Over the past week, two very important events in one’s online identity took place.

First, and most memorable, Facebook began offering usernames, creating a landrush, and second, Twitter began verifying user accounts.

But what if the username you wanted is no longer available? What if your name, your business name or some other element of your identity is gone. This happened to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and, most likely thousands of others.
If this happened to you, the good news is that you may have rights you can protect, especially if you are facing an obvious namesquatter, but it may be very difficult enforcing those rights on either site due to the nature of the law and the nature of Facebook and Twitter as companies.

Still, it may be worth a shot. read more

WordPress MU is the multi-user version of WordPress, which basically means that you can run several WordPress blogs within one WordPress MU installation. It is in many ways similar to WordPress, but adds this functionality along with some other small things that is needed for being your very own blog host. The most well known WordPress MU sites are WordPress.com and Edublogs.

And now, finally, WordPress MU and WordPress will merge. The MU lead developer Donncha O Caoimh said this on his blog:

Basically, the thin layer of code that allows WordPress MU to host multiple WordPress blogs will be merged into WordPress. I expect the WordPress MU project itself will come to an end because it won’t be needed any more (which saddens me), but on the other hand many more people will be working on that very same MU code which means more features and more bugfixes and faster too.

Is this good or bad? read more

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. read more

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. read more

I’ve been watching the BloodCopy debacle for some time. BloodCopy is a new blog in the Gawker Media blog network, about vampired. Problem is, it is a big ad in itself, the whole blog is a HBO promo for the TV series True Blood.

There’s disclosure, hidden away in the Gawker Media footer. There’s no “sponsored post” text or anything. The campaign is, at the very least, balancing along the edge of what is deemed OK within the blogosphere.

We’d better get used to it. read more

One of the initial writers on Duncan Riley’s news site The Inquisitr is leaving today. JR Raphael is a heavyweight in the tech sphere, with a contributing editor gig at PC World and a lot of other big workplaces under his belt. And now he’s leaving The Inquisitr to launch his own site, eSarcasm.

I caught up with both Duncan and JR for a brief interview about what sparked this move. Duncan had this to say:

JR Raphael was with you from day 1 with The Inquisitr. What did he bring to the table?

We were always fortunate to have JR’s services. I’ve never judged applicants by their resume alone, and always looked at writing style and eye for content, but in JR’s case I saw both. As well as writing for MSNBC, PC World, The Washington Post and Yahoo Tech, he’s also won two Emmy’s. Yeah, if that sounds like an insane resume to you, imagine how I felt. The resume should have frightened me off, but none the less he got the gig.

read more

StudioPress is growing, and the themes are getting some serious SEO treatment thanks to the latest member of the team: Joost de Valk, of WordPress fame. Brian Gardner and Joost de Valk have their own respective announcement posts up. They are both really happy with the partnership, this from the latters blog post:

So we are partnering up. I’m going to be optimizing all the StudioPress themes, and offering StudioPress customers advice on how to optimize their sites in regular blog posts and in a new blog optimization package we’ll be offering through StudioPress.

I caught up with Brian Gardner for a really quick chat about this latest development for StudioPress. read more

Variety reports that Twitter is doing a TV show:

The San Francisco-based web phenom has partnered with Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment to develop an unscripted TV skein described as “putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.”

Naturally, that set the blogosphere abuzz with rumors of at Twitter show, reactions and whatnot. However, it turns out that the Variety report wasn’t all that it seemed to be. A post on the Twitter Blog goes on about the openness of Twitter, how various TV networks are utilizing it, and more.

However, Biz Stone sets it all straight as well: There is no Twitter show. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have visions though. read more

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. read more

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? read more