December 11th, 2008

Wordpress 2.7 released; jazzy like Coltrane

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 7:48 am

Categories: Blogging, Commentary, Open Source, Productivity, Standards

Tags: Blog, Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg, Blogging, Internet, Andrew Mager

Matt Mullenweg has come a long way since he worked at CNET developing the earliest versions of his open-source blog management system Wordpress.

The 24-year-old lives and breathes Wordpress, so it’s no surprise that version 2.7 is the best yet. Not only has the dashboard been completely redesigned, but you can drag and drop elements to customize it any way you want. Mullenweg promises that the new Wordpress is more productive: maneuvering around the system is faster, and you can even delete modules that you don’t use. Don’t like upgrading? 2.7 has an automatic upgrader.

Automattic contracted Happy Cog’s Liz Danzico to help consult on the new design, as well as the Wordpress community. They put a lot of effort into QA and testing for this release.

If you want to start a blog, give Wordpress a try. In the past three years, it’s taught me more about publishing and programming than anything else.

The ZDNet blog network runs on an older version of Wordpress (2.1.3 to be exact, with many custom functions), but we will soon be upgrading.

Update: As of 3:30 p.m. PST, Wordpress 2.7 has been downloaded over 100,000 times.

October 9th, 2008

Uncov is back, and you can write for it

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 11:44 am

Categories: Blogging, Commentary, Fun, Humor

Tags: Uncov, Internet, Blogging, Tools & Techniques, Management, Andrew Mager

The rantalicious tech blog Uncov took a brief hiatus from the Internet, but now it’s back.

Former Googler software engineer and current CTO of Pressflip Ted Dzubia will be doing most of the posting, but he’s opened it up for anyone to contribute. Expect stories from other Pressflippers Kyle Shank and Matt Kent.

Although this is not your normal type of tech news, there is still a need for slice-and-dice, Valleywagish commentary. It should be fun.

September 30th, 2008

Live: Mashable Monthly

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:44 pm

Categories: Blogging, Networking, Party, People

Tags: Blog, Pete Cashmore, Blogging, Internet, Andrew Mager

6:30 p.m. The blogger lounge is loaded with pizza, cupcakes, and Fiji water. Pete Cashmore’s sending off party is hosted at Roe in San Francisco, and the place is filling up. I got to work quickly and made friends with the representatives from Artiklz.

Artiklz

It allows you aggregate your various commentaries from different websites into your blog.

Directly below the comments on your blog, you can bring in data from Digg, Reddit, and even FriendFeed.

The site is currently in open alpha, so try give their product a try, and let me know what you think.

6:54 p.m. They are opening up the bar.

7:09 p.m. Here are the cupcakes:

I am going to interview the people from Strands.

Oosah

This service helps you organize, manage, and share your pictures, videos, and music all in one spot. Grab from Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, and more. It’s has an easy web interface too:

You can drag and drop from each service into the other. The guys gave us a really good demo:

7:42 p.m. The place is packed. Getting sweaty in here. Just met with Igor from Unseen.tv. He has an underground erotica marketplace.

WeAre.Us

Social support networks for patients. You can interact with people that have the same physical ailments as you and find friends.

For example, if you have Chron’s Disease, you can use wearecrohns.org. Check them out.

Strands

8:40 p.m. A service that allows you to bring things you do on the web and compile your tastes. There is a recomendation technology that will soon allow you to find other people that would enjoy similar content.

Strands is “people powered discovery”. They are building your taste stream. Definitely check them out.

If you want to try their beta, use the code “mashable”.

The geeks need to learn how to talk like the non-geeks. -Drew Olanoff

CoComment

A Firefox plugin that allow you to make comments on any website. It follows you from site to site.

I will have some more updates soon

Full photoset on Flickr from the past two Mashable Monthlys »

September 9th, 2008

TechCrunch50: Day 2

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:32 am

Categories: Blogging, Conference, Future, Live blog, TechCrunch50, Tools

Tags: Presentation, Andrew Mager

Yesterday’s presentations were a lot of fun to cover. I’m getting right back into the grind today.

6:30 a.m. Here is a list of today’s presentations:

• Alfabetic (Presented by Oded Broshi and Arik Kopelman)
• DropBox (Presented by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi)
• Emerginvest (Presented by Andrew Waterman and Eugene Kim)
• ExchangeP (Presented by Saul Kato and Charles Katz)
• FitBit (Presented by James Park and Eric Friedman)
• icharts (Presented by Seymour Duncker and Tyron Montgomery)
• Imindi (Presented by Adam Lindemann and Galen Kaufman)
• me-trics (Presented by Christian Dodd and Jame Vreelan)
• MIXTT (Presented by Eve Peters and Diana Agraz)
• Mobclix (Presented by Sunil Verma and Krishna Subramanian)
• Mytopia (Presented by Guy Ben-Artzi and Galia Ben-Artzi)
• Popego (Presented by Santiago Siri and Emiliano Kargieman)
• PostBox (Presented by Sherman Dickman and Scott MacGregor)
• Swype (Presented by Mike McSherry and Cliff Kushler)
• Tingz (Presented by Patrick Hunt and Richard Benson)
• TonchiDot (Presented by Takahito Iguchi and Peter Anshin)
• PERSONALRIA (Presented by Guy Hirsch)

6:36 a.m. Walking over to the venue. I am gonna try to get the same seats I had yesterday.

8:11 a.m. Gathering pictures from yesterday, and writing up two quick reviews if I can.

8:20 a.m. ComScore is doing a breakfast session. There’s about 50 people in the main conference center. I bet more people will be at Apple’s announcement.

8:29 a.m. Internet is much better today. There is about 60% more wired Ethernet cables setup on the tables:

Breakfast is bigger today:

When you get to your seat, there are flyers waiting for you:

8:32 a.m. Michael Arrington taking a pic:

9:01 a.m. I got a great demo from John Holland, Chief Experience Officer at Search Me.

Here is the full writeup »

9:12 a.m. Jason Calacanis announces that we are changing the format of the conference to American Idol style. Judges give their remarks right after each presentation.

Mike Arrington, Kevin Rose, and Mark Cuban hanging out:

Calacanis and other join in:

9:20 a.m. Meghan Asha and TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher are doing a Seesmic video:

9:30 a.m. Stage is set. We are ready for day 2:

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September 8th, 2008

TechCrunch50: Day 1

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:40 am

Categories: Blogging, Conference, Startup, TechCrunch50, Technology

Tags: Start-up, Presentation, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, E-mail, Team Management, Investment, Finance, Financing Startups, Management

When Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis team up on a project, the webs are bound to be shaken up.

Last year, their conference TechCrunch40 was an enormous showcase for startups to present their idea to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and the press. This year, it’s even bigger.

I will be liveblogging this event for the next three days. I will try to writeup all 50 startups, plus some from the demo pit.

Email me if you want me to cover something specifically.

6:30 a.m. Here is today’s lineup:

• Adgregate Markets (Presented by Henry Wong and Du Nguyen)
• AdRocket (Presented by Scott Milener and Andreas Svensson)
• Angstro (Presented by Rohit Khare and Salim Ismail)
• BlahGirls (Presented by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg)
• Burt (Presented by Gustav von Sydow and Gustav Martner)
• Connective Logic (Presented by Stuart Smith and Jeremy Orme)
• Devunity (Presented by Alon Carmel and Leeron Shalev)
• DotSpots (Presented by Farhad Mohit and Matthew Mastracci)
• FairSoftware (Presented by Alain Raynaud and Eileen Long)
• Hangout Industries (Presented by Pano Anthos and Lucas Smolic)
• LiveHit (Presented by Jeanine LeFlore)
• OtherInBox (Presented by Joshua Baer and Mike Subelsky)
• Quant the News (Presented by Brett Markinson and Ben Goertzel)
• Rinen (Presented by Hirofumi Manganji and Go Hagiwara)
• Shryk (Presented by Shane Kempton and Kim Stroh)
• Tweegee (Presented by Shay Bloch and Adi Brandwine)
• Yammer (Presented by David Sacks and Adam Pisoni)

6:38 a.m. Heading to the San Francisco Design Center Concourse. Hopefully I can plugin there.

Calacanis announced that Ashton Kutcher will be one of the first presentations at 9 a.m. PST.

Google’s Marissa Mayer will give a presentation today at 11:30 a.m. PST.

7:30 a.m. Just got here. The name badges are two sided:

The demo pit is warming up. Qik’s booth:

Video search engine CastTV:

7:40 a.m. Seesmic is here. Think of it as a video Twitter:

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August 16th, 2008

Wordcamp 2008

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 8:44 am

Categories: Blogging, Conference, Development, Journalism, Startup, Technology, Tools

Tags: Avatar, Wordpress, Automattic, Blogging, Internet, Andrew Mager

In the quiet flats of University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus, bloggers, thinkers, journalists, developers, and inventors melt together for a full day of lectures and learning. The goal of Wordcamp 2008 is to figure out the future of publishing on the web.

Last year’s event was two days long, but this year it’s crunched into a 9-hour multi-session jam.

8:00 a.m. Checked into UCSF. Automattic’s Marianne Masculino set me up with badge, a free tee shirt, and pass for tonight’s after party.

8:15 a.m. Wordpress schwag everywhere!

8:32 a.m. The badges use Gravatars, globally recognized avatars. This is the newest product from the makers of Wordpress. Once you set it up, every time you comment on a blog, your avatar will show up.

Wordcamp is broken down into two separate sections today: the user track and the developer track. Since most of us are quickly becoming “users” of this type of software, I will mainly cover that part of the conference.

Schedule for the user track

• 9:00 a.m. The Future of Education and Wordpress -
• 9:30 a.m. SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• 10:00 a.m. Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• 10:50 a.m. Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• 11:00 a.m. LOLcats and the Secret of Virality
• 11:30 a.m. Wordpress & Microformats
• 12:00 p.m. Lunch
• 1:00 p.m. Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 1:20 p.m. 450 Wordpress Power User Tips - Lorelle VanFossen
• 1:40 p.m. Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• 2:00 p.m. State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• 3:00 p.m. Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• 3:20 p.m. Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• 3:40 p.m. An interview with Om Malik
• 4:00 p.m. Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• 5:00 p.m. A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• 5:10 p.m. Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

8:56 a.m. Matt Mullenweg welcomes the crowd and gives logistical announcements. He announces the after party; they will show a movie at the bar.

“The idea behind Wordcamp is to set the tone for the following year. It’s sort of a nice milestone. We want to expose you to the ideas that Wordpress has been thinking about over the last year. In turn, it’s the audience’s chance to connect on a personal level with Wordpress. It’s 100% user-driven, so here’s your chance.” -Matt Mullenweg

9:00 a.m. Let the games begin.

The Future of Education and Wordpress

Allen Levine, New Media Consotrtium

The powerful thing about blogging is that it’s personal. It’s the most important subject: me. My first blog was Movable Type, and my recovery time was about ten minutes. One of the best templates I’ve used is Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner.

Edublogs - UMW is doing something amazing with Wordpress multi-user installations. They’ve had about 15,000 users sign up so far.

University of British Columbia is getting ready to launch a hosted blog service for their student community.

University of Calgary is doing something similar. The Discovery Channel has an “educator network”.

Al Upton teaches third grade kids in Australia. They have a class blog where the kids are paired with external mentors around the world, where they could get comments and criticism about their writing. The state department shut him down for about a year. He got about 300 comments on his blog from educators around the world about how wrongly he was treated. But he is back up today.

An elementary school in Illinois is showing off student art projects on a simple Wordpress install.

ChickSpeak is a website designed for women at college to help them deal with issues they may run into.

A blog is a great tool for publishing. It has a calendar, it archives your posts, and is searchable.

ScholarPress develops specific plugins catered to educators. Courseware, WPBook, and there are more in development.

• Flickr photoset of the slides.
• Presentation wiki

9:29 a.m. Sitting next to SocialTNT’s Chris Lynn:

SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make

Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

My 16-year old daughter makes about $1,000 a month on a blog about NeoPets.

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