Philadelphia is not going down as a great city to blog. The city is requesting $300 from bloggers. The city calls it a "business privilege license." The City Paper has more details on the blogging fee here. NBC points out that the fee could make some people decide not to blog and that could be bad news for the city and Philadelphia businesses. Take a look:
Magazines.com, ae magazine subscription service, has launched the MagaScene blog network. Magazines.com says it wants the MagaScene blog network to be the "go-to place for magazine readers to find out what’s happening on the magazine scene." The network provides commentary on magazines, information on new magazines and magazine industry news and trends. The MagaScene blog network covers five categories of magazines: food and cooking magazines at Food MagaScene; home and lifestyle magazines at Home MagaScene; fashion, entertainment and celebrity magazines at Celebrity MagaScene; parenting and kids magazines at Parenting MagaScene; and health and fitness magazines at Fit MagaScene.
You can march your Twitter avatar and the avatars of the people you follow in Twitter a parade at isparade.jp. You can also make a parade out of a keyword. May it never rain on your Twitter parade.
MediaPost reports that a Sysomos.com analysis of over 100 million blog posts found that the largest blogging demographic is still young people. 20.2% of bloggers are 20 years old or younger. Here is the breakdown:
20 years or younger (20.2%)
21-35 yrs (53.3)
36-50 yrs (19.4)
51 yrs or older (7.1)
The most bloggers are located in the U.S., followed the U.K., Japan and Brazil.
U.S. (29.2%)
U.K. (6.75%)
Japan (4.9%)
Brazil (4.2%)
Canada (3.9%)
Germany (3.3%)
Italy (3.2%)
Spain (3.1%)
France (2.9%)
Russia (2.3%)
Australia (2.22%)
India (2.14%)
Sweden (2.05%)
Malaysia (1.7%)
Netherlands (1.69%)
In the U.S., California and New York are the states with the most bloggers.
An iPad app called Flipboard is getting some buzz. The app lets you view the stories, photos, news and updates being shared by your Twitter and Facebook friends in the form of a social magazine.
"With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date," said Mike McCue, Flipboard's CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream."
Robert Scoble has a review of Flipboard here. Flipboard (and makers of similar apps) need to make sure they don't anger publishers by taking too much content. It is difficult to see the future of tablet apps, like the apps for the iPad. If tablets get fast enough (which they should) - and have powerful enough browers - then people will just go directly to the websites like they do when they are using PCs or Macs.
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress has added a phone your blog feature.
We've got the cure. Now, instead of drunk dialing random friends, lovers, and acquaintances one at a time, what if you could dial your blog and talk to the whole world at once? It'd be like something out of Star Trek.
The future is now, folks. You can now go to your My Blogs tab, enable Post by Voice, and get a special number and code to call your blog. After you're done, the audio file from your phone call will be posted to your blog for all to listen to and enjoy. (And added to your RSS feed for podcast support.)
This will be useful if you have a lot of readers that will listen to audio. Mashable says the technology is powered by a company named Twilio.
Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton recently linked to an alleged "upskirt" photograph of 17-year-old Miley Cyrus on his Twitter account. The photograph Perez linked to has since been deleted. The L.A. Timesreports that Perez has been losing ads because of the tweet that linked to the upskirt photograph. ABC pulled ads for The View.
Lauren Beckham Falcone at the Boston Heraldnotes that this is not first time Perez Hilton has been accused of being a pedophile.
Last fall, Demi Moore accused him of being a pedophile after he posted photos of her 15-year-old daughter Tallulah.
"Let me ask all of you, what is it called when someone is telling people to look and focus on a child's 'boobs & ass' while providing photos? It's called child pornography" Moore tweeted.
He also posted nude photos of "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens on his Web site perezhilton.com, shots her lawyers contend were taken when she was underage.
Perez Hilton remains unapologetic. He also claims there was nothing wrong with the photograph he linked to, but if that is the case the why did he warn the "easily offended" not to click on the link. If Perez Hilton was trying somehow to be controversial, it was a stupid move. Child pornography is not a subject to joke about. The issue has already cost him ads.
The Telegraphreports that Twitter is seeking a Government Liaison. The new hire will be Twitter's first D.C.-based employee. The new hire will also get to work with important political peeps. You can see the job listing here.
Twitter is looking for an experienced, entreprenurial person to make Twitter better for policymakers, political organizations and government officials and agencies. You'll be our first D.C. -based employee and the closest point of contact with a variety of important people and organizations looking to get the most out of Twitter on both strategic and highly tactical levels. You'll help Twitter understand what we can do to better serve candidates and policymakers across party and geographical lines. You'll support policymakers use of Twitter to help them communicate and interact with their constituents and the world. You'll work with nearly every group at the company and at every level to pursue your vision for how Twitter ought to be. You'll help set the culture and approach of a fledgling public policy department and be an important part of our very small company.
If you are successful, the world will be a better place because policymakers will have closer connections with their constituents and will be sharing more information with them.
They will likely get a lot of resumes for this position. The demand is great enough that Twitter probably needs more than just one person dealing with local and international governments.
There it is. The most beautiful tweet ever. Twitter user Marc MacKenzie from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is credited with tweeting the most beautiful tweet. He won the honor of the "most beautiful tweet ever tweeted" at the Hay Festival. The judge was Stephen Fry. Marc MacKenzie entered 35 of his tweets in the competition.
The Paris Review, a quarterly publication founded in 1953, has launched a blog. The introductory post by editor Lorin Stein can be found here.
Since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has devoted itself to publishing “the good writers and good poets,” regardless of creed or school or name-recognition. In that time the Review has earned a reputation as the chief discoverer of what is newest and best in contemporary writing.
But a quarterly only comes out…well, you know. We have been looking for a way to keep in touch with our readers between issues, and to call attention to our favorite writers and artists in something close to real time. If the Review embodies a sensibility, this Daily will try, in a casual and haphazard and at times possibly frivolous way, to put that sensibility into words.
The Paris Review is calling its blog The Paris Review Daily. The homepage of the Daily can be found here.
The Australianreports that Twitter has reached its 15 billionth tweet just three months after hitting its 10 billionth. Twitter also revealed that 300,000 new accounts are being added daily on Twitter.
For the first time since the site launched in March 2006, Twitter released its numbers, with 105 million registered users and 300,000 new accounts being added on average each day.
The Australian also calls Twitter an "online blog site," which sounds a little redundant to us.
Google decided recently to reveal the percentage it pays publishers with its AdSense program. The numbers were similar to what many bloggers suspected. 68% for content ads and 51% for search partners.
AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google's costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.
We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.
Google says they have no plans to change the percentage. Google plans to add the revenue share data to the Google AdSense interface in the future.
Of course, we can't guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don't have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we'll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.
Danny Sullivan says Google is known to pay more to large publishers. Google Operating System compares the AdSense payout percentage to Google's recent financial results. Paid Content says Google has been under pressure from Italian antitrust authorities to release the data.
Yahoo, Inc. plans to become an online content powerhouse with its acquisition of Associated Content. Paid Content reports that Associated Content uses nearly 400,000 contributors to churn out tons of online content.
Associated Content has more than 380,000 contributors-primarily in the U.S.-and Yahoo says it will now push the platform abroad as well. It will be able to base assignments in part on what users are searching for on its site.
Yahoo's move puts it head-to-head with AOL, which has been acquiring similar mass online content creators like Seed.com. There will be plenty to read on the Internet thanks to AOL and Yahoo.
The Guardianreports that its Guardian Hay festival is offering an award for the most beautiful tweet ever written. Stephen Fry will be judging the award.
The search for the winning tweet begins tomorrow and ends a week on Friday, and the tweets will be judged by the unofficial king of Twitter, actor and writer Stephen Fry.
"The definition of most beautiful tweet could fall into a number of different categories: it could prove the most eloquent; the most impassioned; the best demonstration of a clever pun or metaphor; the most evocative description of a place or emotion, or perhaps prove that brevity is conducive to levity, and be the wittiest tweet ever committed to the Twittersphere," said the festival's founder and director, Peter Florence.
Nominations for the most beautiful tweet award should be sent to the Guardian Hay festival Twitter account, @hayfestival. The winning tweet will be announced on June 6th.