Splog software

I found one of my recent posts appropriated (plagiarized) at a clickfraud spam blog called Christian-radio, hosted or created by a tool called BlogSolution that appears to be designed to create splogs.
Welcome back my friends, to the tragedy of the commons that never ends.

Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word

Quoting from Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word:

Last July, a few of us visited the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in action. Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn’t look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation, spelling and grammar are important. That got the Blogger team thinking about how to help Word users to become bloggers.
So just now I fired up Microsoft Word, wrote this, hit ‘Publish’ on the brand new Blogger for Word toolbar and voila – you’re reading it. Which means there’s really no excuse, blogwise, if you prefer to finely craft your posts over time. Use Blogger for Word as a way to back up your document drafts with the ‘Save as Draft’ button or work on posts while you are offline and post them later. Hope you enjoy this new add-in.

Hmm, I wonder how it handles special characters? Does it turn them into HTML entities? I should check this out, though I’m not personally using Blogger these days.

Ann Althouse fisks Pajamas Media

I really should get off my ass and get a blogads account. All my blogs together might cover my bandwidth costs, anyway.
I don’t think I’m PM material (Charles Johnson creeps me out, for one thing), but even if I were it sounds like a dubious plan. In Althouse: Pajamas Media vs. BlogAds — the blogger’s perspective, Ann Althouse goes critiques their offer email line-by-line.
(via The Editors)

Yahoo 360 adds feeds

Frances Pabon over at Good Bloggin’ alerts me that <a title="Yahoo! 360

Six Apart release MT 3.2 beta

I’m looking forward to testing out the new version of Movable Type (Movable Type 3.2 Beta) – if only for the new administrative features.

Origins of blog software applications

an interesting discussion in the Textpattern support forum pulls together statements from the creators of Greymatter, Movable Type, and Radio Userland describing the genesis of each application.
What’s fascinating is how different they are.
Someone should gather analogous statements about Blogger, Textpattern, WordPress, and so on.

Typo – minimalist blogging engine

Typo “provides a fast and easy way to start a weblog and manage it with a rich desktop client application like MarsEdit or ecto.”

Mac OS X "Tiger" to ship with built-in blog system?

Quoting from Blogging and Ping-O-Matic built into Mac OS X “Tiger”

In Ping-O-Matic in Blojsom we learn that Tiger will ship with Blojsom, a Java based mutli-user blogging system. And Blojsom has built in support for Ping-O-Matic.

Nice.

I wonder how Apple will package it up. Will blogging be one of the sleeper features in Tiger?

Yahoo 247

The other day I was talking to someone about Steve Rubel’s great Micro Persuasion weblog and the energy and enthusiasm he demonstrates as he avidly filters key blog news and posts about whatever he cares about (note to self: add his headlines to the list of feeds down the right side…).

Anyway, I just scored a Yahoo! 360 invite and I’ll echo Steve since he’s doing all the original thinking these days (Trying Out Yahoo! 360):

Today I received an invite to try out Yahoo! 360 – Yahoo’s new
blog/social networking platform. I will play in the sandbox tonight and
post some thoughts. If you have specific questions, please leave a
comment on this post.

First impressions are that it’s a pretty good draft of tying together Yahoo’s latent social-network tools and the blogging interface is “not bad.”

Rex Hammock is not blogging SXSW

But he is pointing to people sitting near him who are. I’m in the Blogging Showdown session that hasn’t commenced yet, where we’ll get to hear some of the leading lights of nanopublishing comparing their products and maybe even confessing to some of the warts therein. If not, I’m sure the audience will hold their feet to the fire.