Here at Crenk we have decided that we’ll share our knowledge about technology and related subjects with you our readers. So we’ve released the first of what will be a collection of PDF manuals for you to enjoy. The first one is our Ten Minute Guide to the Blogosphere.
In it we detail such things like choosing you blogging platform, promoting your blog, using social networking for a blog and keeping your blog going once you’re over than initial hump.
I was lucky enough to receive an invite to Yahoo’s new product Meme. Meme is a micro-blogging service from Yahoo that works in a very similar way to Twitter. You may now ask, whats the difference?
Yahoo Meme is very fast and stable
Yahoo Meme makes it very easy to post Video, Music and Photos straight into your stream
Yahoo Meme has really focused on making it easy to re-post items you like, with just 1 click (Viral focused)
We have joined just to test out the service and even after testing im pretty sure im going to keep using the account, because it is just so simple and easy to use. If you want to follow Crenk on Yahoo Meme our url is: http://meme.yahoo.com/crenk/
So you may be wondering why doesnt everyone just move over to this service from Twitter, well basically its because of the amount of users using Twitter. Additionally its the community of developers who have helped Twitter grow at the rate they have.
What Yahoo Meme really needs to develop:
Yahoo Meme needs its own URL and identity away from the Yahoo.com domain. It would be good to see this as a standalone service
Ability to resize pictures and videos down so that a lot more streams can be seen in the same window (problem with media in the stream)
Yahoo Meme is currently in private beta, so to mark its launch we can offer a lucky 5 people into the system. All you have to do is comment on this post and let us know why you want to use the service so badly!
It appears as though Yahoo! may be the first real competitor to Twitter. Other companies such as Facebook have tried to draw people away from micro-blogging back to social networking. But there has been no real competition on the actual micro-blogging front.
A while back, Yahoo! stealthily rolled out Yahoo! Meme in the Portuguese language only. Nobody was all too sure why they did this because as business goes, you’re supposed to promote, promote, promote! Now their reasoning is clear.
It was a test. To see if it stood a chance without causing the company any embarrassment if it failed. They are now tackling Twitter on the global front by launching the micro-blogging platform in the second biggest language in the world; Spanish.
While people all over the world do use Twitter, studies have shown that services are received better by the public when they are tailored specifically to their needs – in this case their language.
While I can’t see Meme over running Twitter on the English servers I can see the new Yahoo! service picking up steam in South America, Mexico, West Africa and of course Spain.
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It includes a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches.
Getting paid to blog is a distant dream of most bloggers. The initial high hopes for Google ad sense will have vanished after just a few weeks, even days. So what is one of the fastest, easiest ways to get paid to blog? Today.com seems to have the right idea.
The service allows you to establish your own blog as a sub-domain of Today.com. E.g. Myblogsname.today.com. You can then customise using the Word Press tools and begin blogging as you normally would. I tried this out and my third post was featured on the international homepage within hours of it going live. This got my page quite number of views as I’m sure you would imagine.
Today.com do pay you, however, it’s not a set rate or pay per post (at least for most bloggers – there are some who gain popularity and get a pay per post). Instead they pay you depending on how many impressions your page gets. For each impression you, $0.002 is added to your account ($2.00 CPM). This may seem minuscule but if your blog gains popularity you could be earning hundreds each month.
Today.com is different from other blog providers as they actually publicize your blog on the homepage rather than just leave it to it own devices at the mercy of the search engines. Users can search for terms on Today.com and your blog will appear if appropriate.
All in all, it’s a good service that is a step above the rest with the highest industry payout. However, the blogs themselves are always kept looking similar to Today.com and as such you can only really customize basic features such as colour etc…
It could be a good earner for bloggers but keep in mind – to get regular readers and thus impressions you have to blog regularly (one or twice per day) and also publicise your blog. 6/10
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
I wanted to share with you a very, very cool set of posts from Scott Hanselman: Building your own arcade cabinet. This I’m sure fulfills almost every man’s dream, that spent a lot of time with these magnificent toys.
Within the articles Scott will guide you to the entire process about how to build this machine. Including all the tips regarding to the materials used, where to buy them, etc:
Here’s a video that gives you a tour to the entire process:
Here are some of amazing facts about it:
Cost = $441. Yep, only 441 dollars. But there are some disclaimers about it, for example, the monitor was recycled from an old one. But still, sounds like a great number to me.
The work hours took him around 24 hours total, divided in six weeks. I know what you are thinking, if you start building it right now, by this time tomorrow you’ll have it all set
Don’t tell me that you are not considering the idea!
The NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.
But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.
But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.
Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:
For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.
Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.
WordPress Testers and early adopters can now download Wordpress 2.8 and test the new features that promise to make WordPress better and more powerful than before.
There are lots of new features in WordPress 2.8 that are really interesting. Here are a few user features you can look out for
New Theme Installer routines
Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
Don’t notify post author of own comments
Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
Per Page option for plugins
Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
Support more than one gallery on the same page
Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
Fix most popular link category list
Add description field for tags
“Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers
Download Wordpress 2.8 Beta 1 now and try it out. Since its a beta release, don’t try it on your primary blog.
The other day I came across Seekopia which is an online blog magazine you can personalize according to your own tastes and interests. Combining online advertising and blogging, Seekopia has created a completely new way to blog and earn money. Create your free blog today and Seekopia will help you build a list of followers by promoting your posts and keeping track of your readers. By starting a blog, you instantly own a share of advertising on each and every blog post in Seekopia. Seekopia uses both contextual ads as well as custom user adverts throughout the entire network.
The site itself is very simple and the idea is very similar to what Google are trying to do with their Knol project. It seems as though there are a huge amount of these types of sites on the net at the moment and the only way they are going to stay alive in the long run is by providing quality content and giving back good revenues to contributors.
I must admit a lot of work needs to be done on the design of Seekopia. Currently there seems to be a lot of blank space at the bottom of the home page and even in the sidebars of each blog. It is interesting to see that Seekopia is also using Google Adsense as their advertising provider, because this makes me wonder if they are providing the writers with 100% of the revenues or just splitting the percentage with the blogger.
There are many alternatives to blogging on a site like Seekopia, such as writing Paid per post on your own blog, writing for a blog network, writing on Google’s Knol project or simply writing your own blog with Wordpress and using Google Adsense to monetize your site. Overall I don’t really see the point of sites like Seekopia because they provide too much creative freedom to the journalist, but seems to provide little in return. As a user I would much rather read a highly targeted and professional blog compared to something like Seekopia.
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk and discussion surrounding Ashton Kutcher and CNN. First he manages to get almost as many followers on Twitter as CNN (almost 900K). Then he challenges CNN to a race to get to 1 million followers first. If he wins, he’ll “”ding dong ditch” Ted Turner’s house.
This made me think a bit about Ashton and his original tech startup the Blah Girls. Blah Girls launched with a lot of press and publicity (mainly due to Techcrunch and Michael Arrington), but now it seems to be a very basic gossip blog with a cartoon attached.
Blah Girls produce a weekly vidoe who is pretty much a catoon spoof. The videos are very well develop and quite cool. However, these videos and Blah Girls in general doesnt seem to be getting much traction at all. The Blah Girls Youtube channel has over 3,500 subscribers but each video seems to be lucky to get more than 1000 plays. Plus for some reason YouTube has given Blah Girls a partner page, but they dont seem to meet the requirements of being a YouTube partner (apart from the fact that Ashton is quite well known).
Back to the site itself it seem that is had an initial push at launch but then has been slowly growing at the same pace as a normal gossip blog. The site has a great design, but there seems to be a huge gap of white space between the video section and where the actual blog starts. Ashton I really think you need to take a look at the design and try to piece it all together a bit better. Additionally, Ashton why arent you twittering about Blah Girls on your Twitter stream? Im sure 1m followers will really help you in pushing your site to the next level faster, plus you have a benefit that no other gossip blog has, your already bloody famous!
Here at Crenk we have decided that we’ll share our knowledge about technology and related subjects with you our readers. So we’ve released the first of what will be a collection of PDF manuals for you to enjoy. The first one is our Ten Minute Guide to the Blogosphere.
Getting paid to blog is a distant dream of most bloggers. The initial high hopes for Google ad sense will have vanished after just a few weeks, even days. So what is one of the fastest, easiest ways to get paid to blog? 
BlogBackupr
As we’ve announced earlier 
The 
