Earlier today we posted the “State of the Word” presentation by Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. After his presentation, Matt spent some time demonstrating the upcoming 2.7 release of Wordpress. I’ve embedded the video below. Wordpress 2.7 will be available in November.

Matt begins by explaining that eventually everything in Wordpress will have an associated API for extending the service. The new interface looks awesome. The posting functionality of Wordpress is one of the things I wish Drupal had. I find that Drupal can be extended further than Wordpress but the posting usability is WAY better in Wordpress than Drupal. The 2.7 admin interface appears to be even more usable than the current version.

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Earlier this week Google Blogsearch relaunched with an aggregator of sorts. Immediately several sites including ReadWriteWeb claimed it was a "Techmeme killer". The truth is that Google Blogsearch won’t kill or injure Techmeme and I’ve created the video embedded below to outline the main reason why.

There are a variety of good posts on the Google Blogsearch/Techmeme killer topic including: Rob Diana, Steven Hodson, Duncan Riley, Josh Catone and Svetlana Gladkova. Sean Percival had a bit of fun with the topic noting that the only reason Techmeme will be killed is because Techcrunch didn’t make their lead payments on time.

Techmeme would be a much stronger asset to the community if there were topic pages (similar to Blogrunner) and the current hierarchy was removed. There would be a higher level of discovery and a nice dose of leveling would take place. I have been researching Techmeme for over six months and will eventually have a lengthy video about the overall news-aggregator topic and additional thoughts for improvement.

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NY-based content ratings and recommendations provider Outbrain has announced a new distribution partnership with blog network b5media this morning. Under the terms of the partnership, b5media will install the ratings and recommendations widget on all 300+ blogs in the b5media network. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The Outbrain widget allows blog readers to rate the quality of the content and receive recommendations for other content based on their ratings. Recommendations can come from the individual site or a whitelist can be setup where sites can partner together and recommendations are shared across the listed network. 

The more sites that Outbrain can partner with, the stronger their recommendations network becomes. From my perspective that’s where the Outbrain value lies. The raw ratings are not worth a lot to me as I am never sure what it is that the person is ranking. It could be spelling, grammar, quality of the content, subject matter, etc.

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Over the years, WordPress has consistently proven to be the most popular blogging system out there. Millions upon millions of blogs run on WordPress, and that’s not counting those that are hosted on WordPress.com, Automattic’s free, hosted blogging service.

But it’s not just a blogging platform; as many have discovered, it works really well as a fully-fledged content management system — it really comes down to how the theme is written, and often the plugins that are used.

Let’s take a look at some of the oddest uses people have come up with for a mere blogging platform.

WordPress, the Social Network

BuddyPress turns your vanilla WordPress MU installation into a basic social network — complete with private messaging, friends, groups, personal blogs and status updates.

WordPress, the Email Newsletter Manager

Some have gone as far as using WordPress to manage email newsletters—forget using it for building a website! The process is outlined here, but in short, you create a newsletter category, use some theme coding trickery to hide the category on the site, create an RSS feed from it and set it up with FeedBurner. Magic!

WordPress, the Word Processor

Are you one of those people who are queasy about Google having access to all your information? Myself, I’m not so worried about that—but I hate the Google Docs interface with a great deal of passion (to each his own, eh?). So much so that if I’m out and about without access to a desktop word processor I’ll simply fire up WordPress and do some writing in there.

And if you’re collaborating, the new revision histories allow you to reverse any bone-headed changes your collaborator makes. Because you’d never do that, right?

WordPress, the Workplace Chat Room

Back in January, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) released the Prologue theme. Prologue is inspired by Twitter and allows users to post status updates with tags.

Some companies have since used Prologue to help employees stay up to date with each other’s projects, which is important in virtual organizations where these things don’t always circulate naturally. More recently, people have been using it to start workstreaming sites — sites built, in essence, to convince your boss you’re actually working!

WordPress, the Contact Manager

Don’t like Address Book or the half-baked Google Contacts application? Turn WordPress into your personal contact manager with WP Contact Manager, or even a company intranet address book. You’re best off doing this on a private server or with authentication, of course, or you might find yourself running from a horde of rioters.

WP Contact Manager does have some advantages over regular desktop software. You can tag your contacts and search via tags (instead of the bulky “Groups” feature most apps use), and comments have been repurposed as user notes that you and others can leave for future reference, which seems better than the generic Notes capability in most contact managers.

WordPress, the Wiki

Heard of Blicki? I thought not. Automattic started developing this plugin years ago and suddenly stopped. It worked at some point, but when I tested it with the latest version of WordPress it didn’t do much.

But still, it’s a cool idea. Most wiki distributions don’t have the ease of installation and customization that WordPress has, which I’m sure you’ll know if you’ve ever set MediaWiki up and subsequently configured it. Hopefully, Automattic—or someone else entirely—will take this project up again in the future.

WordPress, the Task Manager

This list is about weird and wacky, and this is probably the craziest idea in the list, thanks to some deep and dark crevice within the mind of Dustin Wax: use WordPress as your task manager.

You can email or phone in posts as tasks throughout the day, which are then delivered to your inbox via FeedBurner at the end of each day. Once they’re in your inbox, you can use whatever processing system you’ve adopted to complete that tasks or process them into a task list.

As the man himself said, it’s a crazy idea when there are apps like Ta-da List and Remember the Milk out there, but it seems crazy is what WordPress is all about!

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Wordpress 2.3 ReleasedWordpress Plugins Directory - Thanks, Wordpress!Douchebag Wordpress Plugin Helps You Curb Bad CommentsWordPress 2.5 Is Finally OutRevver Plug-in for WordpressWordpress 2.3 out on Monday; Now with TagsAutomattic Launches Wordpress Support Network

The Blogger King stopped by the CenterNetworks office today and asked me to setup the tripod and camera. Here’s his newest video on how to increase your blog traffic and drive more advertising dollars. Apparently he will be back this week with another "gem" as he called it.

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MicasaStyle is a social network for home owners and interior design aficionados who like to share information about their personal taste. Emerging from its beta test period this week, the idea behind MicasaStyle is to create a space that inspires others when it’s time to decorate their homes, along the same lines as other networks like Curbly.

This happens through a series of users that take the time to share images of their space and tag items in these photos. Think of the Facebook image-tagging capability that allows you to outline additional details in a given photo, providing viewers more data to work with beyond the actual image itself. In fact, MicasaStyle likens its service to a Facebook for room interiors, and its photo-tagging feature is central to its overall service offerings.

There’s a rather involved upload and tagging process that you go through in order to share images of your own space, layering in additional information like the budget of the room, what type of room you’re sharing, and descriptive tag words that will help others find your space. And since MicasaStyle is so apt to become like a Facebook for home owners, I’d actually love to see some image import options from existing photo albums across the Web, like Facebook and Flickr, so that this sharing process can be simplified a bit for users.

One good thing about the tagging process on MicasaStyle is the fact that retailers you add to your shared space will be auto-completed by MicasaStyle, providing links to that retailer so others can visit their site. What’s missing from this particular portion of the sharing process is the ability to add in a retailer’s link on your own, so if a particular retailer isn’t in MicasaStyle’s database yet, there won’t be a link readily available for other users. Additionally, links created by MicasaStyle’s auto-completion feature redirect to the retailer’s main website, not the page with details on the particular object that’s been tagged.

Having a bookmarking tool for MicasaStyle users could help with specific information-sharing on this end, but it would also veer away from the room-specific way in which personal taste is shared on MicasaStyle’s network. To this end, I’d say that the approach MicasaStyle is taking with this site is very niche, as it limits its users to share photos from their own homes, and relies on a pretty good memory for a home owner, based on price, retailer and retailer information for any given piece on their home.

I know that many home owners do in fact remember most of the information about the pieces in their home, but converting all of that into a cohesive, heavily-tagged network for sharing inspiration is a time commitment for participating users, and MicasaStyle would do well to diversify the type of users it attracts as it moves forward.

Source:Mashable!

Most Twitter and blog integration tools aggregate all tweets to a blog and post them exactly as they are, verbatim, which can produce less than desirable results. TweetRemote is a new open source way to integrate Twitter with blogging platforms that aims to give bloggers more control over this process. You can pick and choose which tweets to publish to your blog and how they will look. It accomplishes this by only posting relevant tweets and formats them in a blog-friendly format.

How does it do that?

TweetRemote is able to do this by recognizing hashtags in tweets such as #text, #link, and #image, then pulls those tweets into separate RSS-style feeds and then formats them accordingly. Thus, everything appears on your blog in a more aesthetically pleasing format. The other key ingredient is the use of an RSS aggregator of choice such as FeedWordPress. Here’s the full installation documentation.

At what cost?

There might be a small price to pay for this benefit. In order to make your blog prettier it requires making your twitter stream a little uglier. For example, if you wanted to send a nicely formatted hyperlink to your blog via twitter with TweetRemote then you would have to send the following tweet: #link http://tweetremote.com Cool new twitter/blog integration tool! While the end result will look good on your blog, you might lose some followers on twitter because of what some call Tweet stream pollution. Quite simply, there are many people on Twitter that just don’t like hashtags and the way they look. So, it’s your decision if it’s worth potentially losing a few followers or not.

Conclusion

TweetRemote is intended only for bloggers that host their own blogs because it requires uploading files and some manual configuration. That means bloggers on free services like Worldpress.com and Blogger are out of luck at this point in time. Still, even if TweetRemote doesn’t accomplish this in the easiest manner, it has developed a better mousetrap for this process. Ultimately, that’s a good sign for things to come for anyone that wants to integrate Twitter with their blog.

There will be times that you have to contribute a post for your company’s blog and you just don’t have one idea that inspires you to start a conversation. We’ve all been there and that’s why we’ve created this resource with more than 40 topics for corporate bloggers to help provide that much need inspiration:

Press release – Read a recent press release from your company and write two paragraphs on its significance in plain English.

Industry news – Share your opinion about a recent story affecting your industry/audience.

Best practices – Provide an example of a best practice that you adhere to or that others could learn from.

Tradeshow 1 –  Prior to an industry trade show, share your list of interesting sessions, what to expect or what you’re looking forward to.

Tradeshow 2 – During the show, share images from the floor, notes from sessions or interviews with attendees.

Tradeshow 3 – After the show, write a quick wrap-up, discuss what you learned and who you met.

Find video – Search for a video related to your industry and embed it as your post with a bit of analysis as to why it’s relevant.

Plan a meet-up – Use your post to organize an informal meet-up with readers around one of your blog’s topics.

Current event - Leverage a current event in the news to discuss how your company handles adversity or crisis.

Holiday party – Take pictures at fun company events to show you don’t take yourselves too seriously.

Productivity tip – Email, Excel, PowerPoint… do you have any tips for how to be more productive that your audience might appreciate?

Email query – Send an email asking 5 people in your company the same question and share their responses.

Blog comment – Review some recent blog comments and choose one to discuss in detail.

Write a how-to post - Maybe it’s about your job or about your product, but create a tutorial to help your readers.

Address a post on a competitor’s blog – What is your competitor writing about? Are there any of these topics you’d like to address?

Corporate culture – What makes your company’s culture unique? Why would a prospective employee want to work there?

Humor – It might be a Dilbert cartoon or a video from FunnyOrDie, but everyone loves a laugh.

Stumble – Install the StumbleUpon toolbar and discover new blogs/websites to introduce to your audience.

Delicious – Search for keywords related to your blog and write about what you find.

Digg – See what stories are popular today and share your opinion about it.

Facebook – Look for a group related to your industry and share some thoughts about it.

LinkedIn Answers – Find a question someone has asked related to your industry, answer it, and invite your readers to do the same.

White paper – Is your company publishing new research? Do you subscribe to any analyst reports? Read the white paper and share your perspective.

Flickr image – If you had to pick one Creative Commons licensed image that reflected your mood/industry/workload, what would it be and why?

Make a list – Kind of like this, except related to your industry. People love lists!

Start a meme – Pick a conversation topic, discuss it and then tag a few other bloggers to post on the same topic.

Answer a customer support question – Does your company have forums? If so, pick a support question to answer. If not, ask your sales team for customer feedback and tackle one common issue.

Buck the status quo - Take the opposite view on an industry issue.

Does size matter? - Compare/contrast your product with a competitor.

Share a problem – Sometimes your community can offer insight into a problem that you’re not able to solve on your own. Just positing these types of queries will at times help your readers to feel closer to your brand.

Twitter – Posit a question to your Twitter community and use the collected responses for the basis of your post.

Try a new application and review it – Is there a new software app or a new version of an old app that your industry uses on a regular basis? If so, take the time to delve into it.

Start a series – Take a topic that you’re passionate about and create a series of posts examining it over the course of several weeks.

Take a picture – Use your mobile phone to take a picture of a cool part of your building and discuss it.

Share a PowerPoint – If you create a lot of presentations, pick out a slide (assuming it’s okay to share it publicly) to write about. You can also upload a deck to SlideShare to make it more interactive.

Get personal – Share a story from your own life. Although this is a corporate blog, it’s always nice to know about the people behind the brand.

Conduct an interview – There are many people in the company that aren’t blogging, but probably have some great stories to tell. Find people doing interesting work and sit down for an informal interview with them. You don’t need fancy equipment. In fact, you can probably do it with your digital camera.

Look for trends – What new innovations are igniting conversations in your industry? How is your business changing? Share some insights on the future of your industry. Maybe Trendpedia can help.

Random Thoughts on X – Set aside 15 minutes, pick a topic and start writing. See what you’ve got and post it under the title, “Random Thoughts on…”

Test a pitch – If you’re trying to figure out how to best position your product, use your blog post an opportunity to test what messages resonate with your audience.

Ask the intern – After all, they have a whole different perspective on the company than you do. Some of them are already blogging.

Presentation creation – We all have to create presentations, either for internal or external use. If you’ve got some tips, share them!

Remember, what makes a good corporate blog post is the passion of the writer. Find the topics that you are most interested in and help your readers to feel that same type of excitement.

[Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant. In addition to his posts on Mashable, he blogs about social media and communications at DISRUPTology.]

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We’ve written about all of the new blog comment replacement services over the past few months. I recently had a chance to interview IntenseDebate developer Austin Hallock on our sister blog HTMLCenter. Below is an interview discussing the business side of IntenseDebate with co-founder Jon Fox.

Allen: Can we start with a brief bio?

Jon Fox: I’m 23 years old and originally from Illinois. I have a BS in Math and Computer Science from Illinois College and am about 3 classes away from a Masters in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. I started programming when I was 10 years old and have loved it ever since. I’m also that guy that was obsessed with stories of great entrepreneurs growing up and completely fascinated by the web startup scene in particular.

Allen: How do you describe the Intense Debate service?

Jon: IntenseDebate is a replacement to your stock comment system on blogs and websites. We provide a tool to better facilitate community and interaction by adding loads of new features. Some of my favorites include Reply-by-email (reply to a comment by replying in email to the email notification), threading, voting, universal profiles, reputation, and the ability to track a user and/or topic across blogs.

Allen: Why did you decide to start Intense Debate?

Jon: IntenseDebate was originally started as a 1-on-1 debate site. Users would pair up, make 5 statements each, and then the rest of the community could vote on a winner (as well as comment on the debate). We realized, however, that there were already debates and other great discussions happening all over the web, but the tools were completely inadequate (and hadn’t really ever changed). We ended up moving to put our emphasis on this problem instead, and the IntenseDebate you now know was born.

Allen: What’s the team look like?

Jon: We’re a team of 6 at the moment.

• CEO - Tom Keller
• Graphics/Design - Isaac Keyet
• Voice of the users - Michael Koenig
• Software Engineer - Austin Hallock
• Software Engineer - Mehmet Alkanlar And of course myself, CTO

Allen: What’s your selling pitch for why I should switch my commenting platform to ID?

Jon: We provide a system to help facilitate community and improve interactions among visitors. Many of our users have told us they’ve noticed an increase in both pageviews and the number of comments after installing us. Our enhanced comment system allows the visitors to be more engaged and have a better experience when getting involved in the discussion that the site generates. More and more it’s the comments and discussion around the original content that is becoming important, valuable, and meaningful. We just provide tools to make that experience better for both the publisher and the visitors.

Allen: What’s your take on the SEO issue with regards to using a service like ID?

Jon: This issue is really important to some of our users, and as such it’s an issue we’ll be addressing shortly.

Allen: Why should I trust ID with my data, my users, etc. Can I grab my data anytime I want?

Jon: We get this question a lot, and there’s a couple points to make here. The majority of our users already trust 3rd parties with the data around their blog (posts, users, and even comments). We work very hard to ensure your data is safe. Comments are our life. The truth is we offer more protection than most of our users who store copies of the data themselves.

All that aside, however, we do understand that many users want to have that data in their own hands. As a result, we do offer the ability to export your comments at any time.

Allen: How do you compare ID to other commenting services like those offered by JS-Kit and Disqus?

Jon: There are obviously many similarities. I’m not familiar enough to give a feature by feature comparison, but I know many of our users have told us they like our design/ui and our data migration features more than that of our competitors.

Allen: Can you explain your business model?

Jon: We’re still very young and primarily focused on distribution at the moment. We’re looking into several revenue possibilities including white labeling and opt-in ad revenue shares for the future.

Allen: Do you find that being located outside of the Valley is an advantage, a disadvantage or neither?

Jon: I think at different times it is one or the other. For example, we do find ourselves visiting the Valley to discuss partnerships and other opportunities with other companies in that area. Obviously this would be a lot simpler if we were in the Valley instead. However, the community here in Boulder has been great. People here really want to help each other and it has a very different feel to it than what I’ve experienced in the Valley. In this sense I think it’s been a real advantage for us to be here.

Allen: What’s coming next from Intense Debate?

Jon: We’ve got a lot of exciting stuff coming up in the next month or two. Most of these enhancements will revolve around data migration and getting better integrated into the blogging platforms to make the experience for our publishers as easy and seamless as possible.

Allen: What tips do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Jon: I would say two things. First, find yourself a mentor, or at least a friend in the business that can help to get you hooked in. If you don’t know anybody yet, reach out to a handful. My experience is that these people are generally more than willing to help, and happy to bring someone new into the mix.

Second, don’t be afraid to just dive in. I realize not everyone can do this, but it’s really hard to go half way into the startup lifestyle. Recruiting a team, raising money, building a product, etc all require lots of time and effort and you really can’t do it only on the weekend. It’s a bit scary at first, but once you get in it’s tough to believe you’ve lived any other way.

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