Blogs News & Articles

A new platform that fuses online collaboration, community development, content management and business tools has just been unveiled over the weekend by Concursive Corporation. The new solution, which includes an open source version, ConcourseConnect will enable users to create online communities with embedded Web 2.0 tools like blogs, forums and wikis

Blogs have come along way. We know this because women say so.

According to the 2009 Women in Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, women are nearly twice as likely to use blogs than social networking sites as a source of information (64%), advice and recommendations (43%) and opinion-sharing (55%). It's not that they don't use social networking sites, it's just that they use for conventional means, like keeping in touch with friends and family.

The principal additions to the latest version of Traction Software’s TeamPage (news, site), which has recently been released, are new plugins that will allow companies analyze user activity on enterprise blogs, wiki pages and other interactive platforms.

TeamPage 4.1, Traction says, will allow a company to identify even complex patterns in user habits and, in doing so, adapt enterprise wikis, or blogs, to suit the needs or requirements of the people in the company that use it.

Ahh, blogs. Random chatter? News? A combination of the two? It's a question often posed by those who aim to study new media. In an attempt to monitor the blogosphere and compare it to the realms of traditional media, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has launched the New Media Index which aims to track over 100 million blogs and 250 million social media outlets.

Forrester isn't the only analyst firm taking a close look at Social Media. CMS Watch has taken a hard look at some of the top social software and collaboration tools on the market today. Unlike Forrester, however, they are looking at more than just community tools for interactive marketing.

If you have been unsure about how to use all these neat (yes I said neat) social media tools in a way that benefits your organization and not just ties up your employees time, this report will help.

For every mob of journalists shrieking about the demise of print, there is this guy: Joshua Karp. He's the founder and funder of The Printed Blog, the "world's first" daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated material.

Sure, the concept of producing output based solely on the work of citizen journalists has been done before, but this times it's different. Karp is taking things off of the web and putting them in print.

If you want a little more control or flexibility with your blogging, using a desktop blogging client is a good choice. Not to stereotype, but those creative blogging types usually come fitted with their own Macs. They want a blogging tool that will let them be who they are without forcing them into the constraints of templates and standard front ends.

Yet, of all the hip, savvy software preloaded onto Macs, none really include a true blogging client (iWeb doesn't count).

If you crave a desktop blogging tool rather than a broswer-based interface to help you write your cool posts, CMSWire offers a few suggestions.

With the move to a new infrastructure finally nearing completion, TypePad is starting release more new features designed to take your blog's community to the greater social web. Three new features recently implemented include profiles, enhanced commenting and TypePad Connect.

All these enhancements and the latest batch of TypePad powered services -- AntiSpam, Blog It, Blog Link  -- demonstrate the work that Six Apart is doing with TypePad to make blogging a much more community oriented world.

Groupwise 8 is now available via Novell. The release aims to boosts personal productivity with a customizable dashboard that allows users to interact with traditional and Web 2.0. tools, from e-mail to blogs. It also provides a flexible and reliable tool on a platform that is able to run on multiple servers and clients -- including Windows, Linux, Mac and the Web.

Six Apart, the producer of blogging platform Movable Type, has announced layoffs of up to 8% of its full time staff. The company behind other popular products and services such as MT Pro, Vox and TypePad is a force in the blogging world. Movable Type is a very popular blogging platform, powering many Weblogs on the Internet.

In addition to laying off 16 employees, the entire management staff is taking a 15% pay cut.

The popular micro CMS and blogging engine WordPress is getting ever closer to releasing version 2.7 of their platform. With the final version likely coming later in the month, version 2.7 beta 2 was recently released.

A welcome and much-needed new feature in WordPress 2.7 is support for threaded comments and comment paging. Also, if a site administrator wants to keep a certain post at the top of the page, WordPress now features “sticky” posts to accomplish the task.

Though the changing US political landscape has instilled hope among the masses, there’s little to go around in the print industry as of late.

Lots of lay-offs are impending and merges between print and digital media are inevitable.

This week in the Web publishing industry has been a little bit of everything: from blogs to online content, from social media to online visitors.

We have also learned that 95 of the top 100 newspapers have blogs. As far as the numbers go, it was a great week to be an online publisher.

O, the wonderful world of Web publishing. There’s never a dull moment, that’s for sure. This week has abounded with all kinds of news about acquisitions, applications and product launches — after awhile, it all seems to blend together.

In attempt to straighten it all out, we offer the following synthesis.

The company behind the WordPress blogging platform has just announced their acquisition of PollDaddy.

That’s right, Automattic and the Web-based polling and survey company are now intertwined. Based out of Sligo, Ireland, PollDaddy offers free polls with the option to run more detailed and advanced surveys at an annual rate.