words

This weekend, hundreds of bloggers and Web developers gathered at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco for the second-annual WordCamp conference.

Day 1 was dedicated to the content producers, and offered advice on how to be a better writer. We heard from John C. Dvorak, Om Malik, and Matt Cutts from Google.

Day 2 focused on the development and future of WordPress. Matt Mullenweg wrapped up the conference with the State of the Word address, describing how far WordPress has come in just a year, as well as a sneak preview of the newly designed Admin section.

I covered … Read more

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 … Read more

WordBreaker is a free, online word game for iPhone that challenges you to guess a computer-generated word before it guesses your word. Choose from varying levels of difficulty with shorter or longer words.

iPhone link: http://www.wordbreaker.org/

I spent part of today at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., talking to some of the folks behind Google Docs & Spreadsheets, part of Google's Web-based office suite. I asked the product experts I met for their favorite features that often don't get the limelight or that people simply don't know about. I picked five that I thought were worth sharing:

1. Live lookup via Google and Google Finance. This is only available for Spreadsheets, but it's one of the neater advanced tidbits that makes use of Internet connectivity. Using two special formulas, users … Read more

Category: Productivity

Google's ad services allow anyone to put advertisements up on their site. They can be anything from generic banners all the way to contextual ads that show offers related to content on the site. In addition to site ads, site owners can also purchase AdWords, which are purchased keywords in search terms. When a user buys one of these words, a link to their site will show up in the sponsored area to the right of a Google search using that word.

One of the reasons Google's ads have become so successful is that they can … Read more

Category: Publishing

WordPress is a free blogging platform available to everyone. WordPress has two components, one is a free, Web-based blog-hosting service called WordPress.com. The other is WordPress.org, which provides users with software to run a more feature-rich version of the blogging tool on their own servers.

Both services offer a very easy way to blog, with administrative options to work collaboratively on one or several blogs using the same log-in. Bloggers can write their posts on a WYSIWYG editor, or switch over to a code view on the fly.

The service is best-known for its themes and … Read more

When Power Downloader recently sat down to check his e-mail, he quickly noticed a message from his niece, Kitty Kilobyte. In the message, Kitty explained that she would soon be attending a summer English class, which would mean she would probably be writing a lot of papers. She went on to explain that though she was embarrassed to admit it, spelling wasn't her greatest skill, and any software he could recommend would be a big help.… Read more

Salesforce.com and Google are expected to launch a combined Web site on Tuesday that is designed to allow the online customer relationship management software maker to act as a reseller for Google's AdWords.

For Salesforce.com, the alliance expands its efforts to tie its hosted CRM software with Google AdWords, following its acquisition of privately held Kieden last year. Salesforce.com will expand beyond allowing its customers to launch Google AdWords from a Salesforce.com application to one in which it will act as a reseller of the Google AdWords platform.

The two companies jointly developed Salesforce Group … Read more

In part two of my interview with Matt Mullenweg (see also part one) of WordPress and Automattic, we discussed the release of WordPress 2.2, including its new widgets and Ajax-enhanced interface.

I asked Mullenweg what his favorite widgets were and although he said he "doesn't like most widgets," he did call out some of the blogosphere utilities like Sphere (review) and Technorati.

No conversation with Mullenweg would be complete without a discussion of the WordPress antispam utility, Akismet -- a service inspired by the young developer's mother. I also find it interesting that while Mullenweg … Read more