Watching the updates to Google Translate, it got me thinking about where we might end up in the future. The language barrier is less and less of a barrier, and a lot of content is available if you just know to look for it, through the lens of services such as Google Translate perhaps, but still – it is content that might be beneficial to you.

It goes the other way around too. There are potential readers out there that might not fully understand the language you’re writing in. Taking it one step further, thanks to translation services, you can link content in your own language and supply a direct link to a translated version of that content, and suddenly it works internationally.

I predict that the importance of translation services will grow over the coming years. We’ll use it more, rely on them, and open up new worlds of content thanks to their existence. That’s a good thing.

The post What Can Translation Services Do For Your Blog? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The post WordPress.com Goes Mobile appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Anyway, version 2.8.5 of popular blogging platform WordPress is available and it features code cleanup and addresses some potential issues. You should upgrade as always, either from within your WordPress install, or by downloading from wordpress.org.

In other WordPress news, the team is pimping the exploit scanner plugin which sounds like a good idea if you think your WordPress site might have been hit, and also urges you to participate in the 2.9 beta testing.

The post WordPress 2.8.5: A Hardening Release appeared first on The Blog Herald.

People already search Twitter for information about various service outages, and for those who choose to send out their Pingdom alerts publicly on Twitter this will now add more information to that. We hope this will lead to more facts and less speculation.

Transparency, gotta love it! So now when tdhedengren.com or tdh.me fails, you know you can blame Media Temple, and when tdh.se is down you should bitch to Binero.

Get your own free Pingdom monitoring account to try it out. Just add Twitter in your site settings within the account.

The post Pingdom Adds Twitter Support, Web Hosts Beware appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The new name amends the use of the word Flash, and it also opens up the marketplace for the future. In the last year we have added a budding Flex library and we now look forward to listing other interactive products like Adobe Air and maybe even Microsoft Silverlight!

Beware of using trademarks in your own brands and domains is the lesson here.

The post Envato Launches ActiveDen – Oh Wait, That’s Not New After All! appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The post China Continues to Build The Great Firewall appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Our partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, means a huge population of people can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. Bharti Airtel is offering people in every city, every village, every remote taluk and even the smallest panchayat the opportunity to connect to Twitter and enjoy the open exchange of information with no added fees.

They then go on and talks about how Twitter is about people, which certainly have been proven true over the past year.

The post 110 Million Indians Get Twitter appeared first on The Blog Herald.

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Below is the video where he made his announcement (via Blogger’s Blog):

In a blog post, Drew Carey elaborates somewhat. The thing is, this wasn’t about him getting a lot of buzz or anything, it was about giving money to charity. So he’s got regrets.

Now here’s how I could’ve handled this better.

I should have just donated the money in the first place without doing the million-follower challenge. Yes, I guess it does “raise awareness” somewhat, but who wasn’t aware of Livestrong and Lance Armstrong’s fight against cancer? I think they were doing a pretty good job of raising their own awareness without me.

But instead, I think I made it a bit too much about me by making it a contest that benefits me in exchange for my donation. So there it is. My regret. Maybe I didn’t make it too much about me. Maybe I just though up a fun way to raise money for a good cause. Whatever. I feel like I made it too much about me, so that’s that.

I say forget about those regrets, be happy with your followers, and the fact that you’re giving money for something good.

If you want to participate, be sure to follow @DrewFromTV. You should read Drew Carey’s blog post too, for the background on this whole thing.

The post Drew Carey Wants 1 Million Followers, Will Pay For Them appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Oh, and while we’re at it, WordPress.com got a revamped theme viewer as well. You might want to check that out too.

The post WordPress.com Partners with PicApp appeared first on The Blog Herald.

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The post Guy Screams Your Tweets From Mountain, Gets Buzz appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The future? It’s not looking good. The reason people made free themes was because they wanted to promote their blog. But that promotion just isn’t going to happen any more. So why bother? I believe some themes would do better if they were released as premium themes. And that’s not going to change. Free WordPress themes? Forget it. It’s over.

He paints a very bleak picture, and granted – premium themes take a lot of space and a lot of the free themes released are out there to promote a premium theme. That being said, they are still free even if they are promotional so I’m not sure that really means anything.

Also, I must say that this part makes me a bit sad:

The reason people made free themes was because they wanted to promote their blog.

I have released a number of themes through clients (ie, they have paid me to develop them so that they can release them). While those were paid gigs, you can also download my development framework Notes Blog Core for free, GPL’d and no strings attached, just because I wanted to give something back to the WordPress community. Not to promote a blog, site, or even myself, even if I might end up doing all that just by being a part of the community.

It is much like the $100 bounty I set to kill the annoying Firefox CSS bug in WordPress admin. Not only does it benefit me, it can help others too.

Isn’t that the big thing with open source after all?

So I obviously think Alex Denning paints a bleak picture, and I don’t think it is an accurate view of the community. Premium themes are here to stay, and they change things. However, there will always be great free content, GPL’d and everything, much like WordPress and other open source software can stand on their own against commercial alternatives. In the long run, I think today’s premium themes buyers might pay for support and adaptions, and not the theme itself. In a way you can already see the move towards this with the GPLization of premium themes.

What do you think? Are free WordPress themes dead?

Update: You might want to check out Lelands response to Denning’s post over at Theme Lab as well.

The post Alex Denning Doesn’t Believe in Free WordPress Themes appeared first on The Blog Herald.

For the competition, each competing blogger and twitterer creates a unique “Giving Page” at DonorsChoose.org filled with his or her favorite classroom projects. A “leaderboard” at http://www.donorschoose.org/social-media-challenge-2009 displays the Giving Pages and tracks the live competition progress by total amount donated.

Naturally they want to do even better this year, and you can participate with your own blog as well.

The post DonorsChoose.org Launches 2009 Social Media Challenge appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The first tweet:

I am told that people have been twittering on my behalf, so I thought a brief visit was in order just to prevent any more confusion!

The comes this, split in two:

However, I should flag up now that although I could twitter endlessly, I’m afraid you won’t be hearing from me very often as pen and paper is my priority at the moment

140 characters is obviously not enough for Rowling. That doesn’t stop her from having over 50,000 followers (and following exactly 0 people) though. Maybe she’ll get bitten by the Twitter bug in the future, but I’m guessing not.

Follow @jk_rowling if you will.

Hat tip: Telegraph

The post JK Rowling Joins Twitter, Won’t Use It Much appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Update: And it works, courtesy of Peter “Westi” Westwood and Jonathan Sulo. Westi details the issue in a blog post, you should check that out if you ever encountered this problem.

The post Bug Fixing Through Dollars (Earn $100 by Doing Good) appeared first on The Blog Herald.

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Unfortunately, the lead developers Ryan Parman and Geoffrey Sneddon have decided to cease development of SimplePie. The project will be moved to GitHub and hopefully someone will pick up the reins, since this is one of the best solutions for working with RSS feeds available.

Read the announcement post for more on why this came to be.

The post SimplePie Ceases Development appeared first on The Blog Herald.

On July 15, Facebook announced that it had 250 million active users, and on September 15, two months later, it had reached 300 million users. Facebook grew by 50 million users, roughly the equivalent of an entire Twitter, in just two months.

So yeah. Twitter is huge and great and dandy, soon to be worth even more money, but Facebook is still the juggernaut that just plays on a different level. In the midst of the Techmeme buzz and the millions of blog posts talking about the brilliance of Twitter, it is easy to forget about that.

The post Remember Facebook? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Check out the details on the Mommy Blog Awards page, along with the various categories. I especially like the Daddy Blog category. “I’m the Mommy Blog Award Daddy Blog winner FTW!”…

Hat tip: Bloggers Blog

The post Vote For Your Favorite Mommy Blogger appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Those could include analystics tools, Stone said, and are almost certain to also include the “verified account” functionality that the site has already tested with some celebrity-owned accounts. “We wanted to show people that we’re here to stay and here we are making money”, said Stone.

Sounds like a plan.

The post No Twitter Ads This Year appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Maybe Google can make it work even better? After all, they have a huge amount of content to pull from thanks to Google Books, maybe that can help? Personally I doubt it, Google hints to why they are in fact buying reCAPTCHA in the announcement post (bold added by yours truly):

So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.

That being said, I remain slightly optimistic that Google can make reCAPTCHA a better solution when a CAPTCHA is needed.

The post Will Google Make reCAPTCHA Even Better? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

How do you link that? Or rather, why would you link that?

You wouldn’t, obviously, since most of your readers wouldn’t be able to read the actual content. Paywalls always clash with the rest of the web. When news outlets that might get links from outside sites put up paywalls, they are not only killing the possibility of free links, they are also effectively killing the search engine benefits of quality links from blogs. So while you might understand why a niche news outlet does this, it is definitely beyond me when it comes to wider types of content like what Variety offers.

The post Variety Doesn’t Want Your Links appeared first on The Blog Herald.

That’s why it was such a shame when Curt Hopkins announced its closure, and such a good thing when Andrew Ford Lyons picked up the reins again. So let’s here what he has to say about Committee to Protect Bloggers and the future.

First of all, why don’t you tell our readers a little bit about Committee to Protect Bloggers and how you came to take over the reins after Curt Hopkins?

The Committee was formed in January of 2005. A lot of what it was about remains the same, but we’re adding to it some. The Committee to Protect Bloggers has always been “devoted to the protection of bloggers worldwide” as the mission statement goes, with a focus on highlighting the plight of bloggers threatened and imprisoned by their government. But we also need to recognise that the world and the web has changed as has how people use it. We look at the uses of micro-blogging sites now, such as Twitter, and the use of social networks like Facebook, Friendfeed and so forth to communicate.

My moving into taking the site over for Curt happened pretty casually, really. I was doing some research on the situation in Iran and the use of technology. If I recall correct, it was the whole Motorola scandal, and in my Googling I came across Curt’s final posts about ending the Committee website. In my caffeinated research mode state I dashed him off an email about revamping the site some and that eventually turned into a conversation about taking the site over.

But this is how organisations are supposed to go. Any group has turnover, and that’s not a bad thing. It should happen because that’s what brings new life into them. I’ve organised and supported scads of campaigns and grassroots efforts and one commonality I’ve seen across the lot of them is high burnout rates. You have these groups with maybe four or five incredibly dedicated people giving 200 percent and its no surprise when life catches up. The unfortunate thing is that it can often leave such a bad feeling about the work they’ve done. Curt needed to stop focusing so much energy on this project and get his job situation sorted out. That’s a completely rational reason to want to hand the keys over. I picture a time when I’ll likely do the same, and also am working on ways of sharing the load of the committee website with others who are interested in free speech and blogging. We’ve retained two bloggers from the previous guard: James Buck and Victor Ng’eny. And along with myself, Nigel Parry has joined the group. I’m hoping to continue increasing the number.

(NOTE: You can find current committee blogger profiles here!)

What are your plans for the site?

I have a few ideas, but am always open to other suggestions. First off, I’m wanting to expand the number of bloggers contributing. I’m looking for folks who are fans of blogs. People who not only write blogs, but also read them, participate in their comment areas and like what blogs represent, whatever that is. It’s a hard thing to identify. People who get what it means that the barriers to publishing are being smashed and see that as a good thing. A challenging, tortuous thing on occasion, but a good thing. I’m also interested in filling out our ranks. I’d like contributors with technical web-building, design backgrounds, people with legal backgrounds and those who are already obsessively following blogger issues and writing about them.

I’m hoping to expand the site over time to include more participatory aspects. Rigth now it’s running on the most recent WordPress. One thing I’m toying with is a way to incorporate a Buddypress installation and/or forums and chat, so that we can turn the CPB site into a place where people can practice free speech as well as talk about it.

We are interested in campaign ideas to raise the awareness and profile of blogs. One campaign that should be coming soon is around the slogan “I read banned blogs” which sort of plays on those old “I read banned books” badges and stickers you’d always see at independent bookshops or on the sweater of that one parent who attends school board meetings to demand to know why the Judy Blume books were taken off the shelves. I’m hoping to turn that into some sort of a design contest for our new link banners and graphics.

Eventually I’d like to see us re-invigorate our fund-raising efforts and turn that money into a legal fund of some sort or support development and distribution of new online tools that bypass censorship and help preserve privacy.

Our hope is to keep our interests aimed at all things blogging, and to look at the “protect” part of our name in a slightly broader sense. Sure, we’ll still report on imprisoned bloggers, censored and harassed bloggers. People being injured, jailed and killed for expressing themselves or sharing information in this format, but we also want to celebrate the idea of blogging as a viable medium and raise the profile some. You know, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reports Without Borders and many others are conducting amazing legal fights for free speech and electronic media. It’s not exactly a neglected area. But it’s an area under wide attack from all sides. Those organisations do great work and the benefits to reach bloggers, but their scope is much wider.

We see our niche as focusing on the individual bloggers out there. The girl who mostly writes about fashion but one week when a coup is under way in her country she becomes one of the most read political reporters. The Iranians who use mobile phones, Twitter accounts, blogs and Facebook groups to get the message out as reporters in their country are sequestered to the office. We also want to show people the tools to use for better blogging. Some of these are technological, like open source systems, proxies, security settings and the like. But they can also be things like legal guides. Letting people know their rights. We also want to highlight information about how to report on things better, file freedom of information requests, protecting their identity online and maybe some decent essays on just how to write better. All these things have the accumulative result of protecting bloggers. Because were in the day and age now where anyone can launch a website in a few clicks. It’s very easy to spread a message now. It’s also very easy to get yourself into more trouble than you planned for.

How would you say the situation for bloggers are across the globe these days? Are there any specific cases you would like to single out?

Both good and bad. It’s good that more people are blogging. It’s good that the range of topics people are blogging about is growing hourly. But it’s getting scarier as well. People are writing things, expressing themselves, getting something off their chest, but often not knowing what the response can be. The Committee supports people saying what they need to say, and we think blogs are a great way to do it, or we wouldn’t be doing this.

But we don’t live in a world where everyone simply respects everyone else’s right to free speech. When we think about censorship most of us traditionally look at actions taken by an oppressive government. That is of course, still happening all over the place. But the barriers to becoming a censor are lowering almost as fast as the barriers to becoming a blogger. Companies troll the internet and fire employees who are posting content they deem damaging to their brand image. They sue first and let the potential legal costs silence people. Cut-rate hackers launch DOS attacks because they don’t like what they’ve seen on someone’s website. The same social networks that build the systems so many of us use are sometimes too quick on the trigger to kill a group, profile or conversation that may be viewed as offensive by someone somewhere. Political action groups launch mass email campaigns to get sites taken down, siting poorly worded, vague TOS reasons that may or may not apply to what they are complaining about, but the service provider shuts them down anyway.

We try to report on these situations when we can but people also need to share the information with us however and whenever they find it. In Virginia a woman was jailed for reporting on local narcotics cops in her town. In Azerbaijan two bloggers were arrested on trumped up charges over a satirical video they posted. A woman who very likely did commit an act of libel was hit with a legal ruling that challenges blogger safety elsewhere by forcing Google to reveal the identity under rather broad conditions. All these are on our site now, but there is are loads more cases like them out there. In Iran right now people are allegedly being asked to log into their social profiles when landing at the airport so security can see what they’ve been posting on them.

You’ve appearde on Al Jazeera. Tell us a little bit about that,
please!

I participated in an episode of The Listening Post, which aired last week on Al Jazeera English.

The show was focused on the limits of online anonymity; how much people really have and how easily it can be taken away. While we work to promote the right to privacy for bloggers we also want them to be aware of existing laws as well as the very real possibility that they could be identified through their content, by their blog host or through intensive investigation by a motivated person. Bloggers need to know their rights and also the ways of keeping themselves safe, but they also need to know how much anonymity they can expect.

I’d like to thank Andrew for taking the time, and urge all of you to visit Committee to Protect Bloggers. They’re doing important stuff, so make sure you check them out.

The post Committee to Protect Bloggers: An Interview appeared first on The Blog Herald.