Posts tagged Bloggers
[UPDATED] Anonymous Trolls Tech Bloggers, But Who Are The Real Trolls?
Jan 25th
Noticed some Facebook downtime? We have. It’s intermittent, but Facebook has some trouble with uptime right now, and a Twitter account representing Anonymous claims responsibility (somewhat obliquely, in order to troll tech bloggers).
In some kind of conflation of Facebook with the government, a puppet representing Anonymous threatened Facebook with an attack in retaliation for SOPA/PIPA (though other Anonymous sources denied involvement). That was scheduled for three days from now. The organization has declared war against Facebook in the past, but Facebook is no ordinary target. It’s the cream of the crop. It’s practically never down. Has Anonymous finally cracked it?
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cough cough, uh, looks like facebook.com is having a slight accessibility problem. #Anonymous
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012
Well, no. Facebook is still working right now, but not reliably. It has completely failed to load in a few of our tests. Thomas Knoll posted a screenshot of the outage on Google+ at 5:17 p.m.. (Update 7:10 p.m.: We’ve confirmed with Facebook that the site issues this afternoon were caused by a code push. That’s all it was.)
Just two days ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) drafted a new readiness plan for dealing with attacks from the likes of Anonymous. Maybe President Obama’s “cyber threats” from last night’s State of the Union address are real, after all.
UPDATE 5:45 p.m.: The @YourAnonNews account claims to have called off the attack (again indirectly).
You are now free to play Farmville and Mobwars.
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012
UPDATE 6:37 p.m.: One “official” Anonymous outlet denies responsibility outright.
#Facebook.com is NOT under denial of service attack. STOP LYING.
— AnonOps (@anonops) January 26, 2012
Now the first one says it trolled us. And it did. But I ask you: Who are the real trolls here? The ones who make stuff up, or the ones who report their made-up stuff as dubious, probably made-up stuff?
Facebook down? goo.gl/lZo9n — Bwahaha, trolled! #Anonymous ^_^
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012
See also: How Could Anonymous “Destroy” Facebook?
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Posts Genius Connects SEO Firms and Marketers Worldwide with Bloggers to … – Sacramento Bee
Jan 23rd
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Posts Genius Connects SEO Firms and Marketers Worldwide with Bloggers to …
Sacramento Bee Posts Genius enables advertisers, SEO firms and other marketers to find and hire bloggers for the creation of targeted blog posts and reviews. "Advertisers can have Posts Genius bloggers write reviews for a website, product or service in order to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Posts Genius Connects SEO Firms and Marketers Worldwide with Bloggers to … – MarketWatch (press release)
Jan 23rd
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Posts Genius Connects SEO Firms and Marketers Worldwide with Bloggers to …
MarketWatch (press release) Posts Genius enables advertisers, SEO firms and other marketers to find and hire bloggers for the creation of targeted blog posts and reviews. "Advertisers can have Posts Genius bloggers write reviews for a website, product or service in order to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
WordPress Throws a Lifeline to Abandoned Splinder.com Bloggers
Jan 10th
What do you do when your blogging service is slated to go dark? If you’re a user of the popular Italian blogging service Splinder.com, you pack up and move over to WordPress.com. At least, that’s what Automattic is hoping while it throws a lifeline to the bloggers that are being thrown out into the cold.
Splinder.com announced the shutdown in November of last year. Today Daryl L. L. Houston announced an importer for Splinder.com on WordPress.com that’s available to users ahead of the closure, slated for January 31st.
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Splinder.com is probably not well-known in North America, but it’s very popular according to Alexa.com. It has (as of right now) a global rank of 3,798 and is in the top 250 sites for Italy. It’s no WordPress.com (ranks 18th globally) but it still has quite a few users. How many? It hosts about half a million blogs, according to Archive.org and 55 million pages.
Houston provides a good overview of how to export data from Splinder.com and import into WordPress.com, as well as a pointer to the WordPress.com tutorial.
Self-Hosting?
As a side note, this is why I’ve always been a self-hosted user of WordPress. Even if the unthinkable happened and WordPress development just stopped, the site would be under my control. Splinder.com folks are learning the hard way that when the service is out of your control, you might be left in the lurch.
To be sure, I don’t expect this to happen to WordPress.com anytime soon. However, if you’d rather have full control over your site, you can always move your Splinder.com posts over to a self-hosted WordPress blog. It’s an extra step, but worth it. Import your Splinder.com blog to WordPress.com, then import that blog into a self-hosted version of WordPress with the WordPress importer.
Exporting from a WordPress.com blog.
Start with the steps on the WordPress.com post. Then head to the WordPress.com Dashboard for your new blog and export all content. Then upload the file into a self-hosted WordPress.com blog and you’re ready to blog away happily. You can set the WordPress.com blog to private (under Settings -> Privacy Settings) so that you won’t have duplicate content floating about on the Web.
The really important thing, if you have a Splinder.com blog, is to export that data straight away. The WordPress.com folks are looking for feedback about bugs in the importer, so it’d be best if users try importing right away and report any problems sooner rather than later.
Importing into a self-hosted WordPress blog.
Smart Move
This is a smart (and nice) move on the part of Automattic. It probably didn’t take a ton of development time to create an importer for the service. By creating the importer, they have an opportunity to sign up a fair number of users who will be grateful for the lifeline. It seems Automattic is making a habit of rescuing users when other sites shut their doors. That’s not a bad thing. Users need a place to go when sites with failed business plans, or no business plans, shut the doors.
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WordAds: WordPress Declares Bloggers Deserve an Alternative to AdSense
Nov 29th
Early this morning, WordPress announced a new program that will finally allow bloggers to monetize the 24 million WordPress.com blogs with advertising. The program, which developed out of a new partnership with Federated Media, is named WordAds. Although the launch occurred sooner than most were expecting, WordPress.com and Federated Media first announced their partnership at [...]
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Gulf Bloggers Pardoned
Nov 29th
The five bloggers from the United Arab Emirates who were sentenced to between two and three years in prison yesterday were today pardoned. Ahmed Mansour, Nasser Bin Ghaith, Farhad Salem Hassan, Ali Al-Khamis and Ahmed Abdul Khaleq, were sentenced for “insulting” the leadership of the U.A.E. and fomenting discord by encouraging protests and a democracy petition.
Although we’re glad the innocent men were pardoned (their “crimes” are crimes only in highly controlling states and are not recognized as such by organizations like the United Nations) it was clear that the message of both the prosecution and pardon was this: the leadership of the country owns you.
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Reporters Without Borders describes a smear campaign that was conducted against the defendants after they were arrested in April.
“After their arrest, the UAE Five were the targets of a smear campaign launched on the Internet and carried by some local media outlets. Their critics, who accused them of treason, organised demonstrations outside the Abu Dhabi court and did not baulk at threatening the families of the accused.
“In a joint statement issued on 10 November the five accused the websites Lethal Character and Proud Emirati of being behind the campaign and of fanning a climate of hostility towards them and their families.”
One of those threatening death was another Emirati poet, Antonio Salieri. I beg your pardon. That was a typo. I meant Saïd Bakhit Al-Kutubi.
The five had been on a hunger strike for several weeks.
The whole thing was a shameful spectacle. Given that the U.A.E. is, by and large, a very stable country, it was also an unnecessary one.
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Gulf Bloggers Sentenced to Prison
Nov 27th
Today, the Federal Supreme Court of the United Arab Emirates, acting as the “State Security Court,” sentenced five bloggers to prison time. Pioneering Emirati blogger Ahmed Mansour received the harshest sentence, three years. The other four received sentences of two years each.
Mansoor was charged in April with a very popular “crime” among the tyrannies that crack down on difference of opinion: “insult.” In this case, insulting the U.A.E.’s leadership; specifically, the Vice President of Abu Dhabi.
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Mansoor is a prominent blogger in the Arab World. He is also a communications engineer and published poet. One of his publishers was the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. Mansoor was the creator and administrator of the Web forum “Hiwar” (which means Dialogue in Arabic), which the court ordered shut down. His fellow defendants were active on the site.
Others sentenced, according to Agence France Presse, were Nasser bin Gaith, a lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Sorbonne University, activists Fahid Salim Dalk, Hassan Ali Khamis and Ahmed Abdul Khaleq. They were also convicted with insulting the country’s leadership, as well as “calling for a boycott of September’s Federal National Council elections and… anti-government demonstrations.”
The trial took five months, according to Reuters.
International human rights groups condemned the kangaroo court. Among other things, the “crime” of insult is not recognized as such by most countries. The sentences are clearly disproportionate (precedent for the law they were convicted under treated the crimes as misdemeanours) and used by a frightened oligarchy who fear their loss of privilege, despite the country being only lightly touched by the Arab Spring that has swept through the region.
Supporters have taken to Twitter to register their opinions on the “U.A.E. 5,” as they are called, with the hashtag #uae5.
Other sources: TNW
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SEO Plug-in Helps Bloggers Optimize Content – Search Engine Watch
Oct 31st
 PR Web |
SEO Plug-in Helps Bloggers Optimize Content
Search Engine Watch For now, Eightfold Logic's SEO plug-in takes care of one concern with what was, until recently, a stand-alone web application; that it added an extra step for bloggers. Inbound Writer told Search Engine Watch they're working on features to make the … BizCloud Computing Consultants Offer 6 Essential SEO Tips for Business Blog … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Plug-in Helps Bloggers Optimize Content
Oct 31st
Last month, we had a look at an InboundWriter study that showed how search and social intelligence provided to writers during the content creation process can increase quality score, time on page, search traffic, and conversion to sale. What we fe…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Federated Media Offers Ad Rights for WordPress Bloggers
Oct 19th
At the Web 2.0 Summit today, Federated Media Publishing and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, announced an agreement to provide advertising rights for U.S. WordPress.com bloggers. Over 24 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, and users will now be able to opt into a topically targeted advertising program.
Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.
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Monetizing The Long Tail
Independent publishers on WordPress represent the long tail of Web content. They publish on specific topics for niche audiences. That makes their individual reach small, in terms of raw traffic numbers, but their audiences are highly engaged with particular interests. They’re valuable, but they’re hard to reach at scale.
Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks to improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content. Lijit offers publishers an on-site search box that searches across multiple sites, including blogs, tweets, bookmarks and photos. Publishers can adjust the constraints to include outside content if they want, making Lijit searches a powerful way for visitors to explore topics in more depth. Lijit reports that over 70,000 publishers currently use their service.
In turn, the rich site data gathered by Lijit enables precise and relevant ad targeting, and it has served over 28.3 billion ads so far this year. Lijit’s technology, Federated Media’s scale, and the WordPress.com audience represent a big chunk of high-quality, topically focused Web traffic that major advertisers like AOL, Yahoo! and Google have more trouble monetizing.
This partnership will offer small publishers a way to monetize, and it will give FMP the additional scale of reaching almost 300 million monthly unique visitors to WordPress.com sites.
The State of the Word is Strong
In August, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word address, in which he reported some strong numbers. Nearly 15% of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run WordPress.
The open-source blogging platform also provides a thriving economy for developers. A survey of over 18,000 WordPress users and developers offers rich insight into the strength of the platform, and it’s all available for anyone to peruse.
You can watch Mullenweg’s 2011 address here:
WordPress users: would you opt in to this new ad partnership? Let us know in the comments.
Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb’s advertising partner.
Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.
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