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Microsoft IE Launches Do-Not-Track Tool
Sick of being monitored online?
Microsoft’s latest version of Internet Explorer, due to be released in the US tomorrow, will include a do-not-track tool which will please many Internet users that feel concern about their online privacy.
Internet Explorer will be the first major Internet browser with such a tool, while Mozilla announced in January that its forthcoming release of Firefox will also offer provision for users to turn on do-not-track.
Both Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari) Internet browsers have yet to declare support for the measure which may interfere with the targeting of their search-based advertising programs.
The do-not-track system is a recent idea, proposed just three months ago by the Federal Trade Commission in the US. It comes following growing consumer calls concerning the extent to which their online behaviour is tracked and targeted.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
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Akismet, Anti Spam Warrior
Got a blog and sick of comment spam?
You need Akismet, my favourite anti-spam warrior that automatically shoves comment spam into a junk box.
Look at the stats, over 23 billion spam comments stopped, more than 35 million in the last 24 hours.
(See larger image here.)
Every WordPress blog I build includes Akismet. You can see from the screenshot why I do.
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WordPress.Com Transition To WordPress.Org
WordPress.com is a great platform for users who want to easily create a free website or blog. With more than 23 billion pageviews in 2010, the service is a hit with millions of users.
Even though premium themes are now available for WordPress.com, users of the system are limited to whatever the platform will support. There is a lot more freedom if you move your WordPress.com blog to the self-hosted WordPress.org software alternative.
Over at Mashable, the good folks there have created an easy-to-follow tutorial for people transitioning from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. Even if you have built lots of content and multimedia already hosted on WordPress.com, moving across is not that onerous as the video below attests.
Head over to Mashable for the rest of the story.
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A War Of WordPress Words
Over at technorati, blogger Todd Fast has the WordPress blogging community in a furore over his post WordPress Censoring Blogs?
“For all you bloggers out there, be be warned—WordPress can and will censor your blog. How do I know this? I know this because WordPress censored my blog, today actually, over one of my recent articles.”
The furore was caused after Todd attempted to publish his article about Lady Gaga. It is quite a read for anyone who wants to liven up a Friday.
“Politically, she’s an outspoken supporter of gay rights; gays and lesbians make up a large part of her fan base… But even more shocking is her explicit use of homosexuality, bestiality, sexual slavery, S&M, rape, pornography, and the occult—all themes woven throughout her hypnotic music videos…”
(After watching some of her videos) “While I had a basic understanding of the meaning and power of symbols (colors too), the occult, and Satanism and or Luciferianism, nothing could prepare me for what I was watching. Gaga wasn’t suggesting, she was literally reenacting occult and luciferian sacrifice rituals right in the video.”
Then he assigned his tags. You can take your pick from evil, gay, lesbian, luciferianism, the occult (etc), as to which one you think might have tripped the WordPress platform to freeze publication.
As Alan Kurtz replied in his blog post “Crying Wolf About WordPress“, there is an entirely alternate theory as to why Todd might have found his post placed on hold for a few hours. Without raining on anyone’s parade, sadly the alternate doesn’t involve any conspiracy whatsoever.
“The First Amendment has nothing whatever to do with this. The government did not censor Todd Fast. WordPress temporarily and correctly froze his homophobic smear in place until they could determine that it did not expose WordPress to legal liability. It was corporate prudence, not Big Brother at work.”
Please Note: This post relates to content posted on www.WordPress.com which is the third-party blogging platform that WordPress provides to anyone to create a blog. It is not www.WordPress.org where the WordPress software can be downloaded and installed in your own host environment.
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Facebook Interns Maps Global Friendships
Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, took a data sample of 10 million friendships and mapped them, creating the world’s first map of global Facebook friendships.
“I began by taking a sample of about 10 million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse,” he said in a post on Facebook.
“I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.”
The global areas that shone most brightly were the eastern half of the US, Europe and parts of Indonesia. At the opposite end of the spectrum was China, Russia and central Africa.
Read more at the Herald Sun.
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WordPress, More Than 30M Downloads
If you’re thinking about a CMS for your website, you’d be hard-pressed to ignore WordPress, the world’s favourite blogging platform which is, of course, much more than a pure blogging platform.
Back in November, following head-to-head voting against Joomla and Drupal, WordPress won the 2010 Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award.
To give you a taste of just how many people know how great WordPress is, take a look at at the WordPress download counter. I just did and took the screengrab below.
It’s easy for me to say choose WordPress because I know how great it is – but here’s more proof of how great it is.
30 million people cannot all be wrong.
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ACMA Study, No Choice For Telcos
A new Australian Communications and Media Authority study has found that Australian telcos have no choice but adapt to the consumer appetite for iPhones, Internet TV, iPads and downloadable applications.
Global sales of portable internet devices such as Apple’s iPad are predicted to reach 150m per year by 2015 with Google’s Android likely to be the most serious challenger to Apple’s current dominance.
According to the study, telecommunications companies had responded to the new digital age by:
- Bundling content with voice services.
- Increasing their data quotas in line with increased consumer consumption of content.
- Improving the generosity of mobile telephony capped plans and packages.
- Creating their own mobile applications.
- Increasing the incentives for Australians to retain a fixed line service in their homes.
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How WordPress Themes Work
WordPress developer and all-around web geek Joost de Valk has just graced the Internet with a highly useful infographic.
For a medium that leans toward the amusing, infographics can occasionally be enlightening or even helpful for later reference.
This one serves as a sort of “cheat sheet for how your blog works” and takes the reader through the basics of a normal WordPress theme.
It’s a posts-to-plugins look at the anatomy of a typical WordPress theme.
Read more of: How WordPress Themes Work »
WordPress.Com; 6 Million More Blogs in 2010
Automattic, the company behind popular blogging platform WordPress.com, reported 6 million new blogs and 23 billion pageviews for 2010. The latter figure represents a 53% increase from 2009.
These latest stats were reported by The Next Web, which added, “Media uploads also doubled to 94.5 terabytes of new photos and videos, while new posts were up 110% to 146 million” for the past year.
Just last month, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Scheider disclosed that the company has around 30 million total publishers responsible for roughly 10% of all websites in the world. They also shared that WordPress.com receives 300 million unique visitors each month.
The five-year-old company may be experiencing remarkable growth, but it has yet to become a commercial success. The startup reportedly makes around $1 million per month from premium and hosting services, an inconsequential figure for a company that plays such a central role in web publishing.
Users can create their own blog using the platform located at WordPress.com or download the software at WordPress.org to use under their own domain name.
More at Mashable.
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WordPress – A Blogging Platform You Can Depend On
Web monitoring company Pingdom has tested the most-used blogging services to see how reliable they are over a period of two months.
The five most popular sites used for blogging included Google’s Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Posterous and Tumblr.
“For each blogging service, we monitored the uptime of the homepage and four individual blogs, so we could see how the service as a whole performed,” said Pingdom in a December 17 blog post.
“The winner was without a doubt Google’s Blogger,” reports Pingdom. “The Blogger blogs didn’t have any downtime whatsoever during the two months we monitored them, followed by WordPress.com which had very little downtime.”
The average downtime for popular blogging site Tumblr was 47.5 hours. Posterous had the second highest rate of downtime, 2.1 hours while rivals Typepad and WordPress.com were almost always online with just 0.2 hours and 0.1 hours of downtime respectively.
Read more of: WordPress – A Blogging Platform You Can Depend On »
