WordPress, the most popular open source blogging platform, has just introduced its new piece of software, BuddyPress. WordPress describes BuddyPress as a sister to WordPress, although it actually requires the WPMU (WordPress Multi-user) version of Wordpres to run. The idea is that website owners can easily build their own social networking sites. Rather than just comment on articles, members will be able to interact with each other, and possibly start their own topics too, as well as have their own profile pages.

“In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.”

More information is available from the WordPress Development blog and also the new Buddy Press Community.

“BuddyPress will transform an installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.” BuddyPress.org

“If successful, a lawsuit against the New York Times Co. brought by Gatehouse, a chain of local newspapers, could radically change the way information is distributed on the Internet. The suit challenges the widespread practice of reproducing samples of text with links to original published content on other sites.” Source: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/65638.html

This seems to amount to three main points:

1. Deep linking to content and bypassing ads on the index page.
2. Not getting prior permission to link.
3. Needing to pay for the right to link!

This is all very interesting. When I started blogging, I was actually surprised at the way in which people could simple quote a bit of text and add their opinion, and post it as a blog. The link back seemed like a way of saying “thanks, and here is something in return”. Blogger even had a browser plugin that allowed you to automatically post a blog based on the text highlighted on a page, which is automatically put in a blockquote. But now this could all change – but only if people found out who is copying.

The thing is, this will likely have two effects:

1. people just won’t bother with the link, but will still use the story
2. people will rewrite the story as their own – spending a little more time.

If this happens, then people will improve their own content, and not sent link juice to the orginal work, written by those professional highly paid journalists. Blogs will get more traffic, established online papers less. This could actually damage the likes of NY Times in the long term.

By: Gobala Krishnan

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is WordPress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of WordPress, the earliest now termed as “WordPress” at WordPress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “WordPress.com” which is of course available WordPress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of WordPress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing WordPress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your WordPress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With WordPress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your WordPress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With WordPress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With WordPress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend WordPress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using WordPress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, WordPress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use WordPress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With WordPress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of WordPress (not WordPress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both WordPress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with WordPress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that WordPress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With WordPress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using WordPress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go WordPress, you don’t go back.

About the Author:
Gobala Krishnan is a micro-niche blogging specialist. Get a copy of his report “WordPress Adsense System” at http://adsense.easywordpress.com

Using Blogger.com to post to your own domain is a piece of cake. This website was built using this following method, but has since moved to WordPress:

Here is what you do:

1. In Blogger, “create a blog”
http://beta.blogger.com/create-blog.g
and choose Advanced blog set up at the bottom of the page.
2. Pop in your FTP details, either IP address or ftp.domainname.com
3. Enter the FTP path, eg. if it is for your default domain, then this will be /var/www/html/ (this will vary for every webhost)
4. Choose a file name (usualy index.html)
5. Then the Blog url, eg. http://www.domainname.com
6. Enter your user name and FTP password that your web hosting provider has given you
7. Continue to the next page……
8. Chose a template – the Blogger ones are nice and simple, but I wanted extra columns. There are many free and open source templates available these days. I really like Andreas Viklund’s templates. They are very stylish, easy to modify, and have only a few files.
9. Your Blog has been created !
10. You can add a description next, and change the main title if you desire.
11. The settings need to be modified for the archiving and site feed publishing:
12. Under Archive, add the achive path, e.g. /var/www/html/, and the URL, same as under publishing. Make sure Enable Post pages is set to yes as this allows all posts to have a unigue page that can then be cached in the search engines.
13. Site Feed – add the path and URL here too, most likely the same as for archiving.

That’s it. Create a post, publish, and check it all looks OK. Make sure the Blog, the archive and the sitefeed are all being published to the correct folders. Blogger creates both atom and rss site feeds. The templates can be easily modified once you become familiar with them. Good luck and happy blogging!

“A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘Web log.’ ‘Blog’ can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
“

By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb, itnews.com.au

“More than half of the visitors to MySpace are reportedly 35 years old or older, a surprising statistic given the media attention the site has received as an Internet hangout for teens and young adults.

A recent analysis of the users of leading social networking sites found significant shifts in MySpace’s demographics while the site grew dramatically over the last year, ComScore Networks said. In August, children and teens from 12 years old to 17 years old accounted for 11.9 percent of all visitors, compared with 24.7 percent the same month a year ago.”

Have your say today, By Kieren McCarthy
Published Monday 9th October 2006 10:01 GMT, The Register

“A meeting of the internet’s top brass as well as UK politicians, businessmen, and academics will take place in London at 2pm today – and bloggers have been asked to make their voices heard.

Discussion will cover the future of the internet and seek answers to the problems the medium has thrown up, including spam, phishing, freedom of speech, and child pornography. The results will then be fed into a global meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) that will be held in Athens at the end of the month, and that meeting’s chair, United Nations representative Nitin Desai, will be present and giving a speech alongside trade minister Alun Michael.
Click here to find out more!

Representatives from Google, Nominet, Ofcom, the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), Messagelabs, the Worldbank, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), Cyber Liberties, and the London Internet Exchange (LINX), among others, will put their point across in a number of panel discussions that mirror what will take place in Athens.”