FTC says bloggers must disclose payments and freebies when reviewing products or risk being fined $16,000: This morning, the Federal Trade Commission published their Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials with changes that affect testimonial advertising, bloggers and celebrity endorsements. Though these are guidelines and not regulations, bloggers could face civil fines up to $16,000 and advertisers could also face fines.
Interesting to note is that there are no guidelines on how to disclose relationships and this has no effect on blogs, corporations and relationships outside of the US. The new rules would apply to any transfer of value in exchange for publicity but seems very watered down in its execution. TechMeme is full of reverberations, but is there a lot to worry about for the everyday blogger?
My question is, have you ever received money or gifts for your posts? Have you been offered products in exchange for writing reviews? […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, advertising
Twitterized answer? Abso-freakin-lutely! Take a look at the following graph. It shows the pageviews and unique visitors on this blog from mobile browsers since we started tracking last year. Notice the numbers and the trends? How many of your visitors, do you think, come back to your blog after your page takes five minutes to load on their iPhone, and needs the twenty flick, carpal thumb scroll to read browse through the huge header? If you care about your reader and want to keep up with this growing populations’ reading habits, a mobile plugin on your blog is a necessity. Now what you use is up to you.
Mobile Statistics
We use MoFuse on this blog and I must add it is somewhat successful. The mobile pages are decent, the pages load relatively fast and the statistics are nice. But the admin pages are painfully slow and MoFuse injects their own ads […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
Posting content to blogs has been becoming easier and easier everyday, with apps for iPhone, Nokia S60 and the soon to be introduced Blackberry app for WordPress, users can quickly post content to their blogs.
Yahoo Mail has introduced a new set of applications for their webmail service, and one of them is a WordPress application which will allow you to post content to either your WordPress.com or WordPress.org account from within Yahoo Mail, the interesting thing about this application is that you can drag and drop emails on the application to create new blog posts.
Here is a quick walkthrough on how you can publish posts to your WordPress blog using Yahoo Mail.
Enable WordPress Application
The first thing you will need to do is enable the WordPress application in Yahoo Mail, to do that click on the Add link next to the Applications menu item in the sidebar, enable WordPress in the […]
Original post by Keith Dsouza
Technorati Tags: blog, yahoo
Twitter, WordPress execs in Iraq to help country use new media - CNN.com. Interesting piece on CNN today about Raanan Bar-Cohen, one of nine technology executives, who begin their third day in Iraq on Tuesday as part of a U.S. State Department-led trip on how the war-battered country can effectively use new media as it rebuilds. Go Raanan! He has posted a couple of entries from Baghdad and has a few photos up on Flickr.
Technorati Tags: blog, rss
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, rss, technology
What is Post Templates?
If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages.
Screenshots
To create a template from scratch, you can use the new admin bar group “Templates.”
After clicking “New Post Template”, you will be brought to the edit template page.
After you’re finished creating your template, you can create a post from that template through the template edit page itself or the template management page.
To create a template from an old post, you can use the “Templatize” button on the post listing page.
What I Like About It
What I love most about this plugin is simply what it does. I am a WordPress plugin developer myself […]
Original post by Thaya Kareeson
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging
Let me start off by saying that this post will not talk about how to get sponsors, how to determine prizes, or how to determine rules for a blog contest. This post will talk about how to tweak your WordPress blog to solve the biggest problem in running a blog contest to gain RSS subscribers.
Problem
The issue here is that there is no easy way to track if each contestant has actually subscribed to your RSS feed. Without the ability to confirm RSS subscription, anybody can just claim that they have subscribed to your feed and get a free entry into the contest.
Solution
A known solution to this problem is to include a special contest code into your RSS feed and not have this code visible on your website. That way each contestant will be forced to grab the code from your feed and submit the code via comments […]
Original post by Thaya
Technorati Tags: blog, rss, feed
Matt has put together a tool to easily access (most) of the WordPress.org Plugin stats API using a simple GET string. It returns data back as JSON, and you can see the docs + example at http://api.uproot.us Though the functionality is dependent on the future availability of the endpoint at uproot.us (I wish the source for the API was available), I can see lots of possibilities for plugin developers.
Drew has put together a tutorial to optimize your Apache VPS for WordPress that is worth a looksee if you are running a small VPS and need that extra oomph.
Lastly, via Zedomax, I came upon a small tweak for MySql that could (and has in my case) dramatically improve MySql performance. Check out Angsuman’s tip and explanation if you are interested. Be forewarned that this might have other impacts on your MySql depending on the amount and type of load and queries, […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, news
Wordmobi: Wordpress Client for S60.: Wordmobi is a WordPress client for the Symbian S60 series of devices. You do need to download and install Python on your device for this client to work.
30 Excellent WordPress video Tutorials lists a lot of good videos including videos for administration of WordPress, getting started, theme development and WordPress tools.
Blogo is a blog editor for the Mac and Mashable has a nice review for the application. The new release also adds comment moderation for Wordpress 2.7 or higher, improved Safari integration, and offline editing. I presonally never got into desktop applications for blogging but I happen to find some sort of creative solace in the WordPress admin interface.
Design Trendsinspiration
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, news
easyComment Firefox Extension: “easyComment enables you to One-Click Comment on Wordpress Blogs which makes it an perfect tool for people who comment on a lot of different Weblogs and who don’t want to sign up on every single one. You’ll have to define your Personal Data once in the Preferences Dialog and every time you click the easyComment Button on the bottom Status Bar in your Firefox window, it searches the comment form on the current page and fills it with your data saving you a huge chunk of type-in work.” from the author’s post. Hat tip to Keith, found via the Weblog Tools Collection Crew LifeStream
Design Trendsinspiration
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress.: A fantastic, detailed and quite useful tutorial on creating custom write panels for the WordPress Write Post page. I had written something similar for the WordPress Jobs site and it turned out to be a fantastic tool to quickly get to and add/modify Custom Fields in posts. Custom write panels are most useful for customized installations of WordPress and could be used to add many different types of information into a post both easily and quickly. The image below shows a couple of examples of custom panels and I am sure there are hundreds more.
This tutorial makes use of Custom Fields in WordPress using the various functions that help manage Custom Fields (I keep typing customer), and is a shining example of how useful and flexible Custom Fields can be in developing a full CMS with WordPress.
Since the final code is included in […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
