Happy Monday, folks! Lots to cover this week, so let’s start with the release of Movable Type 4.32. This is a fairly minor release — no security issues, just a handful of changes. What’s remarkable about this release is the inclusion of the Zemanta plugin. If you’re not familiar with Zemanta, they help you find content on the web related to what you’re writing that you can include in your blog post. The Zemanta plugin has been around for a while, but now it’s being distributed with MT. I can’t recall Six Apart ever bundling a third-party plugin with MT before. Several times they’ve bought popular third-party plugins and made them part of the core — not really an option when the plugin is tied to a web service.
Clearly, this is the product of some kind of partnership between 6A and Zemanta. Since the plugin is open source, 6A can include it in MTOS with no licensing issues. Still, some users have complained. Since it’s tied to a commercial service it smells non-free, even though the plugin is GPL and it functions for free. There are those that feel this plugin should have been limited to the commercial verson of MT, rather than included in MTOS. So far, 6A shows no signs of changing things based on these complaints. read more
The results of last month’sBlogging for a Cause are in (in fact, they were in last week but I was on vacation so missed the announcement).
Though it was a fairly small online campaign by some standards, it generated over 400 blog posts in support of around 60 charities and not-for-profit organizations. read more
Zemanta will give away $6,000 to the most blogged about charities during May as part of the Blogging For a Cause challenge.
Three grand will come from the prize money Zemanta won at the Change The Web Challenge last week, while the other half will come from partner Weber Shandwick’s Social Innovation Greenhouse.
Zemanta’s CEO, Ales Spetic, said, “It doesn’t matter what you normally blog about, we want you to write at least one post this month about the cause or charity that matters the most to you. read more
Zemanta, the third-party blogging service that recently extended its reach to Safari and Chrome users, has announced that its users can now gain access to the Last.fm music database.
Bloggers using the service can now add contextual links to relevant tracks, videos, artist pages and other content stored in the Last.fm database.
Practically, this means that users who write about musicians and bands will gain access to a variety of information including biographies, artist photos and music video pages — and it’s all legal.
This will probably suit music and entertainment bloggers more than others, but others may find it useful to be able to link to this trusted information from time to time without fear of breaking copyright.
Zemanta, which Jonathan picked up on last year in his five sources for free and legal images feature, has just announced that its technology is now available for both Safari and Chrome.
This means that users who’ve elected not to use Firefox or Internet Explorer can now have access to Zemanta’s content searching and sharing services. read more
