Wordpress

Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman answer viewer questions about time management, Thunderbird, and batteries.

GooseGrade, the service that lets your blog readers correct any mistakes you've made, has a new plug-in for WordPress users that makes it easier for blog administrators to approve and implement corrections suggested by readers.

Once installed, corrections get sent directly to WordPress' dashboard, where administrators can then make a fix just like they would approve or deny a user comment. Because the plug-in is given privileges to write over your content, it then goes back into the post and makes the edit, without the administrator having to do it manually. Best of all, it shows you a before … Read more

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with … Read more

Web-based blogging tool WordPress.com is getting a big update in a few hours with the release of version 2.7. The update is going out to all WordPress.com users at 5 p.m. PST Thursday, with a release for self-hosted WordPress.org users to follow later this month. Brave beta testers who want to get an early jump on 2.7 early can install the latest release candidate which has been available since Monday.

Version 2.7 brings a host of changes, with the biggest one being a complete overhaul of the blogging tool's dashboard interface. Instead … Read more

If you're keen on moderating blog comments in near real time and would prefer to do so without a browser window open, you should check out Moderator. It's a hybrid tool that uses both a WordPress plug-in and an Adobe AIR desktop application to keep you up to speed with the latest user chatter on your blog.

Once installed, you simply leave it running and it will update itself throughout the day, letting you approve or deny comments to go live. Because it sits on your desktop you can keep your blog comments lean and clean without ever … Read more

Web-based polling and survey company PollDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the Wordpress platform and the Wordpress.com blog hosting service.

PollDaddy offers free polls. (My most recent one is on this post: Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die.) The option to run more detailed surveys costs either $200 or $899 a year, depending on the volume of replies you've signed up for.

PollDaddy is based in Sligo, Ireland. CEO David Lenehan told me the company will be staying there and that his office becomes, "Automattic's first office anywhere in the world.&… Read more

Automattic, parent company of blogging platform WordPress, has acquired IntenseDebate, the free blog comment enhancement tool. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The service launched a little more than a year ago with several innovative features that effectively take over a blog's commenting system and add things like reputation, ranking, and a centralized area where blog administrators can manage comments across several sites at once.

Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says two of the main reasons for the pickup are IntenseDebate's e-mail replies and rating system which will likely make their way as the default … Read more

On today's show, we get schooled about how cell phone 911 works, we school the music industry on its consistently terrible ideas regarding physical formats (seriously? Albums on micro SD cards? Are you kidding us with this?), Obama cools his pro Net neutrality stance, and Japan gets to work on the space elevator. Jason already volunteered to go. He's so brave. We'll miss him.

SanDisk, record labels announce new music format http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10047311-93.html http://www.crn.com/retail/210602962 http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/22/music-on-microsd-i-cant-believe-the-labels-fell-for-this/… Read more