Lt. Ray Murphy, Ladder 16, FDNY. After surviving the collapse of the first WTC tower, Lt. Murphy gathered his men and commenced rescue operations at the second tower before being killed during the collapse of that tower.

Other: Podcast 2007.4: 9/11/07 – Six years in, a Lifetime to Go – Matt reflects on September 11th.

The post Remember appeared first on The Blog Herald.

TV Week has the official news:

ABC Family is bringing Internet personality Brigitte Dale’s video blog to its Web site. Ms. Dale’s blog, which covers news, pop culture and twenty-something issues, will be featured on ABCFamily.com starting this month.

Ms. Dale will continue to write, produce and edit the video blog, which will be produced in partnership with Stage 9 Digital Media.

Brigitte is a highly entertaining videoblogger who will likely bring a unique and interesting perspective in her new gig with ABC Family.

The post Videoblogger Brigitte Dale heads to ABC Family appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Curbed Marketplace is a unique real estate listing site — take a look at these two brief descriptions from their “Help” page:

It’s a place for sellers and brokers to post real estate listings, and for buyers to browse and search them. But unlike some other systems, we’ve designed the Marketplace to feature big, beautiful photographs and a blog-style layout of properties perfect for perusing. We’re hoping this makes discovering a property — and selling one! — a pleasure.

The idea behind the Marketplace isn’t to aggregate every listing from every random brokerage in the city. (We’re not crawling other sites for our data — it’s input by brokers or sellers themselves.) Rather, we’re aiming to create an exchange in which a lack of sheer volume is made up for in quality of the listings and the pleasure of the browsing experience.

Visually, the site is a pleasure to visit compared to most real estate sites — and where else can you browse a $7.3m Townhouse.

The post Curbed launches Curbed Marketplace appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Part One:

1. Relevancy between Audience, Product and Content

One key to high conversion when promoting affiliate products is to align as much as possible the needs of your audience, with the product that you are promoting and the content being produced on your blog.

Part Two:

2. Track What Your Readers Respond to

Yesterday I mentioned that instead of just promoting an affiliate product once that it can be worth running a series of different types of posts to promote it over time. The beauty in doing this is that you begin to see what your readership responds to. You might find that few people sign up for a product when you first announce it but when you write a review that sales increase. Alternatively you might find that when you offer a bonus they sign up more or even that they respond to you doing an interview with the person behind the product. The key is to try different things but then to watch how they convert.

Excellent advice all around…

The post Darren Rowse on making money via affiliate programs appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Today it gives me great pleasure to announce that Paul [Walborsky] has been promoted to chief executive officer. As CEO, he will lead us through our next phase, in which we will go from being a small network of niche blogs to being a new media company with much bigger horizons.

Bringing on board Paul — a veteran of Wall Street, a founder of (two) startups and most importantly, a trusted friend — was perhaps the single most important decision I’ve ever made in terms of shaping the future of our company.

While the first two years have been devoted to laying the groundwork befitting our future, the next few years are going to be about executing our game plan. And Paul over the past 12 months has proved that he can execute.

The post Giga Omni Media hires a CEO appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The new blog, now live, is hosted at The Martha Blog – at www.themarthablog.com.

Martha writes:

In order to have a blog, you need to enlist a blogging platform, which supplies all the necessary tools for getting your photos and text onto the Internet. As my blog has grown in popularity, we realized we were ready to switch to a platform offering more programming options. After careful research, that new platform will be WordPress, which we hope to launch tomorrow with an exciting photo gallery from my most recent trip to Mexico. With this new program, you will notice additions, such as a search engine within my blog and more robust photo galleries.

Prior to this change, Martha Stewart was using Typepad.

The post Martha Stewart moves to WordPress appeared first on The Blog Herald.

It’s a fascinating look at how the process works from the very beginning – through storyboarding, the pitch, and the down and dirty logistics to actually making the feature happen.

The feature is about Charlie Kaufman and is scheduled in run in the November 2008 issue of Wired Magazine.

The post Wired blogs the creation of a Feature Story appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The new Citrus Theme features licenses for single, multi-site, and developer versions of the theme – and comes in multiple color schemes. There’s even a version specifically for personal blogs.

The prices for the new theme range from $79 – $149.

The launch of this new theme continues the trend for premium blog designs from strong designers at a reasonable price – just add some customization and you’re good to go with a great looking new blog design!

The post Unique Blog Designs launches Citris Blog Theme appeared first on The Blog Herald.

HotStartupJobs launched earlier today and is just the place to find that new CTO position in a startup that you were looking for.

Mashable has a review:

The service is just starting out itself. It marked its official debut only hours ago. But already it has pulled substantial amounts of listings from various sources and RSS feeds from around the Web, including sites like Dice, TechZulu, ResumeBucket, KillerStartups, and NeoHire. Mashable, too. Hot Startup Jobs pulls from numerous sources, and designates available work to unique channels.

The post Looking for a startup job? Look no further than HotStartupjobs appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Even Chris Pearson has a new magazine style theme coming out soon to complement his successful Thesis Theme.

So when is the right time to use a Magazine style blog theme?

Smashing Magazine took a look earlier this week and offered some advice along with some key descriptors of what makes up a Magazine-style theme:

1. Magazine themes only use excerpts or headlines on the front page, while standard blogs will use either full posts or excerpts.

2. A magazine theme functions more as a portal to content on the rest of the site. The magazine theme will give visitors a glimpse at what is available and it will direct them to go in whatever direction they like.

3. Magazine themes make more effort to organize the content of the blog and present what is most important, whereas traditional blog layouts will order front page content based on what is most recent.

The post goes on to outline several pros and cons – along with a ton of resources to help you design your own magazine style theme, find premium wordpress themes in this style, and other great resources.

The post When’s the right time to use a Magazine-style blog theme? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

• My Tweeple can be used to make informed decisions when it comes to following people on twitter. You can use it to see who is following you and who you are following. And with a simple click, you can follow, unfollow, or block people all in one place.
• Quotably is another way to follow the twitter conversations. What I do like about this service is that it puts the conversations in what appears to be threads. This is actually one feature I am hoping twhirl adopts soon.

The post Ten Must-Have Twitter Tools for the Home Office Warrior appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Did you know there was an entire underground economy operating in the world focused on defeating those CAPTCHA blocks?

ZDNet takes a look inside the India version of that economy:

Let’s analyze the shady data processing economy of India, discuss exclusive photos of Indian workers breaking MySpace and Google CAPTCHAs, and take a tour inside the web applications of several Bangladesh based franchises, whose team of almost 1,000 international workers is actively soliciting deals for breaking Craigslist, Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook’s CAPTCHA, promising to deliver 250k solved CAPTCHAs per day on a “$2 for a 1000 solved CAPTCHAs” rate.

The story goes on to examine a few different “de-CAPTCHA” firms and has pictures of the workers and links to their websites.

The post ZDNet takes a look at the CAPTCHA economy in India appeared first on The Blog Herald.

According to this article at the Register today, Microsoft has broken this promise with the release of IE8, Beta 2:

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.

The post Microsoft breaks standards compatibility promise with IE8 Beta 2 appeared first on The Blog Herald.

One of the major changes in the design is a new emphasis on search. Scribd has seen impressive growth since its launch in Spring 2007, and now claims more than 20 million unique visitors monthly. But more than half of that traffic comes from search engines – something that the site would like to change. The new design is intended to make the search function more prominent, encouraging users to turn to Scribd instead of Google or Yahoo when they’d like to find a document. And CEO Trip Adler says that it’s working: while A/B bucket testing the new design, Scribd has seen the number of searches double (the number of uploads increased by 70% as well).

Scribd is a great service for incorporating complex documents into blogs via their widget for posts and other functions.

The post Scribd launches a redesign appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Don’t forget to check out the comments where there are even more links to other free resources.

The post 20 Free eBooks About Social Media appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.

The demonstration is only the latest attack to highlight fundamental security weaknesses in some of the internet’s core protocols. Those protocols were largely developed in the 1970s with the assumption that every node on the then-nascent network would be trustworthy. The world was reminded of the quaintness of that assumption in July, when researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed a serious vulnerability in the DNS system. Experts say the new demonstration targets a potentially larger weakness.

This is the second major security flaw found in the core protocols that govern how the internet routes packets of information around the world. Earlier this year, issues with the DNS protocol were revealed and shown to be a significant security issue.

The core issue security researchers face with the DNS and BGP protocol issues is one of trust. Both security “holes” exist because when the protocols were originally developed they assumed that any node on the internet could be trusted. But in today’s world of botnets and black-hat hackers, it’s clear that many internet nodes simply can’t be trusted. But the protocols have never been updated…

Unfortunately, a solution to both of these issues may be a long way down the road:

Douglas Maughan, cybersecurity research program manager for the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, has helped fund research at BBN and elsewhere to resolve the BGP issue. But he’s had little luck convincing ISPs and router vendors to take steps to secure BGP.

The post Largest internet security hole revealed… or what is BGP? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

We’ll let Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs explain:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Their solution is a new extension to the Mozilla browser (Firefox) that allows you to create these mashups using clear english queries. The article on the Mozilla Labs site also has a great presentation video that explains this concept in more details.

While the initial release (it’s a v0.1 after all) is rough and certainly does not contain all of the features that are outlined in their vision – it does contain enough to clearly show the promise of what Ubiquity could be…

The post Mozilla Labs introduces Ubiquity appeared first on The Blog Herald.

You claim to have earned $45,000 from your blog last month, and that your traffic is 3 times smaller than John Chow’s one. How is that possible?

My business model is different, he’s all ad and affiliate-based, while my focus is on creating educational products through my own publishing company, BullShip Prress, LLC, namely my PennyStocking Instructional DVD that makes penny stock trading understandable and TIMalerts, a real-time trading alerts subscription service, both of which I promote endlessly through my blog.

Mind you, I tried Chow’s business model—admittedly only half-heartedly because I have problems promoting all the frauds in finance–but it didn’t work for me…so I adapted.

It’s an interesting interview to read primarily because of the discussion around the question above. Timothy’s income is less about advertising and affiliate income and more about using his blog as a method to promote his product lines – and then pocketing the much higher profits when those products are sold.

The post DailyBlogTips interviews Timothy Sykes, $50k/month blogger appeared first on The Blog Herald.

I’m happy to announce Adium 1.3, a major release seven months in the making. This release improves almost every aspect of Adium, ranging from performance and memory to Facebook chat support, and from user interface polish to much improved MSN support with personal messages (finally!). A brand new, gorgeous Contact Inspector brings together all a contact’s information in one place – coalescing combined contacts’ information and accessing your Apple Address Book to give you at-a-glance information, and intuitive live searching in the Standard Contact List makes it a snap to find your friends.

As a long time Adium user, the upgrade is a welcome addition full of bug fixes and new features that have been requested for some time…

Marshall Kilpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb likes the new version – particularly the new Facebook chat integration:

We’re not sure how likely to use Facebook chat we are, but we know that a lot of people do use it. We’ll now be reachable that way too. By telling Adium to connect to social networking status messages, we’re also now seeing peoples’ Facebook status in Growl notification. That’s pretty nice. Not something we’d want for Twitter, but for the less frequently updated Facebook messages that makes sense.

Effective interoperability with Facebook IM makes us think we should take our friend accepting a little more seriously there. Unfortunately, one known issue is that Facebook doesn’t want to keep you logged in when you’re also logged in via Adium. We hope that can be solved quickly.

With the integration of the new Facebook chat features, I would expect to see other social media tools integrated into Adium as time goes on…

The post Adium releases version 1.3 of its unified instant messaging tool, adds social media tools appeared first on The Blog Herald.

His best tip is #2:

Don’t trash talk a competitor.

Your product should be strong enough that you don’t have to diss a competing company. Back in 2002, an article in the Boston Herald showed up about another search engine. The article claimed that “The entire XXXXXXXXX Catalog is updated every 9 to 11 days.” I knew for a fact that wasn’t true and at first I wanted to rip that claim to shreds like a bulldog. But (with the advice of some wiser Googlers), I decided to take the high road instead of picking a fight. In fact, claims like that motivated Google to be fresher and faster. Now I believe Google has the freshest index of any of the major web search engines.

What advice would you give someone blogging for/about their own company or employer?

The post Google’s Matt Cutts offers three tips for ‘Company Blogging’ appeared first on The Blog Herald.

• Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
• Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
• Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).

Valeria Maltoni weighs in with some great ideas on how to use Twitter for business over at Conversation Agent. One great idea is:

Try new ideas in a space where you will likely receive feedback.

The concept of being in beta is great to test whether there would be resistance to offerings and why. Although the number of Twitter users is relatively small, it is a much bigger crowd than just the one customer who bought something custom from you and thought it was a good product. Before you go ahead and make that a product, find more than one way to test its marketability.

Both posts have great ideas on what to consider and how to implement twitter in your business.

The post Using Twitter for Business appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The design will feature several new features, such as Friend Lists:

Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups. With friend lists, you can get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Another new feature is seeing a feed of your friend along with all of their subscriptions:

You can now see a feed of a person and all of their subscriptions. This new feature is a great way to show your uninitiated friends what your FriendFeed experience is like, and it is a great way to find interesting people you haven’t subscribed to yet.

All of the new beta features, layout, and design can be seen at beta.friendfeed.com.

The post FriendFeed previews beta version of new design appeared first on The Blog Herald.

This year’s convention sees multiple firsts in technological innovations for the quadrennial political party gathering. For starters, the Democratic National Convention Committee is providing bloggers (and floor delegates) with “video-upload booths” where they can upload their footage to YouTube or any other online-video platform.

The DNC is using text messaging and streaming video to keep delegates (and those following along at home) up to date.

Their story also contains great hi-rez photos of the DNC setup along with discussions of other technologies and support that are in place for bloggers covering the convention.

The post DNC is the most covered media event in Democrat’s history — by bloggers! appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The startup, which has one of the most interesting & funky user interfaces I’ve ever seen, is essentially a social networking & book sharing system for those that love to read.. like me!

Shelfari’s team makes the formal announcement on their blog:

We’ve got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon’s expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you’ll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site.

The post Amazon buys book sharing startup Shelfari appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Bethesda’s Honest Tea launched its blog in late 2005 as a way to get close to customers. With a name like Honest Tea, chief executive Seth Goldman said, “we’re trying to be as open and disclose as much information as we can.” When the company announced that Coca-Cola would acquire a 40 percent interest in the brand, many of Honest Tea’s customers who opposed the agreement took their complaints to the blog.

“We gave a very loud voice to the people who said they weren’t happy about this decision,” Goldman said.

Goldman then took one of the most thoughtful, detailed customer criticisms and responded to each point. Even if readers still didn’t agree, “The blog at least helps people see how we think about it,” Goldman said.

All that said, many companies are just now beginning to utilize the power of the internet through blogs in order to have a real dialogue – or conversation – with their customers.

One Fortune 100 organization that I’ve recently been consulting with is still very reluctant to make the move to corporate blogging – or even to allow public blogging by its employees as a future new “face” of the corporation. Their fear? Losing control of their messaging and having employees blogging in public as known employees of their company.

Of course, pointing out to them that an estimated 200-300 of their HQ employees were already blogging scared them – not to mention the thousands of Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn accounts held by members of this large public corporation.

Let go the fear… And for the Washington Post.. what took you so long?

The post Several years later, the Washington Posts notices that blogs are being used for Marketing appeared first on The Blog Herald.