Disqus offers web publishers the ability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.
There's just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn't notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. Today, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.
The new plugin is much more tightly integrated with Wordpress than the old version. First up, the comments are now indexable by search engines since they are stored both on your site and on Disqus servers. Second, it's now easier to import and export comments. And third, you can now moderate comments using the Wordpress Admin interface. No need to login to a separate web page. Improved plugins for other blog platforms should be coming soon.
The Disqus web site has also been redesigned to make it easier to navigate through comments. It's also easier to follow comments left by a particular user.
Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.
The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.
Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.
I've seen my share of bad web products. Some are bad because they are poorly implemented, others are bad because they are ill-conceived. The new Private Label Custom Domains product from FeedBlitz definitely falls into the latter category.
To be honest, I'm not even sure where to start here. From what I can gather, FeedBlitz wants me to pay them for the privilege of syndicating my content onto their domain. They're basically trying to sell subdomains on the feedblitz.com site at prices that are higher ($9.99 per year) than what you can pay to register your own real domain.
This is clearly a product without a market; I mean, who is this mythical customer that is out there wishing they could syndicate the content from their already-existing site onto a subdomain that they pay for at some other site? Nobody, that's who.
And I think FeedBlitz knows this. Follow me through the break for a few more thoughts on this.
There are plenty of applications that let you write blog posts without using the default web interface for Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, or other blog platforms. But most have one limitation - you have to download and install the application on each and every computer you plan to work on. While Zoundry Raven might not have as many features as Windows Live Writer or be as easy to use as ScribeFire, the free Windows tool has one major advantage: You can install it to a portable flash drive and use it on any Windows computer.
Zoundry Raven supports about two dozen platforms including Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal. The program has a WYSIWYG editor and supports the ability to upload images and add tables to blog posts. Zoundry Raven also let you select from a small list of remote storage options in case you want to upload all of your blog images to Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, or another online storage site.
Without a doubt, WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms currently available for people who want to install and maintain their content management system on their own server. I mean, what's not to love? Free, powerful, and easy to use - it's the whole package.
But for all of its positive attributes, WordPress certainly doesn't get everything right. Take, for example, the email notifications that the blogging platform generates. They're ugly, right? Full URLs make for a muddy reading experience.
To be honest, I really wasn't aware how ugly those emails were until I saw what a difference the Clean Notifications plugin makes. It tidies up and re-arranges the information in notification emails to make them much easier on the eyes. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.
Adobe AIR-based microblogging client Twhirl already supported Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic, and now its coverage of the world of mini-updates gets even broader with the addition of Identi.ca. Identi.ca is something like a less-popular open-source version of Twitter. This is a big deal for the Identi.ca folks, because Twhirl may actually be better-known than their service.
Along with potentially pumping up the userbase of a fledgling microblogging site, Twhirl has also position itself to be to these micropost what Trillian and Adium are to IM. Keeping several services readily accessible from the same app is a proven winner when it's done right, and Twhirl delivers on the usability and appearance side of things. It was already one of the most popular clients back when it could only handle Twitter, and its main competition is going to come from some of the better Twitter-specific clients that attract people who don't use the other sites Twhirl handles.
SweetCron is a bit of self-hosted lifestreaming software from Yongfook, the creator of opensourcefood. It's kind of like a hybrid of Tumblr and Friendfeed. While SweetCron hasn't officially been released yet, Yongfook is already using it on his own blog, so we have a pretty clear idea of what you can do with it: feed in photos, videos, status updates, bookmarks, etc, each with a distinct look, so a reader can distinguish content types at a glance.
If this sounds a bit like Tumblr, that's probably because part of it uses the Tumblr API. SweetCron is customizable and extensible via new PHP classes, though, and it lives on your own domain, so you have greater control over the data you're feeding into it. The basic theme can be seen on Yongfook's blog, where he's testing it out, but he says you'll be able to develop your own themes through a template editor. If you're interested in SweetCron, sign up to be notified when it launches.
Due to many complaints from users of LiveJournal the company announced it will again offer basic accounts. Unlike most other free blogging platforms, LJ's basic account has limited capabilities but the bonus of no advertising.
The option of signing up for a basic account was removed in March. Makes sense considering a free account with no advertising generates no money for LJ and in fact, probably costs the company money in storage space at the very least.
Apparently, LJ bloggers have grown accustomed to blogging without the distraction of ads. When the basic accounts were removed as a new user choice, many current users decided to hold a one day protest, refusing to blog or comment. In a news post LJ announced that basic accounts will return by the end of the summer for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The LJ team has also started a new blog specifically to discuss options and ideas for the future of basic accounts.
The LJ team admits it was probably a bad decision in the first place to remove the basic accounts but it looks like the developers plan to work with users on ideas to make things work to everyone's satisfaction.
MoFuse is a service that makes a mobile version of any web site in just a few seconds. We first covered MoFuse last year, when the company was offering a two-tiered service. But last week MoFuse decided to do away with pro accounts and offer all the features to free account holders.
So what do you get with a free account now? You can still create free mobile web pages with URLs ending in .mofuse.mobi (for example, downloadsquad.mofuse.mobi). But you can also use a custom domain, use your own logo in an SMS widget, create up to 5 different mobile sites with one account, and receive up to 50 free SMS messages a month.
MoFuse allows users to place ads on their mobile web sites. Previously free account holders split the revenue from those ads with MoFuse while paid account holders would retain 100% of any revenue generated. If you previously signed up for a paid account, you will no longer be billed, but you will also get to keep 100% of your revenue, while all new MoFuse users will have to share their profits with the company.
Only a few months after its last major release, the WordPress crew has just unleashed WordPress 2.6 into the wild. While the changes with this update aren't as visually sweeping as those ushered in with 2.5, but they do add some great new options and optimizations. WordPress encourages users to upgrade, as the old 2.5 branch will no-longer be maintained, and they have outlined the upgrade process here or you can use the fantastic automatic-update plugin.
We've been playing around with 2.6 on our local installs since the first beta was released, and we think this is a very, very solid release.
The WordPress team posted video showing off some of the new features:
ScribeFire is a Firefox add-on that lets you write blog posts while surfing the web. It provides a WYSIWYG editor that works with most popular blogging software. And it's free. We've always wondered how ScribeFire plans to make money, and now we know. The team recently launched a private beta of ScribeFire QuickAds, a service that makes it easy for anyone to monetize their blogs.
All you have to to place ads on your blog is click an ad size and then choose a location on your blog where you'd like the ad to appear. When you first register your blog with QuickAds, ScribeFire will automatically add a bit of code to your blog template allowing the program to place ads in your page.
Right now ScribeFire will pass all the earnings on to web publishers, but we expect we'll eventually see ScribeFire take a cut of the action. Ads will come from a variety of networks, and ScribeFire will attempt to determine which ads will generate the highest payouts. You can also keep track of your ad impressions, earnings, and other statistics online by viewing your ScribeFire Dashboard.
Twitter is a vast network of individuals posting about all sorts of different things. Take for instance this very second, members are posting about cupcakes, the military, Ferrari, mobileme, the Olympics and much more. But these topics change so quickly you would be mad if you tried to keep up with them yourself. Thankfully, Twitscoop has automated this process so that you can continue to sit in front of your computer staring endlessly at other people conversation.
Twitscoop works by monitoring all the publicly available tweets out there and measures the frequency of the words used. The more mentions of a subject the more popular it must be.
Twitscoop then places them in alphabetical order in a Tag Cloud, the more popular the word the larger it is compared to the rest in the cloud. Mouse over the tag to find out who is talking about what, click on the tag and it will take you to a graph that will display the frequency of the topic along with the users. With all of this information available, you'll be one well informed Twitter!
In our time with using the site we only had one gripe with it, the lack to sort the cloud via the size of the tag. This is only a minor complaint really but something that should be added for those of us out there that like a little order in our lives.
Do you type a lot of SMS or Twitter messages? Watching your character count closely? Maybe you should check out the Thsrs, a new thesaurus from Ironic Sans. Put in the grandiloquent word you were planning to use, and it will give you a shorter synonym to help you save characters while still making sense.
What inspired Thsrs? Well, David at Ironic Sans thought people needed a little help composing understandable messages "w/o needing 2 use ugly abbrev's." Seems like a fine idea to us! There might still be a few kinks to work out -- one commenter noted that 'awesome' humorously returned 'awful' as a synonym -- but Thsrs worked pretty well when we tested it. Try it yourself, and let your messages be understood!
There are already more desktop apps for Twitter than we could ever possibly cover without losing our minds. But what about that OTHER microblogging service, Plurk? A couple of people have hacked the mobile version into Adobe Air to create two similar apps: PlurkAir and PlurkIt. This is ok for now, but it's nowhere near the level that Twitter clients have achieved.
That's where Plurker comes in. It's scheduled to be the first dedicated Windows desktop version of Plurk, and the feature list looks pretty impressive. Sort Plurks using custom searches, set alerts for private Plurks you receive, enjoy autocompleting @message functionality, and way too much more for us to list here. If Plurker is as good as promised, it could give Plurk a big user boost by taking away one major excuse not to use the service.
Maintaining your online presence can be such a giant pain in the ass nowadays since your followers are looking for constant updates on three hundred different web sites. It's especially annoying to try and publicize your new blog post manually after you've spent precious minutes of your morning typing and re-typing it.
Thankfully, the folks at switchAbit have been gracious enough to develop a web app for us that handles cross-site posting for us. What's not to love about an app that makes it appear as though you're doing much more work than you actually are?
SweetCron
Due to many complaints from users of LiveJournal the company announced it will again offer basic accounts. Unlike most other free blogging platforms, LJ's basic account has limited capabilities but the bonus of no advertising. 
Only a few months after its 
Twitter
Do you type a lot of SMS or Twitter messages? Watching your character count closely? Maybe you should check out 
