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Updated to WordPress 3.0

Nothing major, just did a quick backup then hit the upgrade button. While things may have changed significantly in the backend code, there really isn’t much to show you here.

WordPress MU (the multiblog variant of WordPress that is used on WordPress.com) is now built into the maintstream code. Thus endeth the tyranny of MU, a code branch I personally despised.
Custom menus make it really easy to create a special nav menu. I’ve already used this, and it’s a nice feature.
They finally let you pick your own username and password for the admin user during installation. Seems like a little thing, but it’s been a system issue since day one with legions of users forgetting to either change the admin user password or to write it down.
Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies – I haven’t used either, but I suspect that I will soon. Both of these are hardcore CMS functions.
Scads of new hooks and functions for plugin and theme developers.

28 Jun 10 | Blogging, Content Management, Publishing Technology, Technology | Comments (3)

On the Fly Website Translation in Google Chrome

I stumbled on this neat trick the other day while having a look for information on a Russian website. If you are browsing using the Google Chrome Browser and open Google Translate in one tab, when you surf to any foreign language sites, it will offer to translate the site for you. You click yes, and bang, you’ve got that site in English. The actual translation is as good as the library they have, hence Spanish is pretty good, while you can probably bet that Urdu or Swahili will offer mixed results.

I’m now using Chrome for most of my browsing although I do use Firefox for css debug, and IE just to be sure my work is accessible in all browsers. I expect we’ll see Chrome really take off this year.

29 Mar 10 | Publishing Technology, Search, browsers | Comments (0)

Designing for the iPad?

I was listening to a netcast this morning (This Week in Media) and the host Alec Lindsey put forward the suggestion that many content related businesses were planning on developing specific content for the iPad. I had a couple thoughts…

Why would you funnel development dollars into creating something for a single platform, when that platform has not yet been released.
How could you develop effectively for a platform, when that platform has not yet been released.
The suggestion was made that there would be 5 million iPads in the wild within the year. Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on that…and even at that, 5 million is a mere drop in the bucket compared with the internet at large.
Specific versions for ANOTHER platform? C’mon, we’re back to the old Mac vs. Pc, Netscape vs. IE battles here. We have a common mode of delivery for these types of devices, it’s HTML, have you ever heard of it?

If the iPad becomes wildly popular, I’ll have a look at developing specific content for it, but for now, I’ll expect users with that device to fire up Safari and visit the old fashioned way. We’ll get an idea today as preordering started about 9 minutes ago for the wi-fi version of the product.

12 Mar 10 | Publishing Technology | Comments (0)

Demand Media and the New Economy of the Journalist

Demand Media has been a constant topic of conversation among online journalists of late. It all began with this article in Wired entitled “The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model“.

Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.

Demand Media is what we’d generally call a content mill. Instead of the old days of the newspaper where the editorial and advertising teams eyed each other distrustfully, in this case, the entire editorial side is essentially outsourced, and it’s done at rates that would make any professional writer cringe. From their Wikipedia page:

Contributors choose among available titles that were previously identified by the company’s algorithm. They are paid once their work has been automatically checked for plagiarism^[7] and is approved by editors. Typical compensation is $20 for a video clip, $15 for an article of a few hundred words, $2.50 for copy-editing an article and $1 for fact-checking an article.^[6]

To put that into context, I used to write similar content online for a rate of $500.00 per article. Ouch!

For the record, there’s a huge gulf between what you buy for a $20 article and a $500 article. In the $20 version, I’d suggest that some of the little things go out the window, such as revision, or perhaps even contacting sources. Wired puts it well:

Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal.

The question I have in mind is this: at what point does Google start to put some weighting behind their search results that will,instead of just promoting stories that are well optimized for SEO, help good content rise to the top?

In This Week in Google’s latest podcast, Matt Cutts, spam guru at Google made the statement that 2010 would be a bad year for low value content, when Leo Laporte pressed him on the issue (note: this is not a direct quote, I’m going by memory here, but the gist is fairly clear…).

How do I think they could add value to search results? A few suggestions:

Leverage the actual search experience of real users with vote up, vote down, hide capability.
Identify and utilize subject matter experts to fine tune results.
Allow us to add weight to the search experience of our friends (note: that doesn’t simply mean using everyone in our contacts list!).

In the long run, fixing this hole may make things a lot harder for those of us who do SEO optimization as part of our services. However, I’ve got to think that things only improve for those who use the only time proven SEO tactic I know: providing good pertinent content in a tight, well ordered presentation.

The thing that truly worries me is what this portends for journalists. We’ve seen steady erosion in jobs for journalists over the past couple years, as newspapers and magazines cut back. Now it would seem that even online their services are devalued. Is there room in this new online economy for good content at a fair price?

I certainly hope so…

22 Feb 10 | Publishing Technology, Social Media | Comments (0)

Death of Newspapers – RIP Editor and Publisher

When I worked in the Atex marketing department, we lived and died by what we could get published in Editor and Publisher. The once vaunted trade journal was the place you wanted to get mentioned, the measure of your having “made it” in the print world. Those days are now gone – from E&P themselves:

Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.

An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.

The expressions of surprise and outpouring of strong support for E&P that has followed across the Web — Editor & Publisher has even hit No. 4 as a Twitter trending topic — raises the notion that the publication might yet continue in some form.

Its sad to see an industry that was once so much a part of my life now unable to even sustain a trade journal. In my youth, it was impossible to imagine a world without newspapers. Increasingly, it is becoming hard to visualize a future with them…

I could ruminate for hours on the subject, but I think the point is already made. Even the journal of the print publication industry can’t make print work and is looking for a way “continue in some form.”

10 Dec 09 | Print Media, Publishing Technology | Comments (0)

WordPress 2.8.6 Released and a 2.9 Preview

I got the notice last night that WordPress 2.8.6 was released to fix a pair of security holes. So I hopped right into the admin console from my Iphone and in 2 minutes, it was updated. If you have a WordPress installation, I urge you to update right away as well.

This will almost certainly be the last release prior to the much anticipated release of 2.9 which is our next major (feature related) release. Aaron Brazell had a great preview on his site yesterday, and since I’m not currently running the beta, I’ll leave the full on feature review to him. Here are the major bits to expect:

Enhanced image handling – scaling, cropping, and thumbnail sizing on a per picture basis.
Trash Can – this really goes back to the old notion we saw in newspaper editorial systems, delete doesn’t really delete, it just hides. This will come in handy.
The_post_image – if you’ve ever tried to add an image to an excerpt of a post you will know why this is important.
oEmbed – video support, which I’ve had for years using Vipers Video Tag Plugin.
Custom Post Type – this is one of those CMS type functions. It’ll make my life easier, although honestly in the past I’ve been able to make categories do my bidding with little trouble in WordPress CMS settings.
Comment Meta – I have no idea what to think about this one.
Metadata API – Another feature I’m sure I’ll use, but currently I can’t think of anything I’d use it for. I guess this is like custom fields for everything, not just limited to posts.
Theme System Modification – this will allow developers to work on one theme, while real users look at another. This has been needed for some time.
Rel=Canonical Optimization – seems like a little thing, but it will help a lot with SEO.

Check out the preview at Technosailor.com for the full scoop.

Tags: Automattic, Wordpress

13 Nov 09 | Blogging, Content Management, Publishing Technology, Technology | Comments (0)

A Few Coherent Thoughts on Murdoch Blocking Google

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp, said that he was going to have Google blocked from all New Corp. websites. That means something

From EditorandPublisher.com:

The Chairman of News Corp. said in an interview with Sky News Australia (reported here in MediaWeek U.K.) that once the newspapers get their paywalls, News Corp. plans to pull its content from the likes of Google and others.

Murdoch said: “We’d rather have fewer people come to the Web site and pay. Consumers shouldn’t have had free news all the time — I think we’ve been asleep. It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content. No news Web sites anywhere in the world are making large amounts of money.”

Immediately the web went all a flutter, myself included, predicting that that Murdoch would rue the day. Joe Mandese at Mediapost.com noted:

According to an analysis of Google-generated traffic released late Monday by Experian’s Hitwise service, Google and Google News currently account for more than 25% of the daily traffic to the Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com site.

That’s an awful lot of traffic to put at risk. Now the other side of the coin is that Murdoch knows that showing tons of traffic low cost network ads begging them to Punch the Monkey or telling them they just won a lottery is the absolute path of least resistence. You go there when you have nothing else to possibly do… (more…)

10 Nov 09 | Broadcast Media, Online Media, Print Media, Publishing Technology, Search | Comments (0)

Money for Nothing and Your Chicks for Free…

(Disclosures: I work for Namemedia, who is technically a competitor of Internet Brands, owners of vBulletin. I also run several sites that use vBulletin and spend a significant part of my work week working in vBulletin code…)

Over the past month, there’s been a slowly erupting feud in the vBulletin community over the new pricing structure that was announced for vBulletin 4.0 by Internet Brands.

You see, back in the day, the original vBulletin license cost $185 (originally $160 I think) and could be renewed for a yearly fee of $60. With the new version of the software (which has not been released yet) they are moving to a license per major level release, rather than what might be best described as a yearly fee structure. New licenses will cost $195.

I’m going to say right here, right now, that I don’t get why people are so up in arms about this. We want Internet Brands to be able to develop excellent software, right? We want to use the best, right?

Well that won’t happen if they don’t get paid for their software. Ford does not upgrade your car for free. Microsoft did not upgrade your Vista operating system to Windows 7 for free, so why the expectation that Internet Brands will offer perpetual free upgrades?

I know part of the complaint is that it’s going to get expensive if you have a bunch of vBulletin sites. My answer is this: if your sites don’t earn enough to pay for the license upgrade, then perhaps you shouldn’t be running so many sites! If it isn’t earning then by all means you ought to be running open source software.

The plain truth is this: many of us would pay MORE for vBulletin if we could get an enterprise level support agreement. Those of us who have mission critical vBulletin installations would love to be able to get preferred support from them. So perhaps some level of tiering in pricing might work.

The bottom line is this: I have no problem paying good money for good product. I don’t expect free, and neither should you. There are plenty of free open source bulletin board solutions out there, if you can’t pay, I suggest you try using one of them.

Sad to say, but the world of vBulletin has far too much drama about it. Perhaps we will be better off without the complainers…

04 Nov 09 | Community Building, Publishing Technology, Social Media | Comments (4)

A few WordPress sites you might not have seen…

I’ve had a few launches recently and a few of them are worth mentioning.

The Afternic Domainer’s Advantage – this is a knowledge center for use by Domainers, which is fully integrated with the AfternicDLS.com site. For those who aren’t aware, Afternic is the world’s largest premium domain marketplace with over three million domains available for sale. The Domainer’s Advantage site is a fairly standard WordPress installation that makes use of several fairly standard plugins. Special features:
- Integrated news feed of domain news
- Slide Share integration
- Homepage featured content block
- Single sign on integration with Afternic
- Full design integration with the parent site
- Design by Mark Hentschel – a real design rock star.
Blog.Photo.Net – photo.net is a site for serious photographers to connect with other photographers, explore photo galleries, discuss photography, share and critique photos, and learn about photography. The blog is maintained by Josh Root, the community director for the site, and is used to provide a taste of the vast content available around the site as well as to post industry news, events, etc.
- Full design integration with the photo.net site
- Standard WordPress installation
- Twitter feed

21 Oct 09 | Community Building, Publishing Technology, Technology, Web Design | Comments (0)

What is the next Wave?

Google Wave - a chance for us to rethink Social Media?

For some time, I’ve been looking for the next compelling thing in social media sites. For that next development that transforms the way we interact, that re-envisions forums, chat, photo galleries, articles, etc; in fact a redefinition of the way in which we communicate online altogether.

For the past couple years, I’ve watch as vBulletin, my favorite forum software, basically did minor incremental releases, remaining essentially the way it was in 2001. Wordpress has done better, yet still, the fundamental blog/cmslite experience remains pretty much as it was 4 years ago. Photo gallery software, chat, etc. all remain pretty much as they were when they burst on the scene.

The user experience on most sites now is very segmented. Comments are in one spot, while forum posts over here. Most sites don’t integrate chat, as it tends to remove us from the page view model on which our revenue streams are so often based.

We’ve patched together separate systems, and in virtually all cases, the seams are showing. Clear lines of demarcation block logical points of information transfer. Most of what happens isn’t real time, or anything close to it. It’s a post then wait and click refresh experience for most of what we do.

That’s the point of entry for Google Wave, the new open source project that launched in private beta today. It has real time communications, chat has both private/public components, that can take on the threaded view of a forum with real time updates, that can be presented as a forum, or a blog, or whatever you imagine.

You see the important thing here for a developer is that they’ve built the basic tools, but we can add whatever we want via their api. To demonstrate this, they added Google maps integration. Yet that bit could be a video, or even better a live video stream or a recorded application view (think Webex presentation), live photo gallery, or all of them. All of which can be manipulated and edited real time by multiple users.

So what is this Google Wave, really? It’s opportunity for us to FINALLY break out of the box, to really do something new and different, to for once rethink the way we do our sites.

I can’t wait…

Check out the abridged version of the video from the I/O conference to get a taste of what I’m talking about.