Farmville fans can now enjoy the addictive farming game on Farmville.com and bypass the Famville Facebook App which they have been using so long. You still require to connect to Facebook for login, so that you can retrieve your saved game and level, but the interface is much better.
I have been addicted to playing Farmville [...]
The more posts on your blog, the more chances you have of ranking for keywords. Therefore, try to publish a post on your blog as often as possible without dropping the quality of your writing.The boys and girls at Google have added a built in dictionary feature for Blogger fans using Blogger in Draft (Blogger’s eternal beta). (Blogger in Draft) We recently added a dictionary with definitions and translations to “Blogger in Draft.” [...]
If you’d like to see synonyms for an English word, begin by looking up its definition [...]In terms of getting ahead of the latest gizmos and other electronic devices, I envy our friends living in Japan. But when it comes to getting premium Twitter updates from, say famous celebrities and other personalities, I would rather not be in Japan. I mean if that is the only way I could follow those [...]
I stumbled upon this cool way girls can attract more Twitter followers – wear Twitter Tattoo Socks, Tights and Stockings!
These fashionable socks, tights and stockings are semi-transparent, look natural, blend perfectly with the natural skin tone, and are available in 4 body color shades. The printed “Follow Me” Twitter text gives the appearance of a [...]
About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review November 27, 2009 How thankful are you for your role in journalism today By Robert Niles No comments Archive Link Here's my shout-out to all you fellow journalists , working today instead of hitting the malls , sleeping in or lounging on the couch , like the rest of America . today Okay , I suppose some of you have been assigned to covering folks at the mall , but still . Allow me to turn things over to you today . How are you feeling about your journalism career , as the first decade of the 21st century moves toward its finish How thankful are you for your role in journalism today poll by twiigs.com Me I've been on my own for going on 18 months now , and am throughly enjoying the adventure , though the lack of a constant paycheck and employer-paid retirement or health benefits for my family cranks up the stress some months . But how much security would I have now working in a newsroomI’ve written just over 4,000 tweets since I signed up for Twitter several years ago, but I think I’d be hard-pressed to choose 200 of a high enough quality to turn into a book.
However, new startup TweetBookz has decided there must be enough Twitter fanatics who would like to do just that.
Cofounders Jacob Schwirtz and [...]
One feature that I love about both Blogger and WordPress.org is that I can redirect my default RSS feed over to FeedBurner in order monetize my blog feed.
While this option is available via plugin for WordPress.org fans and baked in for Blogger users (ever since Google purchased FeedBurner), WordPress.com users seem to be left out [...]
If you are interested in working with your PC wirelessly, shunning all the boundaries of cabled mice and keyboards, and even trackpad if you’re using a laptop, then this should definitely be an interesting gadget for you.
You are looking at a very useful gadget that rather looks a little less interesting than it should sound, [...]Know what? I’m starting to like WordPress.com as free blog hosting site. I mean at least, it continues to improve its services not unlike its rival – Google Blogger which seems to have stagnated for quite awhile now.
So aside from the recent geotagging feature that was rolled out recently, WordPress.com has also introduced another important [...]
Regardless of whether you are a web designer, journalist or “Joe the Plumber” (note: I say that in love), your tools can define whether you succeed or not on your job.
The same is true for blogging, as having the proper software can help determine the difference between success and failure–or at least separate the pro [...]. About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review November 24, 2009 Microsoft and News Corp . are pursuing yesterday's solution to today's challenges By Robert Niles 3 comments Archive Link News Corp . s alleged plan to shield its online content from Google's search engine in favor of having it indexed by Microsoft's Bing is a brilliant content business strategy . for the 20th . Century But , today , it illustrates just the latest example of backward-thinking by legacy media executives who've been left lost and clueless by the Internet revolution . Microsoft needs to do something to distinguish Bing from market leader Google . And simply renaming its Live search engine didn't get that done . News Corp . like any business looking for growth , wants to find a new source of . revenue So , instead of making its content available for indexing on all search engines , News Corp . could decide to make it available only to one search index ,
Guest Post by Sourish
Using Twitter as a marketing tool for business is something still in the nascent stage on the Internet marketing frontier. The following web tools may be helpful in organizing your marketing campaign on the internet and help use twitter as a marketing enhancement tool.
1. Twellow is often looked up as the yellow [...]The constant push to make ads more visually appealing — reducing the effects of ‘ad blindness’ and helping them to convert better for advertisers and pay more to publishers — continues, as Google announces a pending deal with the Californian startup company Teracent.
Teracent specialises in machine-learning algorithms which have been put to use on the [...]To be honest while I was exploring this new income-generating scheme offered by Google-ventures back Pixazza, the first thing that came into my mind was those in-text advertising that pops-out whenever you hover onto link in a blog post. Only this time, Pixazza is doing it with blog images.
So what is Pixazza really? In their [...]
Swoopo was my weekend project last week. I read quite a bit about the site and decided to put it couple 100 dollars to test if the service really works or it’s one of the smart online scams.
Swoopo is an online bidding portal which offers popular electronic items for cheap. [...]
I’ve managed to collect a handful of geeky projects lately.
First, my move to Ubuntu 9.10 got fast-tracked. After the rocky move from 8.10 to 9.04, I figured I’d wait a bit on Karmic.
But, last week, my drive filled up due to my backup package erroneously writing backups locally instead of to my backup drive, which [...]In this week's Movable Type Monday, we've got what's new in MT5 Release Candidate 2, news about the Melody project, a StumbleUpon plugin, and more.
Blackfriday is just around the corner and for those of us who have been saving and working on a list of things to buy; it’s time to strike the items on the list off.
We’ve put together a list of tech-related resources you can use to make this it a fruitful Black Friday.
Things will [...]
“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet”. The latest buzz around the corner is about the Nokia N900 which has sunk its price surprisingly by almost $169. That’s really one piece of good news if you were just about to buy yourself one.
To be clear, let us say that the Nokia N900 which was [...]
As I prepare for my meeting with Alan Dean Foster, one of the world’s most prolific and famous science fiction authors, I’m not the only one inspired by the whole concept of making dreams come true.
Robyn Seaton introduced Alan Dean Foster to me after she and I met at WordCamp Phoenix, and PodCamp Arizona [...]
Chrome OS was released for developers, just yesterday. Iit didn’t take too long for the uber techies to compile it and make it available for us to try the new OS.
Chrome OS is now installable using VMware (VMfusion for Mac) or Virtualbox for Windows/Mac/*nix flavors. My current setup is Windows Vista Home [...]
While most of us haven’t even tasted the Windows 7 pie to the fullest, there are rumors that the next release of Windows OS, shall we call it “Windows 8” is being dealt as an “underwork project”.
It was October 22nd, 2009 when Windows 7 was officially launched and it would be some good day in [...]
Photo by xmatt on Flickr used under Creative Commons
Paul, Rich and Chet are big fans of Jason Fried, the founder of 37 Signals.
Although I’ve happily used several of their apps (Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire), until recently, I had never read their company blog, Signal vs. Noise, which frequently has interesting observations from Friend, DHH and others.
Today’s [...]
Everybody loves mobile phones and the ones with trendy designs and heart-racing appeals are, in most of the cases, far from reality and demonstrate the geeky levels of idiosyncrasy a human mind can ever reach . Well, that’s what we are talking about, concept phones.
Believe me, they are more appealing than any other phone that’s [...]
Photo by davidseth on Flickr used under Creative Commons
Since last week’s post on the interwebs and fear, a couple other un-related posts have come across my reader that have me pondering the future of our beloved intertubes.
First was Chris (#mrhashtag) Messina on “The death of the URL“, followed by Tim “What is Web 2.0″ O’Reilly [...]Google just announced that the Chrome OS is ready to be kicked out in the open for the developer community to get involved.
Yes, just for the developers for now. The final release will be available same time next year. This release invites the developers to join the open-source community and build the [...]
If you thought California is only serious about legalizing marijuana, think again!
California became the first state to impose energy consumption restrictions on BIG and small screen Televisions.
This is not only done to keep the carbon footprint in control but also to bring down the cost of energy consumption for consumers. The California [...]Youtube can only get better by the day. Google just announced two new features which will be of tremendous help to the hearing impaired. It will also help the video uploaders gain more global exposure for their content.
The two new features are Automatic-Captions and Automatic-Timings. These features let the video uploaders add [...]
I’m in Arizona after a very exciting and busy series of conferences, including the very successful WordCamp Netherlands, WordCamp Phoenix, and PodCamp Arizona, visiting family living near one of my favorite authors in the world, Alan Dean Foster.
During WordCamp Phoenix and PodCampAZ, I shared with my audience that I was too excited to just [...]
About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review November 17, 2009 Can Bottled Water Save Journalism Online By Brian McDermott 4 comments Archive Link The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news . Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000 that's 91 percent told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online . Online it should be free , said 19-year-old Shauna O'Brien , an economics major at the University of Massachusetts , Amherst . In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry , Shauna's words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures , from Times Select to Salon Premium , have shown anecdotally : people just won't pay for Web news . Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online , many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall . The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible . This is the Google
Simplicity by Eric Burke
Eric Burke published this cartoon back in early 2008, and it’s stuck with me for a long time as something that is simultaneously hilarious, sad and maddening.
I started my career in development building those eye-chart apps with fields and labels all over the place, complete with the obligatory button bar. Enterprise apps are [...]
I mentioned a while back that I’m using my iPhone more frequently as a game console, and I know I’m not the only one.
The iPhone makes a perfect gaming device for me because it’s portable, to entertain me wherever I go, and it’s already another device, meaning I don’t have to lug extra gear.
I’ve never [...]: About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review November 13, 2009 Starting your news website : How to get the most promotional value from Twitter By Robert Niles 1 comment Archive Link Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece , Starting your news website : A checklist for students and mid-career beginners In response to a few comments , today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website specifically , how to get the most from . Twitter A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience . Ideally , the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website , as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed and your website and brand to other readers you haven't attracted . yet Again , these tips are designed for beginners to social media journalism students or mid-career legacy
From the “we’re-a-for-reals-product-team” department, comes an announcement: WebCenter 11g Patch Set 1 has just been released.
Peter Moskovits has a rundown of all the new features over on his blog, and there are plenty, including the introduction of the People Connection service, which adds the social networking layer to WebCenter. This service was at least partly [...]
There’s a very scary story floating (h/t Gizmodo) around about a man framed by a virus that compromised his computer, then downloaded child porn and acted as a server, all unbeknownst to him.
The Wallet Inspector (I can't believe that worked!) from Simpsons Episode 503
Let that sink in for a minute.
The man was eventually able to clear his [...]
WordCamp Phoenix is all set to really rock and roll with great WordPress, blogging, and SEO experts on November 13, 2009, in Arizona at the Arizona Grand Resort.
Some of the hottest folks in WordPress and web tech are lined up to speak and attend, taking advantage of PodcampAZ and Az Entrepreneurship Conference happening the [...]
So, now that we’re really a product team and all, rolling into WebCenter development and working full-time on enhancements to the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to add real content from time to time.
I’m hoping that as we learn more about WebCenter and use it that [...]
Augmented Reality (AR) is a phrase you’ve probably heard lately, and you’ll probably get tired of hearing over the next few months.
For the uninitiated, AR apps install to your mobile phone and layer content to views of your, erm, regular reality. Sounds weird, right? There have been several iPhone apps released over the past few months that [...]
The release of Twitter lists and the new “listed” metric has me thinking about reputation and how its applied to people in consumer web examples.
I had an interesting chat with my pal Kelly (@verso) about the listed metric Friday. She doesn’t see it as immediately useful since there’s no way to determine the impact being [...]
Right, wrong or indifferent, we all use the following and followers metrics to make quick judgements about a person’s reputation, and now, Twitter has provided another dimension, the listed metric.
This added dimension provides a much needed, albeit flawed, way to determine a user’s mojo. I use mojo here loosely to represent a user’s authority, something [...]
: About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review November 3, 2009 TwitterTim.es : Personalized news done right By Eric Ulken 1 comment Archive Link I'm not ashamed to admit it : The first time I saw Twitter I thought , What's the point Maybe you did too , or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am . Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it . Biz Stone If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time . For every Twitter enthusiast , there was , I suspect , a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful . Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha moment . For me , it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding . I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items both big international stories and news of a more personal nature through . Twitter I
There’s been a fair amount of debate among the early adopter crowd lately about the place of syndicated content in relation to Twitter.
The debate has been renewed in light of the general release of Twitter lists, which allow people to create and follow bunches of Twitter users en masse.
Since many people use Twitter to share [...]
I’m finally getting around to penning that post on Brizzly I’ve been threatening for a week.
Not that anyone noticed. It’s been eerily quiet in the comments lately.
Anyway, at OpenWorld, Rich turned me on to Brizzly and provided an invite. I’d heard about it over the Summer, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick.
Oh, I know [...]: About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review October 29, 2009 Starting your news website : A checklist for students and mid-career beginners By Robert Niles 7 comments Archive Link My post today is intended for students , mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site , but without the faintest idea of how to . start Here is your guide and . checklist Now , I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write . I'm not covering that . Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors , freelancers and employees . Those are topics for other days . Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic , one-person news site on the Web , to lay a foundation for future expansion and . success A domain Before you do anything else , establish your brand . The Internet domain you select and
Rich provided a sweet tip this evening that I wanted to share.
PuSH Bot, the weekend project of Mihai Parparita, combines the PubSubHubbub protocol with XMPP to create an easy way to subscribe to any feed served by PuSH via IM, meaning you’ll receive updates in your favorite IM client.
Sweet!
Oh, and there are a lot of [...]About Mission Statement History Advisory Board Staff Sponsoring Institutions Blogs Leadership 3.0 Blog OJR : The Online Journalism Review News for Digital Journalists Seminars Speakers How to Apply Training Resources Multimedia Training New Media Resources Contact OJR : The Online Journalism Review October 28, 2009 Does your site really need to be in Google News By Robert Niles 7 comments Archive Link With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy s family , you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers . For many online publishers , affiliated with newspapers or not , the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News . index Get in Google News , and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers , whenever your stories hit the right keywords . Post a hot story quickly , and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page . But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers I'm going to argue . no . Well , at least it's not worth making a fuss over . Why on Earth
Spectives, which launched today, is an excellent (at least in my opinion) RSS reader that aims to take you away from your traditional RSS reader. Instead of simply using text and images that are included within a regular post, it generates, or takes, images from the websites of your choice. Select a group of sites [...]