Mercedes Benz released a new version of their Mixed Tape – download it now. Its as nifty as the old one. Nevertheless there’s been some controversy in the Blogosphere concerning the company and their attempts to put some entertainment to the online community – sadly I don’t find the feed which had some input on this issue. Anyone else?
While reading the Mex Blog and Der Schockwellenreiter I strumbled upon an interesting tidbit concerning „WordPress“. This open-source project is common knowledge for all blog hosters and users, especially for the users if they start their own independent blog on their private server. But what most of them don’t know is simple: Each „powered by WordPress“ found within the blogs increases the PageRank for the official WordPress website at Google and any other search engine. Here’s an excerpt from the original article at Waxy.org:
The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least
120,000168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)
Furthermore, the author questions the idea of how to use and recieve earnings for the open-source projects / foundations. This is some quite interesting issue since „everybody“ or „the community“ is contributing their own input to the developers and registrars of these foundations to create these software programs.
MGM battles at the US Supreme Court against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Grokster for a decision about the applicability of the Betamax concept in the 21st century. About 20 years ago, Sony won the case for the distribution of their VCRs as the question rose whether it was legal to record copyrighted material for your private use at home with a VCR or if it was a violation against common law.
Now the internet millionaire Mark Cuban announced he would give full financial support to the EFF and Grokster to avoid that smaller companies might have to battle for the rights to introduce new technological innovations to the market. Nice move!
I recently noticed that the Blogspirit communities I’ve created in the past (Blogosphere, Student Life and Media-Zone) are getting filled with entries which might not find a focus in the community as the topic and thematic environment of the community differ greatly from the author’s contributions. To avoid this possible misconception of communities, I suggest to enable the creators of the community to add a small description for each community which will be listed on the main community page where all blogs are summarized, and on the page of the admin interface where you join a community. On the other hand, I know that communities are quite capable of developing itself into any possible direction. Perhaps I’m all alone with this idea…
The idea of Multi-User-Blogging (MUB) is absolutely useful to create a phenomenon similar to Blogspirit’s communities: Different people with usually different ideals and lives join under one banner to create content. Johnny Häuseler, the author of Spreeblick, launched his small experiment called Sprblck due to his temporary absence from the internet. His daily readers join forces at this MUB based on WordPress, and because of the open and free registration the potential of this platform reaches an interesting state. Fact is that the platform is sponsored by Johnny while anybody may contribute the content. But because of the significant idea to launch such an experiment in the Blogosphere, the questions of copyrights and any other claims concerning the content are solved within the discussions of the blog’s authors. However, the liability concerning the content usually resides on the side of the Admin-C due to German law, but the communities of the Blogosphere usually regulate themselves to invalidate any kind of misuse or abuse. I believe such kind of experiment would never be possible for any kind of newspaper or profit orientated company.
I found a few things on Blogspirit which disturbed me in a minor case, so it’s not a biggie. I’m simply going to list them all up and let our Tag–Team decide on what to do next… ;)
- The old communities don’t have Trackbacks listed in the major overview compared to more recent additions – probably a template update is necessary.
- The Trackbacks aren’t summed up in the main admin interface page, currently I have 118 comments in total, but the „All comments“ page lists 124 comments (including the remaining 6 Trackbacks).
- Once the blog’s category pages grow too large, a limitation of i.e. 15 articles per category page with the option to visit the next/previous page of each category might help to limit the endless scrolling.
- A list of every blog at Blogspirit with the most recent updates (chronologically listed) might help to find even those blogs that post only once or twice a week but contain interesting information such as Middle Manager’s Heaven or it might help to find dead blogs easier than visiting them manually or checking all subscribed feeds in your RSS aggregator software.
There’s been several rumors about Google trying to accquire the photo service Flickr, but Yahoo made the run as Flickr reports in their own blog:
Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!
I bet Yahoo will make several changes about Flickr’s services – will it remain in the same way as now or will Flickr become integrated into the Yahoo network as „Yahoo’s Photo Service“? Time will tell us…
Nico Wilfer, the hoster of Myblog.de, closed the blog „Girliezine“ on Saturday evening. Wilfer himself explained the blog had been closed due to the facts that even after being warned, „Kelly M.“ chose to spam several other blogs and threatened the authors, too. On the question of the long run to the closure of the blog, Wilfer answered they’d require a very good reason to delete a blog – especially without sending out a warning to the blog’s author, a deletition might catch those users who do not intend to violate rules and regulations. Dogfood at Blogbar concludes some more ideas about virtual death of Girliezine (in German).
I made a larger update for the Blogroll’s RSS List. You may download my daily reading circle and be inspired by the recent additions of the full Handelsblatt’s journalists, several new blogs such as the Futureblog, Blogspirit community blogs, german Podcasters and many more. Enjoy ;)
Currently, several blogs at Blogspirit are facing a probably minor error in the software settings: The administration interface and the blog’s output is usually displayed in french instead of i.e. english or german. This might have been caused due to the recent updates, and I believe Thomas or Philippe will find a solution soon.