August 20th, 2013 § § permalink
Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We launched a fun new featurette today—the tech circle. You can read more about it on our main blog, and on Fred Wilson’s blog, but in essence it is a showcase for our latest product, the content discovery network.
This was my first product launch again in years, so I couldn’t sleep really. But not simply because something was going to go live.
Since Fred was leading the pack with his blog post, and since Fred blogs early in the morning, we had to flip the switch on his blog before he wakes up. Because all blogging tools are somewhat old, the best way to do that is to actually put some code into the design of the site.
I’ve had Fred’s
google analytics access for a while now, and now he shared his blog access as well. So I had the honor to hack my way trough Typepad’s opaque templating system. Of course I first tried on a test blog, and of course the templates changed on the live blog as well while I was still figuring out how it all works. Hopefully nobody noticed. 🙂
Anyways, our recommendations have now connected together a group of very interesting product people from very different backgrounds. Would love to hear your comments on it, and would love to hear if anyone would want to start a new circle with some of your blogging friends.
February 19th, 2013 § § permalink
I have a very special announcement to make, at least very special to me. i’m happy to be announcing the launch of a community project, that’s building on top of the WordPress Plugins directory, augmenting it’s default information about the plugin, with some never-seen-before data, that should make your decisions when evaluating plugins even easier. It’s called RankWP.com
I have been a blogger since 2004, ever since i installed my first WordPress, version 1.0 if i recall correctly. it was the hottest thing online back then, and one could argue, it still is. Also, the first product we ever released at zemanta was a WordPress plugin. of course we uploaded it to the directory, and rejoiced when we saw bloggers discover it, starting to use it, leave reviews and ratings.
one of the best features wordpress had, and still has, is it’s extensibility trough plugins. there is a plugin for just about anything you could think of, more possibly, there are several. for every wordpress-based site owner, testing various plugins is a regular, and fun activity. wordpress.org directory is like an app store for website owners, built in a true open-source fashion as an ever-growing and ever-improving repository of blogging goodness, where developers across the globe are building on top of previous efforts of likeminds.
with thousands of plugins available, it’s not always easy to find the best one for your needs. it’s easier if you know just how popular it really is, so we have built an algorithm that estimates the actual number of active users of each plugin. plugins also become more or less popular over time, so we started tracking their popularity rank and show you how it’s changing. both of these informations are available now for all the plugins for the first time.
all these great plugins are built by people, and most developers publish more than one. we are happy to expose most successful developers based on the aggregate number of users of all their plugins. of course automattic’s own developers have a clear lead, but of the independent developers, Yoast is a clear winner. I’ve shown him an early version of this project and he was kind enough to say a few words for this announcement:
“For users to find new plugins, or better alternatives to plugins they’re already using, is really rather hard. RankWP seems to be a very good step in the right direction of allowing people to see what other people use, which plugins get installed and uninstalled more often and which developers tend to have good plugins. I hope they keep developing this as the community could really use this.” – Joost de Valk
you’re all cordially invited to take a look, send me feedback, suggestions, corrections. if anyone feels like helping, either coding or editing the content, you will be very welcome.
May 16th, 2012 § § permalink
Groucho Marx & anonymous blogging (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’m late to the game, probably everyone knows already, but for the record:
Life just got a little easier for bloggers who use TypePad. The hosted blogging platform announced that it is integrating Zemanta’s content recommendation tools into its service, which suggests links to related stories from across the Web. Zemanta also generates in-text links to related information.
via: www.readwriteweb.com
… when we started 5 years ago, we had a list of most relevant blogging platforms of all times. now all of them are our partners 🙂 it feels empowering and inspiring to make dreams happen, but you have to remind yourself of that achievement, because when you reach them, you have other dream already.
April 3rd, 2012 § Comments Off on How to Overcome the “I Wish” Mentality and Start a Blog § permalink
![envie de randonnée [Explore 118 du 22/03/12]](http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7243/7002267239_07023185b6_m.jpg "envie de randonnée [Explore 118 du 22/03/12]")
Image by Vins64 via Flickr
the last two (of the three) points in this post are spot on! my take:
- stop over-consuming information – everyone wants you to be passive consumer, but you feel you should be active participant. stop f**ing listening to other then, stop obsessing over your wall, stop and think and write! i check out my FB messages occasionally, just so friends don’t call me rude, and that’s it!
- nobody’s perfect, don’t over-engineer – stop worrying about the quality, whatever you write will be 80% OK, and the last 20% you’ll develop by doing, not by waiting.
it’s exactly what I had to change in my mind, to start blogging again. and it makes me happier.
This Guest post is by Adarsh Thampy of Conversionchamp. I wish I started my blog a long time back when there was a lot less competition. I wish I was able to write great content from the start. I wish I had the money to purchase hosting and set up a self-hosted WordPress blog. I wish, I wish, I wish…
via: www.problogger.net
March 29th, 2012 § Comments Off on Using WordPress as your publishing hub § permalink
Personalizando WordPress 1.5 (Photo credit: juanpol)
Your blog is your online home. Even if you spend most of your day somewhere away, this is where your toot-brush is, where you are yourself.
I’ve been a proponent of this view since I started blogging, and it’s also the reason why I’m sticking with WordPress – I like moving furniture around.
This morning at WordCamp San Diego I gave a talk titled “Using WordPress as your publishing hub. It went well and lots of people had great questions. If anyone has followup questions I’m happy to answer them in the comments. The slides are included below.
via: andrewspittle.net
In a nutshell, regardless of what you are doing around the web, you will promote your posts on twitter, and not the other way around. That’s the core power of the blog!
March 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on Compete.com stats about blogging platforms § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
great post with charts and numbers from 2011 on three most famous hosted blogging platforms. it clearly shows that blogs are not declining, and we at Zemanta saw a huge influx of bloggers with new years resolutions in January!
Round 2 of Tumblr vs. WordPress vs. Blogger: FIGHT!
Tumblr is up almost 70% from last December, steadily gaining share. WordPress seems to have followed a similar path on par with an audience size close to Tumblr. Lastly, Blogger seems to be on a steady albeit conservative growth path.
blog.compete.com
March 8th, 2012 § Comments Off on 30K WordPress Blogs Infected With the Latest Malware Scam § permalink
And all my blogs were amongst them:
alphadogg writes with an excerpt from an article over at Network World: “Almost 30,000 WordPress blogs have been infected in a new wave of attacks orchestrated by a cybercriminal gang whose primary goal is to distribute rogue antivirus software, researchers from security firm Websense say. via: news.slashdot.org
It caused me quite some headache yesterday, as I was trying to rescue content, move it to more reliable hosting, and reconfigure all the analytics and links. here’s what i ended up doing:
- delete all infected files from dreamhost immediately. this rendered all my content inaccessible to anyone, including myself, but at least it prevented the virus from spreading to my readers.
- download sql databases
- register for paid wordpress.com account and be nicely surprised by the free domain.
- sed all datadumps, so that the links will still work on new domain
- as I realized that hosted wordpress won’t allow me to use google analytics, i signed up for cloudflare – i love it, and highly recommend it
- install local wordpress on my machine, import datadumps, export as wordpress file
- import into new igzebedze.com
- and while I was at it, i recategorized everything, into the 5 top level areas exposed on the left now.
hope it will bring better experience to everyone reading this…
February 23rd, 2012 § Comments Off on how big is twitter vs the web § permalink
website ideas (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
today Twitter will get it’s 500Mth user, and that facebook is way past that for a year already.
it’s fascinating in a way, that almost 10% of the population of the world is tweeting, but then i noticed another information:Â WordPress now powers over 60 million blogs, 16% of all websites. (business.financialpost.com)
this is amazing % for one single cms, but what really surprised me, is that it seems there is really just 400M websites out there in the web. i kind of assumed there has to be more than that.
February 13th, 2012 § Comments Off on Federated, Zemanta Launch Program to Connect Bloggers with Brands § permalink
I rarely write about my company here, but i’m exceptionally proud of this one:
Federated Media Publishing and Zemanta have announced a strategic partnership that will use technology to make it easier for bloggers and companies to connect, increasing opportunities to create targeted content marketing campaigns.
via: www.contentmarketinginstitute.com
Federated Media and John Battelle have been role models for all of us for years, and it’s a privilege to work with them.
February 12th, 2012 § Comments Off on Why A Blogger Needs To Be Crazy § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
I would actually expand on this point, to claim that ‘to achieve anything, one has to be crazy’. i think we should all start fighting to redefine the word ‘crazy’, clean it of it’s bad connotations, more towards the proposed meaning from this article: ‘extremely enthusiastic’.
Are you a crazy blogger (do you think I am crazing for writing this blog post)? Before we start, let me ask you some questions: What comes to your mind when you think the word crazy? Why? Take a piece of paper and write it down. Do not, I repeat, Do not scroll down to read more. Just answer the question first. Are you done?
via: weblogbetter.com
now, historically, the word crazy comes from ‘cracking pot’, something that is about to fall apart. it’s fascinating how our generation is making ‘explosions’ a good thing. instead of thinking of solid objects, nicely polished, we prefer energy, as free and intertwining as possible. we are fascinated by Emergence of higher-order patterns.
we are becoming ants.
