Webware

Blogging platform WordPress updated to version 2.6 late last night. It's the latest major release since 2.5, which debuted back in late March and adds nearly as many new features as it does bug and security fixes.

The video above outlines some of the major new features. The most useful of the bunch is aimed at bloggers on the go who can now take advantage of the same Google Gears integration introduced to WordPress.com earlier this month. This "turbo" mode downloads some of the files and scripts from your blog to your Gears cache, speeding up the page load when you're on a crummy connection.

Also introduced with the 2.6 update is revisioning, letting you go back to an older version of the blog post and either re-publish it over the newer one, or review the changes. This will be most helpful on multi-author blogs where you'll be able to track changes made by certain members of your blogging team with specific coloring based on author.

Another new feature that is long overdue is a built-in theme previewer, which will let you see a live preview of your blog using a selected theme. Previously you could only see what your existing content and widgets would look like with any theme by applying it over the one currently in use.

As part of the shift in blogging culture, there's also a new "press this" button, which is simply a bookmarklet for posting content from whatever page you're on straight to your WordPress blog. Similar bookmarklets from Facebook, FriendFeed, and Tumblr have proven to be an easy way to take whatever you're looking at and post it, even if the content author does not have a ShareThis, or similar sharing tool integrated into their content pages.

Users of previous versions of WordPress should definitely update to the latest stable release. As many users have discovered (myself included), some of the security holes that continue to be patched with each release can keep your blog from being overrun with spam.

Hot on the heels of Monday's look at Apture, competitor Zemanta has pushed out an update to include several new publishing platforms--one of them being MySpace, a site with over 100 million registered users. It's a good bet a chunk of those active users are taking advantage of the service's built-in blogging tool instead of going to another service like WordPress or LiveJournal.

Once installed, writing a blog post on the popular social network can be sped up if you take advantage of its auto-linking, tagging, and image finding capabilities.

The core service still remains largely the same, but Tuesday morning the re-blog feature, which was introduced early last month, has been tweaked. Re-blogging someone else's post using Zemanta is now a one-click effort, down from a small series of menus. It also better integrates with Tumblr, one of the new publishing platforms introduced Tuesday from which the feature was already borrowed and uses the same large quotation marks to set off what you're pulling from a source. This will also show up better in feed readers, where it would previously not be set apart from regular blog musings.

Other services added besides MySpace and Tumblr include Ning and Drupal--the latter requiring the use of a plug-in which works the same way as the ones for WordPress and MovableType.

Make MySpace blogging a quicker affair with Zemanta, which adds links and photos from the Web for you.

(Credit: Zemanta Ltd.)

Apture is a new tool for bloggers to add a little more context to their posts. Like Yahoo's Shortcuts it will go over what you've written and add little pop-ups in places where you link to other sites or media items from around the Web. The big difference is that Apture can either do all this automatically or let you to do the legwork.

It's set up to work with popular sites like Flickr, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Scribd. Any link to one of those sites will simply enable whoever clicks on it to see the entire entry in a small expanding pop-up window that can either stay affixed to the link text or be dragged around the page like a floating widget. The effect is actually pretty neat--and manages to keep your readers on the page, even if you've got a heap of linked items. If you want to manually link up any word or phrase in your post you simply highlight it, and you'll be given a huge list of items from photos, videos, audio clips and text links to link straight to it without using copy and paste or your CMS.

The site debuted back in mid-April with something called "the experience" which is basically what anyone can now do to their blogs. (Check it out here.) Supported are all the usual suspects like WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger. There are also simple script plug-ins for maybe some of the lesser known publishing tools like Tumblr, Ning, and Blogsome. The install itself is just a line of JavaScript no matter what platform you're on.

What makes it a standout compared to some other services that do this is that each Apture link can be picked from a multitude of places. For instance, in my test account on a Tumbr blog I linked up a mention of Google Maps with a link to the service. I was also able to expand on that with a related media section that let me add all sorts of other items like the Wikipedia entry, a YouTube video, and a large screenshot. All of these things could be seen without me having to add additional links, and as a reader you can see all of this without venturing off my post.

Another service that does this without some of the eye candy pop-ups is Zemanta which I really enjoyed using. As I mentioned back when I reviewed it, tools like these make blogging far easier while simultaneously making the end product a richer experience as long as these pop-up links are used with some restraint. I think the last thing anybody wants when reading a blog post is to have things flying around the screen, which is why I hope Apture's key improvements in the future include giving the readers a quick way to disable some of the eye candy that can make tools like this distracting instead of useful.

Check out the walkthough video of how to use the tool below.

One of blogging's biggest barriers is how much work you have to do to get a post out the door. You can stick to straight text, but adding links, pictures, tags, and related stories makes it more engaging for your readers. But let's face it, doing all that on every post is time consuming. In fact, the length of time required to write a decent blog post is what spawned services like Tumblr and Twitter--the ultimate lazy man's blogging tools.

Enter Zemanta, a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers who simply don't want to spend extra time looking up related links, tracking down properly licensed photos, or coming up with tags for what they're writing. The tool plugs into all the popular blogging platforms and will scan over whatever you've written and provide a bevy of related links. These links don't just go on a dump at the end of your post though, it'll spot mentions within the post and give you the option to add a URL to the first mention from a handful of popular sites. This works for company and celebrity names; it will also pick up on simple domains like anything with a .com at the end.

Another tool that does this to a certain extent is Yahoo Shortcuts, which we looked at back in December of last year. The big difference between Zemanta and Shortcuts is that it's not just Yahoo content--it comes from all over the Web. Zemanta COO Bostjan Spetic tells me the tool is pulling in links from a live index of 600 blogs which have been picked from multiple ranking sites, including Technorati. In addition to that listing, it's also pulling in another 400 popular news and entertainment sites like CNN.com and The New York Times.

Tired of adding links to blogs or finding pictures? Check out Zemanta, a tool that goes through your post to find tags, links, pictures and more.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Maybe one of Zemanta's coolest features is that it gives you freely-licensed photos you can drop into your posts (see the screenshot above). It will automatically pull them in from Flickr if they've been given the proper Creative Commons usage rights. You can sort through them and just stick them into your post. Spetic tells me he's working on deals with a few stock photo services to let bloggers grab beautiful stock photography for free. The photos will be limited in size, but bloggers are free to use them on their posts as long as they link back to the shot's product page.

This morning the company is unveiling a handful of new features including re-blogging, a feature that Spetic admits has been "borrowed" from nanoblogging service Tumblr. With it enabled, other bloggers with Zemanta installed can take your entire post and quote it on their own blog. Each post automatically comes with proper attribution linking back to the post, but they can make small changes too.

Also new is a popularity page highlighting the most linked to or mentioned content on Zemanta networked blogs. Spetic says it's not a competitor to sites like TechMeme, and instead is just a simple way to see what's getting the most chatter. Eventually, Spetic says the tracker will be spun off into different sections so that people can monitor areas of news that interest them the most. Spetic also told me it might become a tracker for other conversation mediums that will become Zemanta-enabled, like blog comments and forum posts.

For now, Zemanta works on all the major blogging platforms. There are also Firefox and IE extensions that let you get the same handy tool without having to install it on your blog. Users can also give it a spin on this demo page and get the same results. Once Zemanta is installed, users see a similar interface, but with a tighter integration into a blogging tool's existing tag and image libraries. To see the tool in action, check out the demo, or simply watch the video below.

Here's a neat service for blog owners who want to add another layer of distribution for their content. It's called Odiogo, and it will take any written blog entries and turn them into spoken word. It uses an integrated player that sticks itself on top of every blog post, and lets readers listen to any post in lieu of reading.

I came across the service while reading a post on UNEASYsilence about hacking the new eeePCs to run a hacked version OS X Leopard (which apparently runs about as well as it can on the aged processor), and was treated to a 5-minute computer rendition of step-by-step terminal commands complete with detailed installation instructions. While a bit tedious to listen to after a minute or two (one of several reasons text-to-speech services are still not more widely adopted), Odiogo's digital voice is definitely a step up from the last generation of computer generated speakers.

To actually add the tool to your blog there are plug-ins and bits of JavaScript code site owners can integrate into their blog installation or hosted template. I installed in on a hosted WordPress tester blog in about two minutes and ran into no problems whatsoever. The service was also able to slurp up all 30 or so entries and convert them into spoken text in less than an hour from the time had originally I signed up for the service, which ain't too shabby.

Odiogo will take any text it can pick up from a blog post and crunch it down into spoken words you can listen to right on the blog, or pull down as a podcast to put on your PMP.

(Credit: Odiogo)

Once installed, the service will go to work on all of your previously published posts and make new ones available for listening within a few hours. What's more, it'll syndicate all your posts into feeds that can be added to your RSS reader or whatever program you use to pull down podcasts for listening on the go. While it's certainly not as efficient as reading blog posts in Google Reader, you could use the service to listen to your favorite sites on a portable music player while out and about.

Despite its speed and simplicity, the service has a few quirks, not only in the speech department--which still suffers from inflection issues, but also the integrated Flash player. While it's super quick to load and can crunch relatively long posts into small files, there's no volume control slider, so be prepared to turn down your speakers or headphones if you've got your system's volume jacked up.

You can already find Odiogo integrated into several blogs including the aforementioned UNEASYsilence and The Jerusalem Post. To demo the service and find out more about how it works, you can also check out the site's demo page here. Also worth checking out is this handy plugin for Firefox called CLiCK, Speak, which will add text-to-speech on any site you're looking at.

I spent part of this morning having a go with the new Facebook app from the folks at WordPress.com (a Webware 100 winner). Once installed and linked up with your Wordpress.com account, you can post to any of your blogs without leaving Facebook. You can also check traffic stats and add bookmarks to your blogroll. The actual blog authoring tool is very limited in this release. There's no way to add links or pictures to posts. You're also unable to manage some of the subtleties of authoring like bold and italicized fonts, indentations, and the handy spell-checker. In other words, don't expect any of the nice, fancy WYSIWYG tools you get when blogging via Wordpress.com

The killer app here is the social tie-in with your feed and friends. For example, every time you post something on your blog, be it in the Facebook application or in Wordpress.com, it will show up on your news feed for all to see. Previously, the only way to call attention to one of your posts was to go writing it on people's walls, or noting it using Facebook's share feature. This automates the sharing feature, so you don't have to do a thing.

Posts you write from Facebook or WordPress.com will show up on your minifeed for all (or some) to see.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The other really neat feature is how the application links you up to the blogs of your Facebook friends. You can browse their WordPress.com blog posts without leaving the Facebook app or visiting the source blogs. The only requirement is that your friends have the WordPress Facebook app installed too.

Still missing is a way to use this app with hosted WordPress blogs, a feature which will likely be added in a future update.

The blogging interface for Wordpress' Facebook app isn't nearly as full-featured as the one you get at WordPress.com, but it's pretty handy.

(Credit: CNET Networks)