of privacy? Defamation? Libel? The laws have long been in place to protect anonymous sources for journalists in some countries, but what about the anonymous blogger? What are their rights? What protections do they get under the laws?

In the next article about blogging anonymously and the consequences of being outed, I want to share with you the courage and determination many anonymous bloggers have for keeping their identity secret, and how they shared that courage with others, including Mudflats.

Possibly Related Posts

The Outing of a Blogger: Social Transparency or Violation?

Lorelle VanFossen — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:32:20 +0000

We live in an age of transparency. I’d say that “transparency” should have been the word of the year last year, and it’s popularity as a buzz word this year continues. It pops up in most news reports, demanding transparency from banks and financial institutions, politicians, governments, corporations, and individuals.

It also litters our social media interaction. We want our online social interchanges to be with real people who want to know us as real people. We want people leaving comments on our blogs to have names. We want folks on Twitter to have real names, not CD Handles and cute nicknames or keywords. So is it okay to be anonymous any more?

Over the years, there as been an ongoing debate about anonymous bloggers as more and more people take to the Information Highway to have their say. For some, anonymity is a matter of life or death. For others, it’s just wiser. But it isn’t for everyone.

Some use a pseudonym, similar to what writers and artists have been doing for many years, either for protection and security, or because their real name, Hildibob Slibbervitzenson, just isn’t “writerly” or “artistic.” Would women have swooned over Archie Leach? Sang the memorable songs of Barry Alan Pinkus, or sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody with Farrokh Bulsara? Or believed in the sung words of Robert Allen Zimmerman with such fervor? Would Moses have been so memorable if played by John Charles Carter? Would the sexy pottery scene in “Ghost” have been so memorable if performed by Demetria Gene Guynes? Replaces those real names with their pseudonyms of Cary Grant, Barry Manilow, Freddy Mercury, Bob Dylan, Charlton Heston, and Demi Moore and everything changes.

There are many people who blog under a pseudonym without condemnation, but there are still those who choose to publicly blog anonymously. They use CD Handle style names, making a visible statement about their need to be private and choosing to hide behind a masked name while not hiding their opinion.

And there continues to be a witch hunt on to out them when their opinion doesn’t agree with the government or politicians.

Politician Outs Alaskan Blogger

Such is the case for Mudflats or AKMuckraker, an opinionated blogger in Alaska being threatened by an Alaska state representative with “outing” their identity.

Author and state representative Mike Doogan is the author of several books about Alaska and mystery novels, and states in his bio that he worked most of his life as a journalist and writer. Of all people, he should know more than most about protecting the rights of authors and writers. It seems he doesn’t.

Let’s start the story in the words of Mudflats talking about the excitement of starting a new blog and finding a voice with their WordPress blog.

I wasn’t quite sure what this whole blogging thing was about, but a dear friend of mine who is a brilliant writer was doing some work for the American Cancer Society blog, and urged me to start one of my own. And so, one evening after some crazy shenanigans from Don Young and a glass of shiraz, the first post went up on Mudflats. It was a strange sensation to write, and then click on that blue oval button that said, “Publish”. With that click, I was putting my opinion out to the world. I was giving permission for people to peek into my brain, and read my diary, as it were. I had no particular desire for anyone to know it was coming from me, and why should they care, anyway? I’m just….me. I’m not a politician, nor a writer, nor a journalist, nor a state or federal employee, nor a lobbyist. I was just a citizen who was paying attention, feeling frustrated, and liked getting stuff off my chest.

I checked my blog statistics later in the day, and noticed that two people had clicked on my article. I sat there utterly amazed. I called to my spouse, “Look at this! Two people read it!” Then, the next day, eight people had read it. I was getting about a dozen hits a day the next week. I didn’t know where they were coming from, but I imagined my little group of a dozen people who enjoyed Mudflats enough to come back and read more. Then twenty people. And by the end of the summer, about 250 a day. Maybe they liked feeling like somebody was speaking their particular truth. Maybe they liked it. It was a good feeling.

These aren’t the words of an anarchist or professional writer. They are the same feelings so many get every day when they write that first blog post and realize that they have just found a soap box they can stand on and call their own. Maybe they aren’t heard in their day-to-day real life and this is the first time they get to have their say. We’ve all been there. We know that feeling of watching a blog grow and how good it feels to have someone pay attention.

Mudflats’ life changed when Sarah Palin entered the US election as John McCain’s sidekick and much ignored Alaska became center stage for the world’s attention. Intrigued and wondering what the future may hold with Palin in charge, Mudflats wrote an opinion piece called “What Is McCain Thinking? One Alaskan’s Perspective.”

Within an hour or two, this personal blog had more than 7,000 hits. By day’s end, the count was up to 64,000. Mudflats started being besieged with emails and blog comments asking for more. The few Alaska bloggers around the state were also besieged, becoming overnight sensations as everyone got out their shovels on the web looking for anything and everything they could about Sara Palin.

With the sudden and persistent interest and enthusiasm, Mudflats was stunned at the response and the process that soon had a life of its own.

Fast forward to the present. Mudflats has become something of an amazement to me. Over the months, kind souls from many places have volunteered their time, and their energy to build this community. It was hard to manage posts that were getting 500 or 600 comments in just a few hours. So the Mudflats Forum was born, run by a team of administrators and moderators who all work very hard for nothing but gratitude. The forum was a way for readers to connect and discuss issues of the day, start their own threads, support each other, and talk everything from Sarah Palin to Barack Obama to salmon recipes…I felt quite qualified to give my perspective and opinion. All of us are.

Among the growing number of political commentaries the site and author started writing, put into the spotlight with the politics of Palin, Mike Doogan was one of the targets, bringing this community blog under his microscope.

Tracing the Path to Outing a Blogger

The email exposing Mudflats is currently on the Alaska House Democratic Legislators front page of their site under “Extra! Extra! Newspapers and Bloggers Edition; Biased? Who? The Alaska Press Club?; A Treatise On A Newspaper Crusade; Anonymous Blogger Anonymous No More.”

It began with this:

Alaska legislator Mike Doogan announced today that it is his civic duty to reveal the identity of Alaska’s most prestigious anonymous blogger. In his weekly email bulletin, Doogan ended with this:

The identity of the person who writes the liberal Democratic Mudflats blog has been secret since the blog began, protected by the Anchorage Daily News, among others. My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name. So I was interested to learn that the woman who writes the blog is Anchorage resident [name withheld].

Why it would change anything to know the name of the person behind the blog remains a bit of a mystery. Until you read the email exchange with Progressive Alaska’s author, Phil Munger, and Mike Doogan. These are part of an email conversation that started with a political issues inquiry, with no mention of Mudflats. Mike Doogan challenges Munger’s questions for clarity, which Munger clearly states in his reply, and gets this back.

Phil:

Thanks, that’s a much better set of questions. Now, why are you asking? Running low on fodder for your blog? And if it’s not for the blog, why are you asking me instead of your own representative?

Mike

The “fodder” reference was ignored by Munger as he struggled to reply professionally, trying to return the conversation back to the original inquiry. What starts out as a simple set of questions becomes a vindictive hunt for the blogger behind Mudflats.

Phil:

Thanks for the response.

I think that if blogging might be detrimental to the “professional and/or business situation” of the person writing Mudflats, then he/she shouldn’t be doing it. But even if it is, are your arguing that it’s okay for people to stand in the shadows and shout into the public debate? What next? Hoods and torches?

How does you keeping this person’s name a secret comport with your “let’s put everything on the blog” ethic? You are talking out of both sides of your mouth, Phil. As long as you are going to pick and choose what information you make public, there’s really no reason for me to communicate with you.

…Mike

While Munger kept the identity of Mudflats private, imagine the shock Mudflats got when the email arrived in the inbox telling the blogger they were about to be exposed:

I was a bit surprised to see my real name, as you can imagine. But after the initial surprise wore off, it really hit me. This is an elected State Representative, of my own political party, who has decided that it’s not OK for me to control the information about my identity; that it’s not OK to express my opinion on my own blog without shouting from the rooftops who I am.

If I were to appear, as many of you have, at a political rally and I were to hold up a sign that expressed my opinion, I don’t have to sign my name on the bottom. And if someone wants to come online and read my diary, they are free to do so. And if they want to disagree, that’s OK too.

Mudflats continues listing the reasons bloggers have for wanting to stay anonymous such as privacy concerns, security, risk to friends and family, risk of losing their job, even risk of personal attacks and violence. While few people blog at risk of life and limb, many blog anonymously to protect their privacy and that of their family, and even to protect their job.

Justification for Exposing a Blogger

As I read through all the blog posts, I want to understand a politician in the “freedom of speech” based United States would care about a blog. It seems that Mudflats was thinking the same thing.

What appears to matter to Rep. Doogan is that either 1) he feels that if he “outs” me, he’ll change what I have to say, or keep me from saying anything. 2) he gets to play mystery detective (like in his books) and believes people will think he’s really cool for figuring it out, or 3) he feels like getting revenge. He knows I want to remain anonymous, so he’s going to take it away. In any of those three scenarios, he didn’t think it was important to get the bigger picture.

And in any of those three scenarios we should probably find it disturbing that an elected official is using his time and mental energy in this way, against an ordinary citizen.

The outing didn’t escape the notice of the Huffington Post, reporting:

Doogan has been quick to make hyperbolic comparisons between the anonymity of AKM and the anonymity of the KKK, drawing not-so-subtle historical parallels between the anonymous post-Civil War editorials of the KKK’s original Grand Cyclops. He has also mentioned “hoods and torches” in several emailed responses to constituents who voiced concerns about the ‘outing’ of AKM.

No doubt Doogan feels vindicated by outing this anonymous blogger — someone associated with a media form that is taking the jobs of his colleagues, someone whose work is lesser in his mind than the print journalists of yore. Doogan says that AKM gave up her right to anonymity when her blog began influencing public policy, but America also has a rich tradition of anonymous political commentary — so much so that the framework of our country was shaped by anonymous political prose.

….Doogan would do well to remember that, although he is a mystery novel writer, he is not a detective in real life, and this was one mystery that should have gone unsolved. New media is replacing traditional media regardless of whether Mudflats continues to exist or not. Taking down one blogger — or even thousands of bloggers — will not bring back your dying newspaper industry.

Historically, many have protected themselves with pseudonyms, so why not bloggers? Or is it okay to have a “real” sounding name? Would the attempt to uncover Mudflats be as such a big deal if the blogger had called themselves Jane Smith? Is it the blatant obfuscation that irritates so many?

In the next article on the issue of anonymous blogging and the Mudflats outing, I want to know if you think it is right to out bloggers and reveal them to the public, and I’ll give you some insights into those who have been outed and fear such revelations.

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: WordPress 2.8, Summer of Code, PodPress Returning, iPhone Update

Lorelle VanFossen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:51:50 +0000

Lester Chan covers the new WP_Widget Class for WordPress 2.8.
The new WordPress Widgets API will include converting all default WordPress Widgets to work with the new API.
Optimizing Script Loading improved with tips in part 2 and part 3.
Lester Chan has tips for using JavaScript in WordPress Plugins for WordPress 2.8.
Changes to WordPress Themes include new functions and body classes, automatic_feed_links, and more.
A new template tag, the_modified_author(), has been added.
Matt Mullenweg says that OpenID and OAuth will be in upcoming versions of WordPress, possibly WordPress 2.8.
Maggie is being replaced by SimplePie.

WordPress Summer of Code: As announced in Want to Break and Remake WordPress? and Time to Break WordPress This Summer, the Google/WordPress Summer of Code is underway and applications are being taken for college students to be mentored over the summer (and compensated) by top WordPress staff and experts to help create awesome WordPress code, Plugins, Themes, and everything.

PodPress Reborn? Andrew Ozz has been working with those behind the popular podPress and Popularity Contest WordPress Plugins and reports that podPress, the very popular and powerful multimedia publishing Plugin, is back in action and now has a development version ready for testing. Popularity Contest is also due for an update.

WordPress for iPhone Update: Matt Thomas reports that WordPress for iPhone 1.21 is out, an update for the popular WordPress for iPhone. Weblog Tools Collection has screenshots of the new iPhone app.

WordPressMU Vulnerability: BlogSecurity reports on a WordPressMU cross iste scripting vulnerability impacting WordPressMU versions prior to 2.7. If you haven’t upgraded WordPressMU to 2.7, it is highly recommended you do so to avoid exploitation of this vulnerability.

BuddyPress Site Revamped: BuddyPress has revamped their site and now includes a WordPress Plugin repository, BuddyPress Theme browser, developer landing page, developer groups, integrated forums, and developer profiles.

WordPress.com News

Twitter on WordPress.com: WordPress.com bloggers can now feature their Twitter tweets on their blogs. While this has been available through feeds for a long time, there is now a sidebar Widget to showcase your tweets along with @replies and hashtags, and multiple Twitter accounts.

Blog Design Contest on WordPress.com: The “I <3 Blogging Design Contest” ends in a few days. Get your entry in now.

WordPress on Your Calendar

Past WordPress News Reports

If You Are Reading This: If you are reading this blog post NOT on the Blog Herald or from within your feed reader, it is being used against the copyright policy of the copyright owners. Please report it immediately so action may be taken to break some heads and feed scraping blogs.

Possibly Related Posts

Social Media Sites Risk Growing Threats and Attacks

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:44:29 +0000

According to Investor’s Business Daily, evil is sweeping social networks, moving beyond email and blogs to where you like to virtually hang out and congregate:

Security experts last week warned that a new strain of the Koobface virus is hitting Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. It looks for links and passwords to other social networking sites.

Social networking site owners work actively to put a lid on nefarious activity. On Tuesday, a federal judge in northern California issued a temporary restraining order against three people accused of widespread spamming and phishing attacks on Facebook. It comes three months after Facebook won a suit that prevents another group of spammers from using or accessing Facebook data and applications.

Virus creators are increasingly targeting social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies such as the micro-blogging site Twitter and instant messaging services from Google, AOL and others. Virus writers are also creating fake profiles of celebrities, real friends or business associates hoping people will link with them. Users can be tricked into linking to the fake profile, which can be loaded with various forms of malicious software.

The article by Brian Deagon showcased Facebook users who responded to an email from a “friend on Facebook” to visit a link that initiated a program that “rifled through his hard drive, installed malicious software and sent the same e-mail to all of Daradics’ friends on his Facebook profile.”

Other attack targets included Google Talk, Yahoo and Microsoft Instant Messaging services, and Twitter users. They were sent a message to check out a video or link that required their login information.

The Business of Disrupting Your Business and Life is Big Business

Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media tools and networks are becoming the target of an increasing number of phishing and criminal activity. Unfortunately, many of us continue to fall for these misleading attacks, handing out passwords and personal information, risking our personal identity as well as our privacy and computer data.

Identity theft is on the rise, and it’s a lucrative business to disrupt your business and your online life.

More than 1.2 million people filed a complaint of fraud, identity theft or a related act to law enforcement or regulatory agencies in 2008, up 16% from a year ago, according to the Consumer Sentinel Network, a branch of the Federal Trade Commission. Financial losses came to $1.8 billion, or about $3,400 per victim reporting a financial loss. Losses of $1 million or more were reported by 257 people.

Identity theft was the top complaint, named by 26% of the complainants. Credit card fraud was the most common form of identity theft, at 20%. Most fraud victims said the initial contact with the crooks came through e-mail or Web site visits.

…According to research firm Javelin Strategy and Security, in 2008 about 9.9 million U.S. adults were victims of identity fraud, up 22% from the year before. It pegs the total loss at $48 billion. Most incidents were the result of lost or stolen wallets, checkbooks and credit cards, but online access accounted for 11% of the total.

In articles I wrote recently on the Downadup Worm Infection and increase in cyber attacks, F-Secure reported that the total amount of malware accumulated over the past 21 years “increased by 200% in the course of just one year” for the year ending in 2008.

With the big business of security attacks and identity theft come big losses. The financial impact of these cyber crimes is on the rise as well. In another article, I wrote that online fraud and phishing scams have increased to impact more than 3.5 million Americans falling victim to phishing schemes and online identity theft throughout the past year, up 57% increase from 2007, costing USD $3.2 billion dollars.

I’ve written a lot about blog scams including the danger of exaggerated claims, how to spot a scam and report them, web hoaxes, blog scams making money from your content and gulibility, get rich schemes, and the growing number of phishing, fake, and impostors out there on the web pretending to be something they aren’t.

I’ve declared this year to be the This is the Year of Original Content, a year where we fight back against those who steal our content for their own evil purposes without our permission. Don’t let your guard down against those who abuse us in other ways, too.

In general, the web and blogosphere is a very safe place to play and network. Just beware of those who enjoy the dark side of the force. We don’t want them to win either.

Possibly Related Posts

Preparing for the Voice Web

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:41:23 +0000

Audio Version: Preparing for the Voice Web by Lorelle VanFossen

Abhijit Nadgouda of iface thoughts recently talked about the new Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) for the future of the web. Pushing HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), HSTP is designed to incorporate voice applications.

Here is his reaction:

My immediate reaction was that it would really ease the mobile usage, where you need to navigate through the cumbersome keypad to use the Web. The voice Web will be a heaven-sent alternative. Some more thought and the skeptic start thinking about various other issues. What about identification and authentication? What about security? The HTTP Web is still struggling with these things.

He goes on to bring up some very good points, playing devil’s advocate on the issue, but he got me thinking about how voice would change the face, and sound, of the web from a blogger’s perspective.

I do a lot of podcasting, interviews, public speaking, and find myself in situations where my voice is recorded and heard by many. A lot of people are familiar with the sound of my voice.

I wrote recently about LeVar Burton recording his blog posts, as do many people, especially those determined to reach out to the hearing impaired or “listening” audiences. Their audiences come to know them through their voices.

Our voices are part of our identity. People make assumptions when they read your words, but when they hear a voice, their perceptions and assumptions may change, reinforcing or negating the words they are hearing.

What happens when voice web applications become the voice people hear when they access your blog? How will our perceptions about voice – and our judgments about the voice we hear – change and adapt when we move from print content to audio content?

Talking to the Internet

Called the “Talking Web protocol,” HSTP enabled users to create voice sites as well as set up transactions, focusing on the commercial side of web projects in the current version of the program. This makes sense as e-commerce will explode when it is not only easier to connect but to communicate with voice rather than clicks and keystrokes.

IBM called this one of the “five innovations that can change the world” permitting Internet access and interaction hands-free – totally voice operated. That’s a powerful statement, and the truth.

In some countries, people still can’t read and write. Imagine opening the web to those people dependent upon the spoken word to communicate. They talk to the web and it talks back to them.

There are live chat options such as the one being developed with Woopra, instant messaging services with web Widgets, and things like MeeboMe, the customizable live chat/instant messaging service widget. These are human to human live interactions, not computer manipulated.

It will be fascinating to see where the web voice goes. How much control will we have? Will we be able to choose the style of voice “heard” on our web? Or will that choice be up to the user? Currently, you can add an Aural style sheet to your website or blog to dictate the recommendations for screen readers and audio interaction, though not all screen readers obey the recommendations, and few sites offer them.

Web designers may have to become experts not only in design elements but audio elements as well.

The voice web is coming, there is no doubt. We’re ready for it.

However, I have a lot of questions. What questions do you have, and what features would you want and not want in the future of the voice web?

Possibly Related Posts

Want to Break and Remake WordPress?

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:55:41 +0000

The Google Summer of Code^TM 2009 is on and applications for the WordPress aspect of the project is in full swing with student applications now being accepted.

In a comical typical dialog between a son, desperately trying to explain web technology and terminology to a father, thrilled his son might get paid for what he’s long considered was “time wasting computer stuff,” Jane Wells of Automattic spells out some of the basics of this year’s WordPress Summer of Code 2009.

Dad: Don’t be lame! You said yourself you’re awesome. And that you could learn from the kings. And that you could earn over FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS. Life is full of rejection, kid. Best way to get over that is to make yourself so awesome that no one wants to reject you. And know that even if they do reject you, there’s always next time.

Billy: I dunno, Dad.

Dad: Tell you what, if you apply, I’ll give you $500 toward that car you’ve been wanting, whether you’re accepted into the program or not. And if you get in and complete it successfully, I’ll match that $4500. I’d be so proud of you. And the bragging rights at work! My kid, a Google engineer!

Billy: I wouldn’t actually be a Google engineer, Dad.

Dad: Oh be quiet. Do you think Harold in shipping knows the difference?

The Google Summer of Code is a chance for college students to work closely with the top software engineers, developers, and experts from around the world. It’s a chance to hack up WordPress. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime to create code that will change the way we use WordPress. It’s a chance to show off your stuff. And you could get paid to bury your head in the coding sands. Who wouldn’t want that?

This year, Google has 150 free and open source software projects which include WordPress. Students apply for acceptance and those chosen will receive a stipend of USD $4,500 to participate in the program. The deadline for student applications is April 3, 2009 at 19:00 UTC, so you don’t have much time to get your application in.

Past WordPress Summer of Code Projects

WordPress is looking for students to apply for the Google Summer of Code and help WordPress improve. The past few years has seen a lot of improvement in WordPress, from the creation of the amazing WordPress Plugin installation and update feature from within the Administration Panels to streamlining and speeding up the engine under the hood. Other highlights from past Summer of Codes for WordPress included:

Creation of a testing suite to measure performance issues and caching.
XML-RPC functionality improvement and automated testing.
New import standards and tools for importing and exporting from WordPress.
bbPress forum development and new features.
Improvement of the underlying code running the WordPress interface.
Hierarchical Page management.
JQuery inclusion and development within WordPress.
Internationalization and localization of WordPress.
Improvements in WordPress Plugins, hooks, and functions.
Improvements to the WordPress native search functions.
Improvements for multimedia support within the user interface.
Code and visual improvements to WordPress comment management system.

Some great WordPress Plugins and Theme development projects have come out of the Google Summer of Code with WordPress.

2009 WordPress Summer of Code Goals

This year’s list of WordPress code projects is one of the most far-reaching and challenging ever. The list includes:

BuddyPress-related projects.
Multimedia, gallery, slide shows, and improvements for media files.
Developing and enhancing the WordPress Video Solution Framework with features such as related videos, screenshot capture on preview, ad overlays, and more options.
WordPress import and export functionality.
User roles and capabilities for improved management and security.
Template versioning to preserve changes to the WordPress Theme files within the built-in Theme Editor.
Theme Frameworks for Plugins that modify Themes or add “packages” to Themes for event planning, CMS, education, media-based sites, etc.
Modified Pre-order Tree Transversal (MPTT) for displaying Pages and categories in a better and faster hierarchical method for scalability.
Improving the native search function to allow advanced search with multiple metadata sections.
WordPressMU feature improvements and new features and functionality.

One of the fascinating highlights on the list is a BuddyPress/WordPressMU/bbPress integration to build a community organizing platform. Using the new WordCamp site as a base, WordPress mentors want to create a “one stop shop” for WordCamp events and organizers using WordPress and Automattic tools. They want the community platform to focus on event coordination and promotion with registration, calendars, extended profiles, special user permissions, discussion and messaging, special pages and areas for vendors, sponsors, and participants, social coordination of transportation and planning meetings, media handling, and more. With almost all WordCamps live streaming and offering videos of the event, I see great possibilities for video and multimedia improvements that will benefit the three products individually as well as together.

The Google Summer of Code project with WordPress has some amazing mentors lined up to work with the students. In the past, over a hundred students have applied from all over the world, bringing their expertise and advanced studies knowledge in science, computers, technology, web security, social media, multimedia, and blogging.

This isn’t just about the students, staff, and volunteer experts within the WordPress Community. Your feedback is also essential. WordPress wants to know what you think is most important to work on and improve in WordPress. The WordPress Ideas forums are a great way to tell WordPress want you want, and to vote on the suggestions of others. Lloyd Budd will be coordinating the WordPress project with the timeline starting after the student finalists have been announced in May and ending in August.

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: iPhones Up, WordPress Widgets API, 2.8 Delayed, International WordPress.tv, and More

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:39:10 +0000

iPhone for WordPress is in the iTunes store. WordPress Widgets will use new Widgets API as of WordPress 2.8. Security authentication will improve with OAuth in future versions. WordPress 2.8 delayed. WordCamps in Hong Kong and China coming up. International languages embraced on WordPress.tv. And more WordPress news, tips, resources, and help.

WordPress News Changing: Your input is needed to help the Blog Herald WordPress News evolve. See “Changing the Blog Herald WordPress News: Your Help Needed” to share your thoughts on the shape of this weekly report.

WordPress News

iPhone for WordPress: The iPhone for WordPress Version 1.2 is now in the iTunes App Store, ready for you to blog and track comments on your iPhone.

WordPress 2.8 Delay Confirmed: The WordPress Development team has confirmed that WordPress 2.8 will be released in April, pushing back the release date a few weeks in order to take a little more time with improving the underlying code, incorporating the new Widgets API, and improvements for managing JavaScripts, Plugins, AJAX, and more. There is a list of features, changes, and improvements in the WordPress Codex.

WordPress.tv News: WordPress.tv has now launched the Making WordPress.tv development blog run on the new P2 WordPress Theme for those who want to keep up with what is going on with the new video service for the WordPress Community. The first goal for improving the new WordPress.tv is to improve the localization, the ability to understand the videos in your language. Michael Pick is working on adding language filtering to help with the translation of videos into other languages. You can now filter the videos by language preference, too.

Review WordPress Plugins:. Recently, Weblog Tools Collection started their “User Reviews” project where anyone can add their reviews of WordPress Plugins. The first set of Plugin Reviews from their readers is out. If you would like to join their reader review team, go get involved. It’s a great way of helping WordPress Plugin authors by supporting your favorite WordPress Plugins, and a great way to give back to the community by helping point out the coolest and most helpful WordPress Plugins.

Help WordPress Development: Jane Well is asking for help from the WordPress Community and you are invited to join. At WordCamp Denver, she presented a program on community involvement, opening the door to more non-developers to help WordPress develop, helping with quality control, documentation, ideas and opinions, user experience, graphic design, accessibility, usability testing, community organization, and WordPress.tv.

WordPress Release: The most recent version of WordPress is WordPress 2.7.1, a maintenance release. If you are using WordPress 2.7, take advantage of the automatic built-in upgrade.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Are you just catching up now to our Blog Herald WordPress News? Check out the past news in last week’s WordPress News: Plugins Reach Milestone, New WordPress Community Project, Help to Search for WordPress Help.

WordPress on Your Calendar

WordCamp News: Jeff Chandler recently published “What I Learned From WordCamp Denver,” his experience of watching WordCamp Denver through the eyes of the BitWireLive live streaming from the lobby of the event as well as watching the Twitter tweets and live blogging. It’s an interesting look at a WordCamp event through the eyes of a “non-participant” – showing us how far and wide a WordCamp goes to make an impact. You can watch the live interviews by BitWireLive on Ustream.

WordPress Meetup or WordCamp Near You? If you are putting together a WordPress event, please email me so I can publicize it here. If there is a WordCamp near you, go. If you are interested in setting up a WordCamp, stay tuned for news and information on to bring a WordCamp event near you.

Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar.

March 2009

April 2009

May 2009

June 2009

July 2009

WordCamp UK – England, July 18-19, 2009

October 2009

Upcoming WordCamps not scheduled or confirmed:

WordCamp Indy (Indianapolis)
WordCamp Augusta
WordCamp Seattle (WordCamp Seattle Twitter)
WordCamp Portland
WordCamp Argentina
WordCamp Perú
WordCamp New Zealand
WordCamp Iowa

Upcoming WordCamp and WordPress Event News

WordCamp Toronto News: WordCamp Toronto volunteers are working overtime to publicize and prepare for their May 8-10, 2009, event. They have found the event venue at OASI in Toronto’s West End, are looking for local artists to display their work during the event, are having a FREE WordCamp Toronto Tickets Giveaway, and invite everyone to help promote the event by downloading a WordCamp Toronto Banner and displaying it on their blogs. Registration is filling fast for this amazing event, so sign up now to get a seat.

WordCamp Dallas News: WordCamp Dallas is June 27-28, 2009, at the University of Dallas in Dallas, Texas. The ticket price is $30 and covers meals and t-shirts and other goodies over the two day event.

WordCamp RVA News: WordCamp RVA is May 9, 2009, in Richmond, Virginia, at Hirschler Fleischer. Admission is free but registration is required. You can also track the event’s news on their Twitter at @wordcamprva.

WordCamp Chicago News: WordCamp Chicago now has a venue. It will be at the UBS Tower Conference Center in downtown Chicago. It has a maximum capacity for 200 attendees, which means seating will extremely limited. Register now.

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 News: WordCamp San Francisco 2009 is open for registration. Some hot speakers are already lined up for the May 30, 2009, event at the Mission Bay Conference Center, including Matt Cutts, Tim Ferris, Philip Greenspun, Douglas Hanna, Tara Hunt, Andy Peatling, and Steve Sounders. This often sells out so get your ticket and arrangements to attend the parent WordCamp event of the year now.

WordCamps and WordPress Meetups Everywhere

WordPress Meetup: A WordPress Meetup is a frequent meeting of WordPress fans. If you would like to start a WordPress Meetup group, find a meeting place and announce it among your friends, and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordPress”, as many track WordPress event announcements there.
WordCamp: A WordCamp is a day or two long event with sponsors and dozens if not hundreds of WordPress fans gathering annually. If you would like to sponsor or host a WordCamp, check out the new official site for tracking WordCamps is WordCamp Central, which includes instructions and guidelines for running a WordCamp. Get a Twitter account and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordCamp.
WordPress and WordCamp Event News: In addition to our weekly Blog Herald WordPress News, you can learn more about the various WordPress and WordCamp Events on the official WordCamp Central site, The WordCamp Report, Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress, WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events, and Upcoming: Public events tagged with “WordCamp”.

WordPress Fan Blogs and Podcasts

Weblog Tools Collection: Recent news, Plugin and Theme reviews, and helpful posts on Weblog Tools Collection include:

Recent posts by Weblog Tools Collection include:

WordPress Plugin Releases for 03/18, 03/14, and 03/10
WordPress Theme Releases for 03/17 and 03/13
Postie Has New Life
Plugin Review: WP Mollom
How to Track RSS Subscribers in a Blog Contest

WordCast Podcast: WordCast 47: Sneeze for us! saw Kym come back to the show after too long away, and WordCast 48: Leave Twitter alone! covered Twitter and WordPress, the inside scoop on the new version of Woopra, and more WordPress tips and news.

WordPress Weekly Podcast: WPWeekly Episode 45 – Unlucky Stream covers lookup functions in Flash, WordPress 2.7 Plugins milestone, revamping the WordPress Support Forums, BuddyPress framework Theme released, previews of WordPress 2.8, and more WordPress tips and news.

Talking WordPress Plugins: The most recent episodes of the The WordPress Plugins Podcast featured Plugins 011 – Search And Replace Plugin and Plugins 010 – Contact Form 7 Plugin.

WordPress Podcast: The latest episode is “Episode 50: WordPress 2.7.1 released, WordPress.tv, How much do YOU love WordPress?” and covered WordPress Plugin writing, WordPress 2.7.1, WordPress.tv, the first WordPress permanent tattoo, the WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin, and more WordPress Theme and Plugin information and tips.

WP Engineer: WP Engineer has tips and techniques for using WordPress, including:

WPCandy: WPCandy offers tips and information on WordPress Themes, Plugins, and code.

WPRecipes: The WPRecipes site offers tips and techniques for using WordPress, and recent posts include:

WPTavern: The recent news from the WPTavern blog and forum includes:

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

New WordPress Widgets API: A new WordPress Widgets API in in development for WordPress 2.8. Based upon MultiWidget Class, it will handle all the multi-widget functions and hooks to implement a multi-widget Plugin, giving developers an easier process to extend their WordPress Plugins with Widget functionality. The WordPress Development team has announced that they are converting all default WordPress Widgets to work with the new Widgets API. If you are a WordPress Plugin author with a Widget-enabled Plugin, or you want to expand the flexibility of your Plugin for WordPress 2.8, check this out.

Lester Chan covers the new WP_Widget Class in WordPress 2.8 in greater detail to help Plugin authors understand how it works and how it can help them.

OAuth in WordPress Coming Soon: Will Norris wrote about “Authentication in WordPress 2.8” as part of his ongoing project for the OpenID WordPress Plugin. Working with Peter Westwood, WordPress 2.8 now includes a new filter for authentication that passes through three paramters, along with the username and password. According to Matt Mullenweg, right now, the OAuth for WordPress will be a WordPress Plugin, with hopes of integrating it into the core in the future.

The libxml2 Saga Continues: There is now a new WordPress and libxml2 Plugin to deal with the release of PHP 5.2.9 and libxml2 2.7.3 that solve the ongoing issues Joseph Scott has had with how the XML-RPC requests work. This fix resolves the issues of stripped brackets for XML-RPC requests and a few other related issues. If you cannot upgrade to the latest PHP and libxml2 versions, then this Plugin will help.

Are Your WordPress Plugins in the WordPress Plugins Directory? Justin Tadlock is doing it, are you? Most of the most popular WordPress Plugins are now hosted on the WordPress Plugin Directory, the official resource for WordPress Plugins. It ties directly into the automatic Plugin installation and upgrading feature in WordPress 2.7. If you want your Plugin found, why don’t you join others and have it hosted on the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Are You Ignoring the Potential of Pages? Justin Tadlock wrote “Page templates: The untapped potential of WordPress,” a look at WordPress Plugins and how to customize them to work differently from the rest of your blog. Some WordPress Themes offer a few sample Pages but there is so much more you can do. Why not experiment?

WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide: The “WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide by Vladimir Prelovac has been published and is available for sale.

WordPress Plugin and Theme Development Tips: The following are tips and techniques for WordPress Theme and Plugin authors and developers.

WordPress 2.8 News and Development: Articles worth noting on WordPress 2.8 development include:

Interesting WordPress Plugins:

Get My Tweets integrates a specific number of Twitter tweets into your WordPress blog.
Insights speeds access and embedding links, images, videos, maps, and more into your blog posts.
WP Columnize creates multiple columns within posts for a newspaper/magazine layout.
Thumbnail Viewer shows larger thumbnail images than the WordPress default.

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection Plugin and Theme announcements.

WordPress.com News

Blog Design Contest on WordPress.com: The first blogging design contest has been announced for WordPress.com called “I <3 Blogging Design Contest” is ending in a very few weeks. Co-produced by Infectious, this isn’t a blog web design or WordPress Theme contest. It is a graphic design contest. Design a “why I love blogging and WordPress” graphic design and if yours wins, it could be printed and sold on laptop and iPhone skins around the world through the Infectious store. Let your creative self loose and show the world how you would design what blogging and WordPress mean to you.

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Videos from WordPress.tv: WordPress.tv WordPress tips and WordCamp videos include:

WordPress Tips and Techniques: Here are a few more WordPress tips from around the WordPress Community:

WordPress Tips on Twitter: I’ve started sharing WordPress Tips and Plugin suggestions I’ve collected over the past couple years on Twitter at @lorelleonwp. I’ll be posting one WordPress tip and one WordPress Plugin link every morning (PST) covering recent versions of WordPress and WordPress usages and features.

Want Your WordPress Tip Shared Here? The WordPress Community generates some of the best WordPress tips, techniques, and resources. If you would like your WordPress tip and technique included in this list, see Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips and Writing and Publishing Code In Your WordPress Blog Posts. When its ready, contact me at lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com.

WordPress Community News

Things You Need to Know in the WordPress Community:

Help Installing WordPress: Installing WordPress for Free
Finding WordPress Plugins: WordPress Plugin Directory
Finding WordPress Themes: WordPress Themes Directory
WordPress Logos: The official WordPress logos are available for use on your blogs or WordPress event promotions. Please start with the official logos even if you wish to redesign them.
WordPress Experts Found: Automattic WordPress Consultants List, WordPress Jobs, and the WP-Pro mailing list
WordPress Facebook Community: WordPress on Facebook
WordPress Bugs: Reporting Bugs in WordPress
Online WordPress Manual: WordPress Codex
Have Your Say: WordPress Ideas
WordPress is Trademarked: You are not allowed to use WordPress in your domain name.
WordPress is WordPress: It’s spelled “WordPress” not “Wordpress” and Plugin is Plugin, not plug-in (what you put into a wall electrical socket).
WordPress Schwag for Sale: WordPress Shop

Past WordPress Wednesday News Reports

WordPress News Sources

Each week, the Blog Herald features WordPress News, a weekly column by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress featuring the news around the WordPress Community. If you have a WordPress news item or tip to suggest, please contact her at this special email address: lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com

Possibly Related Posts

We Keep Screwing Up to Give You Something to Write About

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 05:07:22 +0000

Driving home last night, I was listening to On the Media radio show on NPR. They were reading their Letters section with corrections to some of their past stories.

After they’d reported on the most recent corrections, they summarized that section of the show by saying:

We’ll do our part to keep screwing up to give you something to write about.

I’m sure they heard my laughter all the way to their studios.

Honestly, I can’t say when I’ve heard a better description of blogging.

Think about it.

Someone screws up. It gets blogged about.

Someone screws up on their blog, you comment and you might even blog about it.

You screw up on your blog, they will tell you. Or someone might blog about your screw up.

Screw ups start conversations. They give people something to write about.

John Dvorak has no problem with a mistake or two in a post spelling, using it as an excuse for interaction. “Feedback is feedback.”

I’m not advocating screwing up in order to get comments or attention. What I am saying is think before you leap up in defense of that blog post you just wrote, whether to stand up for the message you wanted to convey or the misspelled word or grammar gaf.

If what you said incites them to write something down in response, shouldn’t you take a moment to honor that. To recognize the effort that they made to say something. To start a dialog?

On The Media tracks news stories on journalists and the media. They understand that things get messed up in the reporting. Not all of the facts are consistently and thoroughly checked, and sometimes you have to go with what you have, even if you try your best to verify all truths.

So what do you do when you mess up? Admit you did and understand that the big picture is that someone noticed. When they notice, you know they are paying attention.

The Magic of the Comment

Remember when you started your first blog? The wait for a comment was painful. For most, that first comment was spam. In a twisted way, even that was welcome. Blogs are supposed to be about interaction, right? Until the interaction gets rolling, it’s a very dry desert for sharing.

When someone tells you that there is toilet paper attached to your shoe, or you have food in your teeth, aren’t you grateful? Embarrassed, yes. Frustrated by not knowing how long it’s been there, but so thankful that someone told you so you can take action to fix things. When someone pays attention enough to tell you that you misspelled a word or messed up a link, it’s a step in the right direction for some form of exchange. Be grateful.

We experts in blogging often talk about how important it is to give people linkable content, blog posts worth linking to. When you screw up, that’s another motivation for people to link to you.

So screw up well. :D

Possibly Related Posts

WordPress News: Plugins Reach Milestone, New WordPress Community Project, Help to Search for WordPress Help

Lorelle VanFossen — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:50:00 +0000

WordPress Plugins reach 100,000 milestone. Jane Wells working to build new WordPress Community team where everyone can help WordPress. Lots of tools to search for WordPress help out. iPhone for WordPress new version in testing phase. WordPress 2.8 delayed to April 1. PollDaddy has new API and Twitter tool. Want to publish a WordPress Plugin review for the Weblog Tools Collection blog? And a lot of news for WordPress Plugin and Theme developers.

WordPress News

WordPress Plugins Crack 100,000: According to Westi, WordPress Plugins reach a great milestone and surpassed 100,000 subversion repository check-ins. At 8:17am GMT, Jeff Yen checked in the Google Maps GPS Link WordPress Plugin and goes down in WordPress history with the 100,000th Plugin check-in. Congrats!

There are currently 4,245 Plugins, 22,152,788 downloads in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Have you searched for any interesting Plugins there recently?

Firefox Users Rejoice in Ability to Search WordPress Codex: WP Codex Search for Ubiquity is not a WordPress Plugin but a Ubiquity Plugin. Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that adds extreme functionality and usability to your web browser, changing how you surf, work, email, and function on the web. Coming Ubiquity and WordPress, Vladimir Prelovac has created this add-on to Ubiquity that will allow fast and easy searching of the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, to help you find the information you want and need with little effort from your browser.

Don’t forget the WordPress Helper Firefox Extension you can add to your browser to help you find WordPress help and advice, as well as other development and coding tools.

WPLookup – Another WordPress Codex Search Tool: WPLookup.com is a new service that works with OpenSearch with browsers to look up WordPress documentation and functions within the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users.

WordPress Release: The most recent version of WordPress is WordPress 2.7.1, a maintenance release. If you are using WordPress 2.7, take advantage of the automatic built-in upgrade.

PollDaddy API Released: PollDaddy has a new API to improve third-party access to the polls and surveys. It also announced a tool for polling Twitter followers from within Twitter.

Improvements to WordPress Support Forums and bbPress: WordPress Tavern recently pointed out that MichaelH’s recent review and recommendations for the WordPress Support Forums and WordPress.com Forums and Sam Bauer responded with answers to upgrading BBPress project with those points in mind as a “thing to do” list. Hopefully, we will see improvements and changes in the forums, and those benefits passed on to the popular forum program. I recently covered bbPress news, tips, and Plugins.

Would You Like to Review a WordPress Plugin? Weblog Tools Collection is inviting people to submit their reviews of their favorite WordPress Plugins for inclusion in the Weekly Plugin Review. Weblog Tools Collection is a foremost resource for WordPress news and information. Why not help promote a favorite Plugin and help support WordPress Plugin authors.

WordPress 2.8 News: WordPress 2.8 release has been delayed until April 1, 2009. The WordPress Development team is working on a long list of version tickets and patches in preparation for the Release Candidate of WordPress 2.8. There is a list of features, changes, and improvements in the WordPress Codex, and Jeff Chandler offers a preview of some of the changes.

iPhone for WordPress News: The iPhone for WordPress Beta 2 release for Version 1.2 is ready to go and testing is underway.

Flash Security Vulnerability Warning: F-Secure reports there is a security vulnerability with Adobe Flash, specifically a Adobe Flash Player remote code execution vulnerability which impacts several versions. Many WordPress Plugins rely upon Flash, as do many WordPress blog. It is recommended you upgrade Adobe Flash accordingly.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Are you just catching up now to our Blog Herald WordPress News? Check out the past news in last week’s WordPress News: WordPress Wins at Irish Blogger Awards, WordPress Events Everywhere, WordPress for PowerPoint, Flash Security Issue, Feedburner Deadline.

WordPress on Your Calendar

Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar.

March 2009

April 2009

May 2009

June 2009

WordCamp Chicago – June 6-7, 2009
WordCamp Dallas 2009 – Dallas, Texas – June 27-28, 2009

July 2009

WordCamp UK – England, July 18-19, 2009

October 2009

Upcoming WordCamps not scheduled or confirmed:

WordCamp Indy (Indianapolis)
WordCamp Augusta
WordCamp Seattle (WordCamp Seattle Twitter)
WordCamp Argentina
WordCamp Perú
WordCamp New Zealand
WordCamp Iowa

Upcoming WordCamp and WordPress Event News

WordCamps and WordPress Meetups Everywhere

WordPress Meetup: A WordPress Meetup is a frequent meeting of WordPress fans. If you would like to start a WordPress Meetup group, find a meeting place and announce it among your friends, and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordPress”, as many track WordPress event announcements there.
WordCamp: A WordCamp is a day or two long event with sponsors and dozens if not hundreds of WordPress fans gathering annually. If you would like to sponsor or host a WordCamp, check out the new official site for tracking WordCamps is WordCamp Central, which includes instructions and guidelines for running a WordCamp. Get a Twitter account and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordCamp.
WordPress and WordCamp Event News: In addition to our weekly Blog Herald WordPress News, you can learn more about the various WordPress and WordCamp Events on the official WordCamp Central site, The WordCamp Report, Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress, WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events, and Upcoming: Public events tagged with “WordCamp”.

WordPress Fan Blogs and Podcasts

Weblog Tools Collection: Recent news, Plugin and Theme reviews, and helpful posts on Weblog Tools Collection include:

Recent posts by Weblog Tools Collection include:

WordPress Plugin Releases and News: 03/02, 03/04, 03/06
WordPress Theme Releases and News: 03/03, 03/05, 03/07
WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide
WPLookup – Find Functions and Template Tags Fast
Plugin Review: Feed Reading Blogroll
Would you like to review plugins on WLTC?

WordCast Podcast: WordCast 46: WordCamp Denver Wrap-Up is the latest podcast which features a special edition summary of WordCamp Denver by Dave Moyer and Lorelle VanFossen, talking about the various speakers and our experience in the mile-high city.

WordPress Weekly Podcast: Episode 44 – Interview With Brian Gardner talked about WordPress Theme development, especially premium versus free Themes and GPL licenses. They also talked about WordPress Plugins and some WordPress trivia.

Talking WordPress Plugins: The most recent episodes of the The WordPress Plugins Podcast featured Plugins 011 – Search And Replace Plugin and Plugins 010 – Contact Form 7 Plugin.

WPHacks: Recent tips for WordPress from WPHacks includes:

WP Engineer: WP Engineer has tips and techniques for using WordPress, including:

WPRecipes: The WPRecipes site offers tips and techniques for using WordPress, and recent posts include:

WPTavern: The recent news from the WPTavern blog and forum includes:

Yoast: Yoast by Joost de Valk offers a wide range of WordPress developer and user tips and techniques. Some recent WordPress-related blog posts included:

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

Change the Web Challenge: The WordPress development team challenges you to participate in the Change the Web Challenge, a contest to create a WordPress Plugin, WordPress Widget, mash-up, hack, or other web application that “helps people find and share opportunities to take action.”

WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide: The “WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide by Vladimir Prelovac has been published and is available for sale.

BuddyPress Theme Framework: There is now a Skeleton Member Theme for BuddyPress for those who want to work with the template files to design a BuddyPress Theme. It includes all the template files and basic CSS outline documents to begin the process of styling a BuddyPress Theme.

Making Plugins Play Well With Others and AJAX: Donncha pointed to an article by Thaya Kareeson about making any Plugin play nice with the popular WP Super Cache WordPress Plugin, including how to get WordPress Plugins to work with others with dynamic AJAX calls. He also points to AJAX in Plugins from the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, and Best Practice for Adding JavaScript Code to WordPress Plugins by Vladimir Prelovac, worthwhile reads for all Plugin authors.

WP Super Cache Updated: WP Super Cache 0.9.1 is the latest version of the popular cache WordPress Plugin. Changes include bug fixes for installation and shutdown functions, warnings that caching must be enabled, improvements for Windows servers, empty supercachefolders fixed, Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin no longer conflicts, and you can relocate the Super Cache Plugins folder. Donncha has also added a donation link in the readme file and Plugin administration panel to encourage people to help keep this project going.

Pasting a Lot of Code? Just like tiny, shortcut URLs are now the fad, did you know you could do the same with code? If you are posting a lot of code on your WordPress blog, on the WordPress forums, or elsewhere, you can use a code paste bin such as Paste Bin to store your code for free and just link to it. It’s a must resource for the WordPress support forums, so why not try it with social media?

WordPress Plugin and Theme Development Tips: The following are tips and techniques for WordPress Theme and Plugin authors and developers.

WordPress 2.8 News and Development: Articles worth noting on WordPress 2.8 development include:

Running WordPress on .Net: A code project has been released into beta for a .Net version of WordPress. This is not an official WordPress release, but could prove interesting for those using Microsoft .Net.

Interesting WordPress Plugins:

List Subpages With Descriptions: WordPress Plugin
wpng-calendar WordPress Plugin from Google Code allows integration of a Google calendar into a WordPress blog.
WP Review Site WordPress Plugin turns a WordPress blog into a review site “engine” for managing reviews of products, services, entertainment, or anything, with rating systems and a variety of options.

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection Plugin and Theme announcements.

WordPress Jobs: WordPress Jobs is a WordPress Job service hosted by Weblog Tools Collection. If you are looking for a WordPress-related job to hire or for hire, you can look there and check out the Automattic WordPress Consultants List and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress.com News

February WordPress.com News: February Wrap-Up for WordPress.com includes review of the news from last month and the statistics, which include 351,904 blogs created, 776 terabytes of content transferred from their datacenters, 7,964,018 comments, and 1,022,236,821 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 948,586,171 on self-hosted blogs (1,970,822,992 total across all WordPress.com blogs). There were also seven WordCamps in February.

Blog Design Contest on WordPress.com: The first blogging design contest has been announced for WordPress.com called “I <3 Blogging Design Contest” co-produced by Infectious. This isn’t a blog web design or WordPress Theme contest. It is a graphic design contest. Design a “why I love blogging and WordPress” graphic design and if yours wins, it could be printed and sold on laptop and iPhone skins around the world through the Infectious store. Let your creative self loose and show the world how you would design what blogging and WordPress mean to you.

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Videos from WordPress.tv: WordPress.tv WordPress tips and WordCamp videos include:

WordPress Tips and Techniques: Here are a few more WordPress tips from around the WordPress Community:

WordPress Community News

Things You Need to Know in the WordPress Community:

Help Installing WordPress: Installing WordPress for Free
Finding WordPress Plugins: WordPress Plugin Directory
Finding WordPress Themes: WordPress Themes Directory
WordPress Logos: The official WordPress logos are available for use on your blogs or WordPress event promotions. Please start with the official logos even if you wish to redesign them.
WordPress Experts Found: Automattic WordPress Consultants List, WordPress Jobs, and the WP-Pro mailing list
WordPress Facebook Community: WordPress on Facebook
WordPress Bugs: Reporting Bugs in WordPress
Online WordPress Manual: WordPress Codex
Have Your Say: WordPress Ideas
WordPress is Trademarked: You are not allowed to use WordPress in your domain name.
WordPress is WordPress: It’s spelled “WordPress” not “Wordpress” and Plugin is Plugin, not plug-in (what you put into a wall electrical socket).
WordPress Schwag for Sale: WordPress Shop

Past WordPress Wednesday News Reports

WordPress News Sources

Possibly Related Posts

Exploring Social Media: Security and Monocultures

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:38:41 +0000

F-secure reports on security vulnerabilities with Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader for reading PDF files.

While this could be seen as another day-in-the-life update, the warning came with an interesting twist:

Do note that while we are recommending users move away from Adobe Reader, we are not recommending any particular replacement.

…Instead, we recommend users to find their own Adobe Reader replacement.

This way we get more heterogeneous userbase, which is a good idea security-wise. Nobody wants to repeat what happened with the great IE —> Firefox switch. As 40% of users switched to Firefox, about 40% of the attacks switched to target Firefox.

Monocultures are bad.

In the new world of online social, more and more people using the same tools, putting us all at risk as hackers and attackers move towards the natural migration of popularity. Monocultures are bad as they open the door to mass risks.

Yet, the number one cry of many computer users is consistency in look and feel. Everyone wants a single powerful interface that brings all the fabulous third-party tools and resources together to use Twitter. Adoption of Microsoft products on a wide spectrum was part of the desire to fill that need – one product everyone was familiar with and could easily exchange files and data.

The development of HTML was based upon that very premise – breaking the barrier between data so it could be shared universally. We all want a single tool that integrates all the social media tools together, so we can connect the dots in our online social life without dancing between tools and web apps.

If monocultures are bad, and hackers, time wasters, and evil doers follow us to whatever is most popular, literally worming their way into our programs and disrupting our lives, what should we do? What can we do?

The open source world is based upon options – giving users the chance to choose from a range of tools that basically do the same things, give or take, and the freedom to develop that variety. We now can choose from multiple methods to access and mashup Twitter, blogs, and other social media platforms.

With API development, we rarely interact with the tool or service itself, using third-party apps to connect. Some Twitter users go months without ever accessing the Twitter website, using the social media microblogging publishing tool through third-party apps. Meanwhile, Twitter’s core functionality stays the same and the third-party apps improve upon it.

While I’m using TweetDeck to access Twitter, and others are using PocketTweets, Twitter for iPhone, Twitterrific, Tweetr, Twhirl, Twinkle, Tweetie, Hahlo, Twittelator, and any of the other Twitter third-party access apps, if a hacker goes after one of those, only that app is impacted. But if someone really wanted to disrupt the whole of the microblogging social network, they would target the source, right?

While there is diversity, all of those services are still dependent upon the source. Isn’t that still a form of monoculture – putting all of our eggs into one basket? Sure, the eggs are all different colors, shapes and sizes, but they are riding in the same basket.

I admire F-secure for pushing protection through diversification. Unfortunately, we are a society that uses whatever came in the box, resistant to trying new things. Until we change, we are still reliant upon products and services with watchful eyes on security issues, and upon ourselves for upgrading when warned.

Possibly Related Posts

Changing the Blog Herald WordPress News: Your Help Needed

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:46:29 +0000

The Blog Herald WordPress News that I’ve been producing weekly will soon be changing, evolving naturally into something that meets the needs of the Blog Herald readers and editors. For over two years, every week almost without fail, I’ve brought you a summary of the news from around the WordPress Community. That’s over 110 issues stuffed with a ton of WordPress news, tips, resources, Plugins, and Themes. It’s time for the next step and we want you to be part of the process.

Before it changes too much, I’d like to talk about how it developed, and the choices made along the way, as it may help you if you produce your own newsletter, news digest, or similar report on your blog.

Like any major publication, and this weekly WordPress News is major weekly publication, it must be constructed with a plan and agenda, evolving slowly as the needs and production changes.

It must also serve two key purposes. It must educate and inform the readers, and serve the needs of the company it serves.

Help us improve how we deliver the WordPress news to you.

Centralizing the WordPress News

Over two years ago, there was no central location for WordPress news, and there continues to not be, except for the Blog Herald WordPress News. Matt Mullenweg would publish some news on his personal blog, Ryan Boren would release WordPress development news on his personal blog, Mark Jaquith and Andy Skelton would take turns with Plugin, Theme, and development news on their blogs, and the rest was scattered all over the place. In the early years, Matt loved encouraging (and challenging) members of the WordPress Community working on the various efforts to be the first to report on their blog, which made tracking down the news hard, but also gave everyone a moment in the sun.

The official WordPress aggregator, WordPress Planet, brought WordPress and non-WordPress stories to WordPress fans and the WordPress Administration Panel’s Dashboard. Many complained about the non-WordPress topics making it into the feed, and slowly this list was pruned down to only WordPress categories on those blogs.

This was too limiting Ozh, so he created Planet WordPress from Planet Ozh, an unofficial but well respected aggregator covering a much wider spectrum of WordPress experts. New WordPress fan blogs continue to be added to the aggregator, making it one of the most extensive resources for WordPress information.

Planet WordPress Canada was recently announced, bringing together a variety of WordPress experts and fans blogging about WordPress representing Canada. I expect that more countries and regions will soon offer their own WordPress Community aggregator, representing the best their communities have to offer to the WordPress world.

Almost since it’s conception, Weblog Tools Collection has survived two owners to stay on track as one of the most important sources and resources for WordPress news and information. Matt Mullenweg has even blogged news and editorial commentaries as a guest blogger, in keeping with the value Weblog Tools Collection brings to the WordPress Community. Owner Mark Ghosh has expanded their WordPress coverage to now include Weblog Tools Collection General WordPress News, Weblog Tools Collection Videos, forums, PressItFor.me, and the popular WordPress Jobs, a resource for WordPress experts and consultants.

There has also been a huge growth in WordPress fan blogs and podcasts. Charles Stricklin started The WordPress Podcast, and while some WordPress-oriented podcasts have come and gone, the current popular ones include WordCast, WordPress Weekly Podcast, and the new The WordPress Plugins Podcast.

While you can only find a schedule and a few updates, there is little WordCamp and WordPress event news at present on WordCamp Central, The WordCamp Report has moved from a live WordCamp San Francisco blog to a news center for all things WordCamp and WordPress events. You can also track WordPress events and WordCamps on Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events.

There are some “official” WordPress news and resource sites. WordPress started the WordPress Development Blog, the WordPress.com Blog, WordPress Publisher Blog, WordPress iPhone, WordPress.tv. Still, there is no single resource for all things official WordPress news. Whether or not there should be is a topic for another blog post.

Between the hunt for WordPress news to the now overwhelming resources for WordPress news and information, producing the Blog Herald WordPress News, the only source on the web with a summary of WordPress news from around the world, could easily be a full-time job for two to three people. Unfortunately, you are stuck with me, a WordPress workaholic fan girl.

Paring all that news down into a weekly news digest takes 4-8 hours during a normal week. Lately, there hasn’t been a “normal” WordPress news week with a growing number of WordCamps and WordPress events to cover, release information, and tips and techniques for the latest version. During a major WordPress version release, the two weeks before and the week or two after increases the time commitment to 12-20 hours a week. All the development news around WordPress 2.7 kept me working an average of 18 hours a week to produce that one weekly news summary.

No where else is there a report that brings together all the news from all over the web on WordPress. I’m proud to have developed it, and guided it’s course, and eager to see where we take it next.

The Blog Herald WordPress News Serves Reader’s Needs First

When planning and reporting the Blog Herald WordPress News, the first filter that all WordPress content passes through is “how will this help the WordPress Community.”

I would love to brag about this and that, or honk my own horn when it comes to WordPress stuff, but that’s not the point of the weekly WordPress News. It is to serve the needs of the readers and WordPress fans.

Here are my basic rules and guides for deciding what gets published on the Blog Herald WordPress News.

It must meet the guidelines in Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips such as:

WordPress spelled and capitalized properly.
All WordPress terms and references spelled and capitalized correctly.
The WordPress news, tip, technique, Theme, or Plugin applies to the masses, not individuals.
The writing is clear and specific to the topic, with a solid, keyword specific introduction, and step-by-step instructions and references.
The article’s intent is to educate, not sell.
All tips are to directly relate to the full version of WordPress and free hosted WordPress.com blogs, as well as related Automattic products such as BuddyPress, WordPressMU, and bbPress, but only as how they related specifically to WordPress users in general.

This filtering process takes time, as I pour through hundreds of articles on WordPress every week. A lot are cast aside because they ramble, take too long to get to the point, try to solve every problem in one blog post, or use WordPress tips to push their products and services. I find a lot of plagiarism and redundant information, too, which takes time to verify and find the original source.

While there are a lot of poorly formed WordPress tips, there are some hidden gems that I find all the time. It’s a needle in a hackstack some weeks, but I get so excited when I stumble upon a great resource or single post tip or WordPress Plugin I know will thrill many WordPress users. These often come from the most unlikely sources – you never know, so it’s work to plow through all of the web looking for those precious gems, often changing a life with a link in the Blog Herald WordPress News.

The same applies to WordPress Plugins. Luckily, the WordPress Plugin Directory makes it easier to find interesting WordPress Plugins, but some fabulous ones are still not listed there. Whether they are in the Directory or not, WordPress Plugin authors continue to struggle with how to clearly define and describe their Plugins, making the task of uncovering these gems part of my job as I have to speak for them.

The hierarchy of the WordPress News structure has changed over the years, from a long list to a grouped-content framework, using small graphic icons to highlight the different sections and lead the reader to the news of interest to them.

Originally, the order of the content was general WordPress news, WordPress.com news, then WordPress Plugins and Themes. As WordCamps and WordPress Meetups grew, I added the WordPress Events section, then added WordPress Tips. At the beginning of 2008, there were a number of security issues to report on, so I added the WordPress Security News section, but dropped it as there is now so little to report.

Just recently, I added the WordPress Fan Blogs and Podcasts section to highlight the work of those who have blogs and podcasts dedicated to nothing but WordPress, or at least the majority of their content. This puts top “reporters” on WordPress topics, tips, and news into the limelight where they belong. It takes a long time of watching and evaluation before a site can enter that section of the WordPress News reports, so consider it an honor and visit these wise and generous WordPress fans.

While a few WordPress news tidbits are emailed to me, I spend a tremendous amount of time in my feed reader tracking hundreds of blog, social media, and custom feeds. It’s back breaking work, but it’s important to me and the WordPress Community to keep up with all the news.

I pick up a lot of news and tips at the many WordPress and WordCamp conferences I attend and speak at, including breaking news and tips not published or hard to find.

The Future of the Blog Herald WordPress News

This is truly a labor of love as few could afford to compensate me for all the time and effort it takes to produce each issue. Accordingly, the Blog Herald WordPress News must change and evolve.

As we plan our strategies for the weekly news on WordPress, how would you like to see it change and improve? We’re playing around with breaking it up into pieces, removing elements, expanding others. It’s a balancing act to ensure that the Blog Herald doesn’t become the “WordPress” source but stays an online journal bringing you the best news, information, tips, guides, and resources from the blogging industry.

This is your WordPress News report, so what do you want and need to help you work harder and do more with WordPress?