FTC Guidelines on Blogger Disclosure, Have You Done Something About it?

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Just a gentle reminder to everyone, especially if you do product reviews on your blogs that today,  FTC’s new regulation covering blogger disclosure takes into effect.  If you haven’t done so yet, it’s either you’re playing hardball or you’re not a celebrity blogger or endorser popular enough for the FTC notice your practice and actually goes after you.

In case you forgot (I personally did, except that FTC rulings does not apply to us non-US based bloggers I guess), the revised FTC guide states that

“…the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

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WP Robot Plugin Gets Updated to 2.0 with More Auto Features

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wprobotpluginFrankly, I don’t really like autoblogging. Putting time stamp to future post is alright especially if you are on a tight schedule and auto-posting is the only way you can fulfill your posting schedule.

But auto-posting using an autoblogging plugin such as WP Robot, which just released its version 2.0, is not really my cup of tea. In case you’re not aware, autoblogging is used by blogs that were created for affiliate marketing purposes or revenue-generating schemes through the use of aggregated content culled automatically from affiliate networking sites. [Read more…]

Tweetie 2.1 iPhone App Adds Retweet, Lists and GeoLocation Features

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Screen shot 2009-11-30 at 8.06.44 PMFrankly, I really don’t dig why anyone would actually pay for an iPhone app that can be had for free through another app. Take the case of Tweetie iPhone which has just released its version 2.1 (iTunes Link). While the newest version of this iPhone app is sprinkled with new features such as retweet, list and geolocation, it is still being offered as a paid app. The thing is, there are other Twitter iPhone which won’t cost you a dime to have on your iPhone. Are these features worthy of the price you have to pay to get the app? [Read more…]

Will Pay-Per-Tweet Work?, Twitter Japan Ready to Test it

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twitter_japanIn terms of getting ahead of the latest gizmos and other electronic devices, I envy our friends living in Japan. But when it comes to getting premium Twitter updates from, say famous celebrities and other personalities, I would rather not be in Japan. I mean if that is the only way I could follow those people, I’d rather follow my friends and their free non-sense tweets on Twitter.

Reports had it that Twitter Japan’s latest move to differentiate it’s service from its global counterpart is a tierred payment model that will charge Japanese Twitter users for viewing tweets from Premium Twitter accounts. How’s that for Twitter being a free online communication tool? [Read more…]

WordPress.com Rolls Out Blog Subscription Widget

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Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 7.48.34 PMKnow what? I’m starting to like WordPress.com as free blog hosting site. I mean at least, it continues to improve its services not unlike its rival – Google Blogger which seems to have stagnated for quite awhile now.

So aside from the recent geotagging feature that was rolled out recently, WordPress.com has also introduced another important feature – email subscriptions. Yes I know,  like me you are also wondering why WordPress.com took this long to have this feature. But hey, better late than never, right?

Anyway, to add email subscriptions to your WordPress.com blog, you need to add the blog subscription widget to your blogs. Fortunately, it’s just as easy as clicking a button once you logged on to your WordPress.com account. [Read more…]

Pixazza is Like Google AdSense for Blog Images

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pixazzaTo be honest while I was exploring this new income-generating scheme offered by Google-ventures back Pixazza, the first thing that came into my mind was those in-text advertising that pops-out whenever you hover onto link in a blog post. Only this time, Pixazza is doing it with blog images.

So what is Pixazza really?  In their own words:

Pixazza is a new platform that allows shoppers to buy products from photos seen on websites of our web publishing partners. Our unique capability allows these web publishers to generate  incremental revenues by “visual commerce enabling” the images that already exists on their websites.

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We Asked, Matt Answered – WordPress and Windows Azure Explained

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Update: Here’s the  link to Matt’s post at the WordPress Publishers Blog explaining his appearance on stage at the PDC.

When I asked a couple of days ago why Matt Mullenweg was in Microsoft’s PDC, I was never really expecting Matt to read my post and answer the question. Back then, it was just reported that he was called onstage by Microsoft’s Ray Oozie but what he talked about was not reported yet then.

A good fellow that he is, Matt was kind enough to leave a comment on my post and posted the link to the transcript of what transpired during the PDC, particularly on what he talked about. [Read more…]

Pikk Gives New Twist to Social News Polling

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pikklogoRecently, startup Pikk.com joined the ranks of Digg, Mixx and other social news/blog links aggregation sites.  In the company’s own words:

Pikk is a link aggregation service that lets users submit and vote on stories. Every story is submitted with two choices, such as “thrive or fail.” Stories with the most votes make it to the front page.

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What Was Matt Mullenweg Doing at the Microsoft Conference?

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Automaticc’s Matt Mullenweg appeared on stage, together with Microsoft’s CTO Ray Ozzie during their Professional Developers Conference. Ray was talking about Microsoft’s latest foray into the cloud computing niche called WindowsAzure.

According to reports, WindowsAzure will let Microsoft’s corporate clients to write code on a cloud-based OS running on Microsoft’s data centers. WindowsAzure is about to go live sometime in January. It’s obviously a paid service which will have business corporations as the main clients.

But what was Matt’s business there? [Read more…]

Tim Berners-Lee and W3C Announces New Projects

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photo_tbernerslee-118x150Of course you all know who we refer to as the father of the web, right? – The one and only Sir Tim Berners – Lee. Berners-Lee is set to go on a trip to Africa, particularly Kenya and Uganda, to meet with several government leaders, educators and development workers. Part of the discussions that will be held during the meetings will be on various local web initiatives relating to health and education.

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