By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed)

It's no secret that I'm a huge proponent of self-hosted Microblogging. I've written numerous times on LouisGray.com and my own blog about the benefits business can see by "rolling their own" microblog with their own brand, look and feel. Not sold on this idea? Read what I wrote earlier about the implications of ESPN running their own sports network, or even the company I advise for, TodaysMama.com and their recently-launched network for Moms, TodaysMama Connect (which has quite a community going now!).

There is something to be said for a brand being able to have full control over the relationships and community they build. Self-hosting is the only way to achieve this full control. This is why I was excited to see the developers of both Laconi.ca (which hosts TodaysMama Connect, Identi.ca, and Leo Laport's Twit Army), and OpenMicroblogger (which we also wrote about before) both come out with their own way to easily set up your own, hosted microblogging environment without the need to even run your own servers. The two services, Status.net, and Twitteronia, I guess you could say are the "Wordpress.com" of the "Wordpress.org-like" self-installed microblog platforms. They provide the complete set up for anyone to have their own branded microblog with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

This evening, I got an odd alert from Twitter saying I had made an error with yesterday's story about optimizing headlines. Amusingly, in that story about headlines, I had made a simple copy mistake, confusing "you" with "your". The alert came from an application called "Emend", which, since its start in November of last year, has suggested almost 70 edits Web-wide, regardless of their source.

The service, which is hosted on Google's App Engine, lets you log in with your Google credentials, and report copy mistakes for any Web site or blog out there, from mine, as was the case today, to Wired, FiveThirtyEight.com, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, the New York Times, or practically anything.

The process is fairly straight forward.

Once logged in, to make "a new edit", just enter the offending URL, show the original copy that needs to be changed, and offer a proposal. When you hit submit, the proposed edit is added to the service's open items list and sent to their Twitter stream.

You can't post edits to Emend anonymously, which is good, and you can see your own list of submitted items (see mine here). From this list, you can choose an open edit and Tweet it from your own account, declare it "fixed", or if you're more daring, you can send a Trackback or pingback to the page - which would be more "in your face."


Anybody who has been on the Web for a good amount of time knows there is a secret army of grammarians waiting for you to slip up, mixing there and their or it's and its. Now, with Emend, you can make the process official and glory in your grasp of the language (or just openly mock those who don't get it right). A list of most edited sites is kept, including the status on proposed changes.

For fun, and just to see if I could tweak my cranky Canadian friend Steven Hodson, I suggested an its vs. it's problem from his own blog, using Emend, and blasting the edit out via Twitter. (see here)

If he doesn't change this post, I'll leave it open, but if he finds the time to make an edit, I'll declare it closed. It's essentially quality assurance for the Web. And if you tweet a proposed edit using Emend, I'll see it and do the best I can to fix things.



See if you can annoy your favorite blogger or journalist today at http://emend.appspot.com.

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I have tried to avoid the newspaper crisis, and the AP's comments for as long as possible. Today, a TechCrunch post got me thinking a little more about what is happening. There have been complaints that Google is killing newspapers and all other sorts of silliness. However, the biggest online driver of news traffic is Yahoo!.

According to comScore, Google News attracted 16.2 million unique visitors in the U.S. in February, compared to 42.3 million for Yahoo News and 46.2 million for the sites operated by New York Times Digital.

This means that the whole "Google as middleman is killing newspapers" idea is misguided and Yahoo may be the true culprit. Of course, this is if you believe that an Internet property is to blame. Google as a search entity does not steal traffic from anyone because it is only indexing the content on the Web so that it is easily found. Obviously, this cannot be the reason that people would blame Google.

If Google is not to blame, and you are not buying the Yahoo News idea, then who is to blame for newpapers demise? The newspapers themselves. A long time ago, television came along, but did not kill newspapers. You had a handful of channels that would show some news and some other programming. Then cable came alive, and we got specialized channels for sports, music, movies and more. So far, newspapers had not seemed to be affected, but they had not changed anything. On the TV side, we got more 24-hour news channels, and they did not kill newspapers either. Is the internet killing CNN or MSNBC? No. If anything, they are stronger because they are leveraging the internet.

So, why are newspapers dying? If you followed the TV analogy, you will see that TV has continuously evolved. Newspapers just got bigger, but did not change much. Many newspapers have Web sites, but they are just the online version of the newspaper. Where is the evolution into something better?

The Internet as a whole has been slowly killing newspapers because they are not taking advantage of what people are doing. We are in a fast-paced fast-food culture now, and newspapers are definitely best when slowly consumed. If newspapers were smart they would join forces to become a major internet player. For most newspapers, much of the content is sourced from wire services like the AP and Reuters. So why don't the newspapers use this to their advantage to become specialists. The Wall Street Journal has been a business and finance specialist for as long as it has existed.

However, I do not think that newspapers want to adapt because change is scary. The only thing you hear is that they are looking for ways to find revenue streams online. That is a band-aid that will only help for a short time. Like many companies that go into bankruptcy, they need to reinvent themselves. The problem is that they think they are fine.

Image courtesy of Jacob Whittaker

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Digg's new DiggBar is gaining a great deal of negative feedback as many see the URL shortener as reducing publishers' impact on Google and other search engines, giving Digg.com the credit as the new shortened URL is discovered. The debate has been lighting up Techmeme and John Gruber of Daring Fireball has pratically turned over his entire site to link after link decrying the new product. (See also: Ted Dziuba, Danny Sullivan and 3DogMedia)

With this backdrop, ReadBurner's new URL shortner, BurnURL, which similarly to the DiggBar, frames the original articles with a "share bar", explains how they have tried to help both readers and publishers. As author Michael Davis writes:

"One of the changes we recently put live was to remove the Sharebar when we detected the user-agents of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (these four account for the largest portions of search traffic). These crawlers don’t need to see the Sharebar (as they’re not going to interact wtih it), so we don’t need to serve it to them. Instead we feed them a 301 redirect. This tells them the URL that was burned is the original content owner and it should be listed in the index on that topic. Our shortened URL effectively gets ignored."

While I am an advisor to the ReadBurner team, they didn't check in with me on this update (or ask me to write about it), but I'm glad to see they are keeping their eyes open and trying to create a service that benefits users and content sources.

See the full blog post here: FRAMED!: What BurnURL is doing to help out Readers AND Publishers