Did you know that you are for sale on Twitter already? read more

Duncan Riley has announced the addition of Paul Montgomery as the in-house sports writer on The Inquisitr. Montgomery is a journalist by trade, and with the addition the site now features a dedicated sports category.

Riley also announced a syndication deal with BANG Showbiz, which means that The Inquisitr can run up to ten stories from their celebrity content stock, as an addition to the regular celebrity coverage. Finally, Riley also announced a deal with GumGum for celebrity photography. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, especially the syndication deal.

As for traffic, Riley reports that pageviews are down in June, 2.7 million to 2.55. He calls it a comfortable level.

While Google may be looking into making Twitter searchable, Microsoft has already started implementing its own real-time search into Bing.

At present it’s a fairly limited offering, indexing “some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres”.

It seems that you can only search for the latest tweets from certain people who have been indexed, using syntax such as “[name] Twitter” or “[name] Tweets” or “@[name]”.

As a concept, it’s a good start though I’m not interested in using any search engine to find anyone’s latest tweets — I use Twitter or one of its desktop clients for that. read more

Web network Glam Media is a fan of microblogging, it seems. Following the set up and monetization of a moderated Oscars Twitter feed this year, the company has announced that it’s to roll out the Tinker.com conversation aggregator in the UK over the next few months.

Tinker.com was launched in the US last month and will trial in the UK before being fully implemented and funded by advertising.

Conversations being held across Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed are currently aggregated by the service. read more

CBS Interactive has recruited blogger Richard Lawson from Gawker, according to Silicon Alley Insider who also has a quote from Lawson:

I’ll basically be doing what I do now, just probably fewer posts a day plus some actual reviews and stuff. I’m excited/nervous/gassy. All that.

Richard Lawson is one of the key entertainment writers on Gawker, and apparently averaged 2.4 million pageviews per month which is top of the bill according to the SAI story. In other words, a blow to the Gawker Media network, not only by the loss of a writer but also in pure money since it is unlikely that his replacement will reach the same levels quickly.

Lawson will write for CBS Interactive’s TV.com.

The hub of all things WordPress, as in the kind you install on your own, is wordpress.org. There’s both a plugin and a theme directory there, and the latter has now gotten some commercial (aka premium) themes treatment. However, the new page merely lists some resellers of commercial GPL themes, so this is not the marketplace a lot of people has been waiting for.

Some of them you may pay for access, some of them are membership sites, some may give you the theme for zero-cost and just charge for support. What they all have in common is people behind them who support open source, WordPress, and its GPL license.

If you’re selling GPL themes for WordPress you can get listed, just scroll down to the bottom of the page. Personally, I think the themes should be hosted on wordpress.org so that they got automatic updates and so on, but that’s a whole other story. I do hope this is just the first step of many in this area, but we’ll see. An official blog post has yet to outline this addition, which might or might not have been up for some time, I really can’t tell.

Twitter has applied to trademark the word “Tweet” says the official blog. They think it is an obvious attachment to the Twitter brand, but say they have no intentions of going after users of the word.

We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of “going after” the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.

That’s good, I think. It is also good that they come clean and say that they are “a bit more wary” about the use of Twitter in projects. So cancel that Twitter Herald project and find another name, you might get in trouble otherwise. read more

Pingdom is a widely used service that monitors uptime and notifies you whenever a site goes down, as well as gives you the data you need to whine at your webhost’s 99.99% uptime guarantees whenever they fail to meet their promise. Up until now, it has been a paid service, but now you can get an account for free.

Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.

You also get 20 SMS alerts for free as well, which is nice. Naturally, you can upgrade your account to monitor more sites and get more SMS alerts (email is free) and so on whenever you like. Which of course is the whole idea.

Give it a go, free is the best price ever and I can, as a user, honestly say that Pingdom is great. Particularly when you don’t hear from them…!

Twitter has added a couple of neat features to your Following List interface. Now you can see the most recent tweets, a straight list as before, and more with a contextual menu to the side. read more

Sam Sethi, the former TechCrunch writer, BlogNation owner, and Twitblogs founder, has filed a lawsuit against TechCrunch. For what, you might wonder? Nothing less than “a series of libelous postings” according to the lawsuit letter exchange reposted on Arrington’s CrunchNotes blog. There are some juicy details about Sethi there too, including claims that he’s being sued and is or was barred from being a director or manager for a company. I’ll not recount that though, since Arrington obviously is a party in this mess.

I’ll say this though, I love the openness of which Arrington treats these things. I know I’d think twice before publishing something from a law firm with this in the heading:

Letter Before Action
Private & Confidential (Not For Publication)