Black and white blog posts aren’t nearly as successful as they used to be. Though blogging is a timeless way to convey information to consumers and garner attention for your website, if you don’t have enough visual interest within that platform, you’ll have a difficult time making them stay. [Read more…]
Fwix launches local news revenue-sharing service: AdWire
With the increasing number of publishers creating hyper-local sites, it’s no surprise that services such as AdWire are springing up to allow them to add a new stream of relevant advertising and earn revenue.
AdWire, from Fwix, is a local news distribution system which allows web publishers to add widgets to their sites that will provide local news and ads.
AdWire serves up news based on particular categories that a publisher sets, but it also takes visitors’ geography into consideration when serving content, hopefully keeping stories relevant.
Ads are served in between main content. [Read more…]
feedforward: New Blog Traffic Driver? Lucien Burm Believes So
We caught up with Lucien Burm, founder of Kimengi, which has created an interesting new tool for bloggers called feedforward (see demo). Here’s the interview.
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1. How do you explain what feedforward and Kimengi do to people who have never heard of them before?
The first thing I say is that we create a more lateral web, but most of times I need to explain two things first: recommendations and widgets.
Everyone knows about recommendations that webshops provide, such as ‘people bought this, also bought…’. So at first I explain to people that this is the functionality we provide. Then I talk about our widget as a very smart website within a website that can create the same kind of recommendations on your blog/title and even better. It is better because all widgets on all participating sites can work together creating cross-site recommendations. And then, the recommendations are not only based on what other people liked, we look into context too. [Read more…]
Getting “tangled up” in iWeb ’09
A raise of hands please: Blogger? Joomla? Moveable Type? WordPress?
In the world of blogging, these are more than likely the top platforms you’ll recommend to friends if they’re out to set up a new blog. But how many out there will actually recommend using iWeb? Wait, let me rephrase that question. How many Mac users will actually recommend using iWeb for publishing your blog?
How many of you are running blogs built on iWeb? [Read more…]
Amazon Launches Blog Widget
This is an interesting move from Amazon. They are adding a Amazon Blogs Widget, a new feature that lets you embed the latest blog posts from a selection of eight blogs writing about stuff that Amazon sells. If you’re an Associates member (ie got an account for their affiliate program) you can earn money on sales generated through the widget links.
Check it out, along with the new author stores, which is basically designed author product listings. Great for niche bloggers, and consumers as well I guess.
Movable Type Monday: Benchmarks, Importing, Forums, and More
Happy Monday, folks! For this week’s Movable Type news, let’s start out with some benchmarking. Alwyn Botha tested 2,200 websites to compare load times of various CMS applications. There’s a lot of data to sift through there, but overall Movable Type did very well, averaging the fastest load time of the systems tested. Alwyn attributes this to the static publishing system that is commonly used by MT sites.
Does fast page loading convince you to switch over to MT? If so, check out the blog conversion tools found by Technology Bites. They provide conversion between several popular blogging applications. You can download these open source tools, or use them from one of the Google App Engine sites that host them. [Read more…]
