Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

VH1 has launched a new celebrity gossip blog called Scandlist. The blog kicks off with a long entry that details the top 100 celebrity scandals of all time. That's a good start but will the new blog be able to compete? It's not like there aren't already plenty of these types of blogs. That's probably why they went with the extensive top 100 celebrity scandals blog post - to give the blog a big kick-start.

VH1 already has a successful blog at blog.vh1.com covering games, music, movies and gossip. The Scandalist.com launch follows on the growth of the VH1 Blog according to VH1. A press release says the VH1 Blog will continue to live on VH1.com and will focus primarily on VH1's shows, artists and events. The press release says Scandalist.com will include up-to-the-minute celebrity photos, interactive features and gossip and entertainment news. It also says original video will eventually be incorporated into the blog posts.

"After taking a look at how quickly we were able to grow the VH1 Blog on VH1.com, we decided to look at ways we could go deeper with our blog coverage of pop culture and our VH1 shows and events separately," said Tom Calderone, President, VH1. "With a dedicated staff of writers, Scandalist.com will serve as a distinct, yet complimentary site for fans of pop culture, entertainment news and all things celebrity."

Posted in New Blogs

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The Science News Blog reports that the Sci Fi Channel has added another blog to its blog network that includes Dvice and Fidgit. SciFi.com's latest blog is called How You Can Save the World and it includes posts from top scientists and visionaries about how people can make a difference and about future technologies.

It doesn't take a company or a government to save the world (though, admittedly, it helps). People - individual people - are making a better future right now, and we've got a passel of the best. Brilliant minds from art to science, entertainment to architecture, government to technology and points in between are writing for SCI FI's new online blog, "How You Can Save the World". This blog site will bring you amazing ideas from the frontiers of innovation and help set forth first steps in helping solve some of the challenges we face today. Read it and join the conversation.

A little more about the blog is explained here in a post from Sci Fi Channel President Dave Howe.

But it doesn't take a company or a government to save the world (though, admittedly, it helps). People-individual people-are making a better future right now, and we've got a passel of the best. Brilliant minds from art to science, entertainment to government to technology and points in between are writing for SCI FI's new online blog, howyoucansavetheworld.com. SCI FI has called upon each contributor to share his or her unique perspective on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The blog will draw upon their distinct and visionary reflections - voices that represent the choices that we as a society will be making to help shape our own future choices.

Howyoucansavetheworld.com will serve as a platform for some amazing ideas from the frontiers of innovation and will, hopefully, help set forth some first steps in helping solve some of the challenges we face today. Check back here often, catch up on some unique visions of tomorrow, and then go forward to bring your own visions to life.

It sounds like the blog will make an interesting, regular read especially with this impressive contributor list.

Posted in New Blogs

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DealBook is reporting that Carl Ichan has hired Thompson Reuters hedge fund reporter Dane Himlton to help write his blog called The Icahn Report.

Carl C. Icahn took his first steps into the Internet earlier this year by beginning a blog. Now he's about to get some help.

The activist shareholder has hired Dane Hamilton, a hedge fund reporter at Thomson Reuters, to work on his Web site, The Icahn Report, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Hamilton is expected to contribute original reporting and analysis to the site, augmenting Mr. Icahn's own voluble opinions on the state of corporate America.

Mr. Hamilton will start working for the site this month, these people said. He declined to comment; Mr. Icahn could not be reached for comment.

Wikipedia notes that billionaire Carl Icahn is the 46th richest person in the world so he can certainly afford to hire reporters away from any media outlet. Carl Icahn owns 5% of Yahoo stock and his name was in the media recently when he tried to force a Yahoo-Microsoft deal. Yahoo ended up cutting a deal with Icahn which gave Icahn a seat on Yahoo's board.

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Google's Blogger.com service suffered an unfortunate error over the weekend that marked some legitimate Blogger account as spam. These users marked as spammers were unable to use their accounts reports The Register.

Blogger.com emailed an apology to users on Saturday when access was restored.

The company said it was looking at extra monitoring and process checks to stop the mistake happening again.

One irate blogger said: "Google lost my trust yesterday. They'll have to work twice as hard to regain it due to their lack of acknowledgment of the problem."

Figures from Alexa.com found Blogger suffered more downtime in 2007 than any other Top 20 website.

There is an apology Blogger users posted here on Blogger Buzz titled "You Are Not Spam."

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We've tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

Google's Blogspot isn't the first social service to have its spam fighting efforts bring down legitimate users and it won't be the last. Twitter has also recently been suffering from similar problem as it tries to curb spam.

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Many bloggers embed the Feedburner chicklet onto their blog to show how many readers they have. Unfortunately, this number is far from perfect. People may have subscribed to your feed from multiple RSS readers so there could easily be duplicate counts for the same user. This is especially true for blogs that have been around a while as people have changed rss readers over the years. There are also ways to fake the Feedburner subscriber count. The video below from The Next Web shows a way to do this using NetVibes.

The best real way to inflate your subscribe count is to get your feed offered by an RSS Reader in one of the recommended bundles - but that's much easier said than done.



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