Gawker Media has launched a new blog called Jezebel. In the introductory post the blog is introduced as a blog that Gawker claims will dispel the “great lies of women’s magazines.” To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women’s magazine we’d want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don’t much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag. Women deserve some of the blame here: if men ever bought $2000 handbags, Esquire and GQ might be as bad — and profitable — as Glamour and Vogue. The post goes on to list five of the biggest lies Jezebel’s editors think can be found in women’s magazines such as the must-have lie and the celebrity-profile lie. The Wikipedia entry for Jezebel says that in popular culture Jezebel is a name that “has come down through the centuries to be used as a general name for all wicked women.” Jezebel is also the name of an Atlanta luxury magazine that currently features singer Christina Aguilera on the cover. Gawker publisher Nick Denton hinted Gawker Media would be launching a women’s title several months ago in a Valleywag post that was critical of Glam Media’s traffic numbers. Posted in New Blogs Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

MyBlogLog Adds Tags
MyBlogLog has added a useful new feature — tagging. Tags were added last week before the memorial day weekend hit. Tagging will make it easier to identify and organize blogs that belong in specific categories instead of just arranging blogs alphabetically or by community size. Here are a couple unique ways the tags could be used that were mentioned on the MyBlogLog blog. 1. Spam – If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe. While they have the ability to delete the tag and never see it again, WE can see it internally. As their user account racks up the schmoe tag, we’ll investigate their conversations and take appropriate action. 2. Hot Members – Let’s allow the users of MyBlogLog to pick Hot Members! Every week I’ll dig through the users who are frequently tagged a Hot Member and let you all know about one of them. User chosen Hot Members sounds so much cooler to me anyway. It looks like a few people have already been tagged as schmoes. A lot of people have been tagged as hot members already. As you might expected the example topics listed under that tag input box already have a large number of tagged members: Xbox 360, Mom, Social Media. Posted in Widgets Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Washington Post Launches MyPost
The Washington Post announced earlier this month the launch of a new social networking feature on washingtonpost.com called MyPost. MyPost allows Washington Post commenters to create profiles and add friends. Our goal is to provide you with a home base on the site, a page where you’ll be able to both share and track your thoughts over time. When you post a comment to an article or discussion group, you’ll be able to get to your MyPost page by clicking on your MyPost ID just above the comment or by clicking on your ID where it appears in the top left corner of the washingtonpost.com home page. Other readers will be able to browse to your MyPost page from your comments and, once there, view what you’ve had to say or ask to message you by sending a “friend request”. You’ll see those requests on your page — they won’t be visible to others — and may choose to accept them, turn them down or ignore them. You’ll be able to exchange messages with readers you’ve accepted as “friends” on the site, and those messages will appear on your page. By default, only you and your friends will be able to see them, although you can open them up to any site visitor by changing the settings in the Profile section of your page. You can also tell others about yourself in your Profile by uploading a photo or filling in a brief bio. MyPost isn’t intended to be MySpace or another general social networking site, but a feature that will make washingtonpost.com more useful to you and others. We’ll be adding features to MyPost over the next few months and hope you’ll email us with your comments and suggestions. This is a trend that should start picking up steam and spreading to smaller online newspaper websites. USA Today relaunched back in March with new community features including blogs, avatars and profiles. Comments are probably helping the newspaper websites grow traffic and keep people on the newspaper websites longer. Adding profiles and friend features may be another way to keep users regularly visiting newspaper websites. Posted in Social Networks Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Read/WriteWeb Blog Network Launches
The Read/WriteWeb blog, a popular technology blog edited by Richard MacManus, has expanded into a blog network. Read/WriteWeb has announced that the first blog in the network is last100, which will focus on the digital lifestyle and how the Internet is being used in homes. last100 will provide news, reviews and industry analysis on products and services related to the digital lifestyle, with a particular emphasis on how the Internet is being used throughout the home. The site is edited by Steve O’Hear, a London-based consultant and journalist. Steve also writes a blog for ZDNet called The Social Web and wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary In Search of the Valley. Where does the name last100 come from? It refers to what industry insiders call the “last 100 feet” problem, which is the gap between the typical home’s computer and its living-room TV set. While the digital living room is a primary focus of last100, the site will also cover other areas of the digital lifestyle (VoIP, portable media, mobile web etc). The name of website comes from the “last 100 feet” problem or the “gap between the typical home’s computer and its living-room TV set.” Read/WriteWeb also says more blogs in its network will be launching soon. Posted in New Blogs Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Google Launches Online Security Blog
Google has launched an Online Security Blog. The introductory post explains why online security is an important topic for Google and web users. Google says their investigations have found 12 million suspicious URLs and about 1 million that engage in what Google calls “drive-by downloads.” Google also said that many of the websites may be unaware that they are infected. It also contains a couple maps — one of them shows the location of malware distribution servers. Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we’ve been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we’ve started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we’ll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post. Malware — surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer — is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed “drive-by downloads”. To protect Google’s users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search. Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised. There is no question malware is a very serious and overwhelming problem. The post also includes a link to StopBadware.org’s Tips for Cleaning and Securing a Website, a webpage designed to help webmasters keep their sites malware free. Posted in New Blogs Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Tech Companies Turn Widgets Into Ads
It has been expected in the tech community that eventually retailers and marketers would have to pay to get bloggers and website owners to put more commerical and marketing-focused widgets on their sites. Google plans to make this a reality by including Google Gadget offerings in its AdWords/AdSense program. Google is not alone. Tumri with its recent infusion of $6.5 million is also in the business of widget advertising. Technorati also recently asked an interesting question related to widget advertising in a survey. Niall Kennedy writes that widget construction and directory sites like Widgetbox and Clearspring also have plans for widget advertising. Mashable has a post about a widget affiliate advertising program called Starnum. And a TechCrunch post mentions a few others including Mpire, Boobox, AuctionAds and Ebay. Amazon.com also has a number of embeddable ad tools that Amazon affiliates can place on blog and websites. Google won’t be the only player in widget advertising but with its huge AdSense network it will be the biggest player. To get the best placement on blogs widget advertisers may have to offer a combination of cost per click, CPM and referrals. A widget advertiser only offering referral commissions probably won’t get as good placement as a widget advertiser offering a high CPM rate or a combination of CPC, CPM and referall fees. Posted in Widgets Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

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