Zemanta is a company that will help you to blog faster, and as they say, “Smarter.”

Here at Tech Startups we use it and find it indispensable. After using Zemanta with WordPress for a few weeks it becomes integrated as part of the workflow.

How does Zemanta do this?

Let’s start with a complex system of linking data together that as users we don’t have to worry about. What we should keep in mind is what the plugin does best – recommend.

The plugin polls the main text area where posts are being written every few minutes and based on this it recommends media, related articles, words to link (with links) and post tags that will enhance the post. All of these recommendations are returned from their platform to be contextually relevant.

What does this mean?

When it comes to media, Zemanta, will recommend photos and video that can accent a post or add to the value of the post. This content is CC licensed and when added to posts it will have a div around it with automatic attribution and link to the source.

Related articles operates a bit differently by adding a footer to a post with similar articles from the Zemanta platform. These are mostly other bloggers and news sources that use Zemanta. Also users have the ability to click on a related link and view it in a new window . . . a great way to get inspired or review a source for inclusion in a post.

Linking is self-explanatory – but I’ll give it a few words. Companies, hot topics or difficult topics are recommended as terms that should be linked in a post. They are placed right beneath the text input area are as easy to add as clicking them. This saves minutes worth of trying to get URL’s for terms.

Tags. Oh, yes. Since the last update the tags that Zemanta recommends are spot on. Previously I would use a few per post. Now I use all of them and a couple of my own. You can literally tag an entire post with the plugin in about 2 seconds with relevant, SEO juiced tags. They work just like the links but only tags.

I’m on the go, what about me?

Well, fire up your Mozilla Fennec browser and you’ll have the opportunity to use Zemanta to author posts. Zemanta can be installed the same way that it is done for Firefox by adding it as a browser plugin. That’s it. Now you have all the power Zemanta can offer and the ability to get photos, links and tag without having to find them or forgo them because you’re on a mobile device.

Faster, yes. Smarter, yes.

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Use WordPress? You Need Zemanta is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you wanted to set your own blog up today, it would take you less than 10 minutes and would cost about $20. I wanted to set up a personal blog about genetics that I’ve been talking about for weeks.

I bought the domain name DNAdoll.com from GoDaddy. But buying a domain isn’t enough. I needed to figure out which company I wanted to host the blog. I could either do this through GoDaddy or another site.

Kris Smith, the senior editor of Techstartups, sat with me at a coffee shop today, to help me set up my blog. After discussing the options with Smith, I decided to host the blog through Wordpress.com and pay $9.97 for domain mapping. This allows me to have a Wordpress.com blog that has the domain name DNAdoll.com instead of the generic, standard domain offered by Wordpress.

After I successfully mapped my domain by following these directions, I picked a template. Now I just have to produce blog posts.

It takes a while to build up traffic and to build an audience. I work for several websites, including Techstartups.com, that are growing everyday. But you have to start from somewhere.

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How To Set Up A Blog is a post from: TechStartups.com

It seems strange that I wrote about OpenCalais yesterday and am now doing it again 24 hours later.

There is good reason to be doing it again, a revamped OpenCalais has been released with updated features that add to the current healthy bevy and extend it them in ways to make them easier for developers to work with and supplement user experiences.

This trove of updates listed on their blog includes:

• Version 4.3 of the OpenCalais service features enhanced Social Tags for categorization; improved disambiguation; new entities, facts and events in English; and an entirely new feature called News Names.
• By popular demand, the improved Tagaroo plugin for WordPress gives users more control over the tagging process.
• Our URL submission tool, SemanticProxy, has been normalized to ensure that its results are identical with those you would get by programmatically submitting content to OpenCalais via the API. Additionally, we are now supporting JSONP. You can now specify a callback function when requesting results in JSON.
• Our Gnosis plugin for Firefox now includes categorization of processed Web pages in the sidebar and can sort entities by alphabetical order or according to frequency or relevance.
• And finally, we have published the OpenCalais Schema in OWL, enabling OWL enthusiasts to apply ontology based tools on OpenCalais metadata.

I’m eager to install the updated Tagaroo plugin for automatic generation of tags. This will be a welcome addition to making our posts even better. Once I have a chance to run Tagaroo through its paces, I’ll be sure to share.

Congratulations to the OpenCalais team for getting these updates out the door! The semantic web landscape is really starting to shape up into something that can help publishers and consumers discover better content.

OpenCalais Ups the Semantic Ante with Updates is a post from: TechStartups.com

My current favorite Twitter client (and Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.FM) has just received some major updates today.

For starters, you can now post to your Wordpress.com blog right from within HootSuite. The company says that support for self-hosted Wordpress blogs will be coming soon.

They’ve also added Link & Media Previews allowing you to preview the content of URL’s before visiting them. This is a feature that I’ve missed since moving to Tweetdeck and now I have it back. Huzzah.

The feature I find most interesting is HootSuite’s ability to define Twitter Trending Topics. Want to know what the Trending Topic named “Avatar” is all about? Hootsuite will tell you. (Of course, you’d have to living under a rock to not know about James Cameron’s new movie, but you get the idea.)

New features are all available right now. Just log in.

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclzr.us/0

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HootSuite Makes Major Updates: Wordpress Support, Previews, Others is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

I’m trying out both! I’ve been using Wordpress for about two years now. And this blog runs on Wordpress.  It’s familiar to me. However, I had nothing to do with the redesign. That was all of Kris Smith’s brilliant work. Maintaining a Wordpress blog can be coding intensive. I just write blog posts.

However, the urge to revamp websites is contagious. I felt the need to improve my personal site right after Techstartups.com got a fresh look. When I started my personal site 5 years ago, it looked advanced. Now it’s a static website that has a few select clips. I wanted a way to keep the website current with a written and video blog.

I first heard about the blogging platform, Squarespace, when I attended and filmed their holiday party. I signed up for the service yesterday. I didn’t make any commitments though. Squarespace lets you try out the service for 14 days (with no credit card needed to log in). So far, I’ve picked a design. I still have a lot of work to do in the coming days.

The good thing about the blogging platforms today is that you can blog without having to hire a designer for thousands of dollars. But by doing-it-yourself through Squarespace or Wordpress, you’re going to have to deal with their limitations. From my impression, you’d want to use Squarespace if you don’t want to spend time programming and just want to build a blog like its made of Legos. You’d be limited by your template design. Wordpress is an open source platform, so you have hundreds of plug-ins and templates to choose from.

You’ll have to buy a domain to for each one, so the cost is about the same. For Wordpress, you go through Godaddy.com or any of the other web hosting companies. Or you can host your site on Squarespace’s servers for a monthly fee.

And of course, there are other options. I’ve just narrowed it down to these two platforms. I think I’ll go with Squarespace. I still have 13 days to commit. Which platform would you suggest?

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Blogging On Wordpress or Squarespace? is a post from: TechStartups.com

Let me say, first off, that I am a huge fan of the elegant WPTouch plugin for WordPress by Brave New Code. This is one of those plugins that I would gladly pay $99 for since it creates such an amazing version of a WordPress blog for iPhones, iPod Touch and for Android devices.

Word to my peeps – perform this update only if you HAVE NOT modified the theme. If you have, you will lose your changes as all of the theme files will be overwritten.

I learned the hard way that any modifications to the code or layout will be removed. Of course, once I hit the update button I thought to myself about the nature of this plugin. Then, upon refresh of Tech Startups on an iPhone and with Agent Switcher . . . my handiwork was toast.

Before you spend seconds obliterating hours of work to make changes in your WPTouch theme make sure you back up your original files (I do have mine, fortunately) and don’t do the automatic update in your WP admin. Download the upgrade, unzip it, add your hacks back in to the new theme and then upload it to your server.

I have to say, it is kind of cool to have a plugin for a theme. What is important is to realize that it is a totally different animal than any other plugin.

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Hold On! WPTouch Update Available is a post from: TechStartups.com

WordPress 2.9 is now street legal and straight outta beta for the masses.

You’ve probably read about the full release already and that is a good thing. You might have even read my review of the beta.

It’s true that I wasn’t that excited with this what I was seeing. The beta was much of the same old stuff. The full release, yes, the same with some catchy features for the less savvy users. A good move.

Now that WordPress has the newbs and graphicsprogramiphobes covered, it is time to get on with 3.0 and I hope it is a great departure from the current release.

I wrote a post about what I’d like to see in WordPress 3.0 a month ago or so, but lets talk about it some more.

1. Simplify the options

Currently there are too many options that appear in the left hand navigation when a publisher is writing a post. A contextual menu system that displays navigation items when needed would help out even the most advanced user.

2. Simply the posting process

There is an ability to produce a quick post inline on the dashboard but nothing like that in main admin. Would be a nice option.

3. Simply theming

No exception to the rule, WordPress often integrates the best of the open source plugins that authors produce for it. But some of the best of these get left on the table and remain plug-ins. Themes haven’t had much of this treatment and deserve it. There are elements of themes and options, like those for auto-thumbnails that could be added to the codebase and used as hooks for themes.

Congratulations to the entire WordPress team for rolling this new version 2 update out the door. There are plenty of shimmers of what will come in version 3.0.

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WordPress 2.9 Now, Next 3.0 is a post from: TechStartups.com

I’ve been a bit harsh on WordPress the last few weeks and need to give them some credit. Credit for being able to grown a large business from open source software and in the process share those gains with independent publishers worldwide.

WordPress is a startup success story.

It can’t be easy to build such a business with the multitude of competing interests that one is confronted with on a daily basis. Interests like monetization, product roadmap, network capacity for scale, software for scale, public opinion, etc.

So last Friday I wrote about not being excited by the new WordPress beta. I’m not. That isn’t because the software isn’t top notch and free. It is because it doesn’t wow me. When it comes to functionality it presents not a single new feature that I myself find better than the previous version. And that’s ok. My wishes are a competing interest with other users and most likely in the minority, for now.

This blog, right here, the one that you are reading is running on WordPress. I am intimately acquainted with it as over the past 6 weeks i have written 134 blog posts using it. Through extensibility I’ve found it to be even more of a solid companion for allowing me to publish with more ease. I’ve blogged about the Zemanta and OpenCalais plugins for the admin panel and they have helped to greatly speed the process up of adding metadata.

With all of that said, WordPress did impress me yesterday with a scantily documented feature, that in my mind makes it more useful. And to make it more exciting it is a feature that I lauded Engadget and its development team for yesterday – URL graffiti.

Apparently, for over a year, hibernating in the WordPress codebase has been the ability to add multiple tags to a URL to create a query that will retrieve the corresponding content. A quick example being this link that looks up posts tagged with engadget, stylecaster and twitter. And they have the RSS component built in as well.

For all of the same reasons that I praised Engadget I will praise WordPress too. There seem to be many lesser documented features that make the platform a stronger engine for publishers. Maybe these are extensibility hooks that added in hopes that they will be enhanced later in the development cycle and they’ve fallen by the wayside.

Regardless, WordPress is a great product for those not wishing to build their own blogging platforms. Which, of course, I would say is north of 99.8% of bloggers. It offers the opportunity to self-publish in a way that very tools throughout history have for the cost.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Cutting WordPress Some Slack is a post from: TechStartups.com

Linking words together online is an hobby. Creating context from those words is an art. Making them work in harmony is a gift. The team at Thomson Reuters have done this for some time with their Calais project and the first consumer product from it OpenCalais.

OpenCalais is a monster database filled with linked data that can be accessed by anyone via a special API. Currently it works on an individual application level and as plugins with other popular CMS and blogging platforms. In tandem they create a more powerful experience for the publishers of new content by allowing the integration of linked data for linking, tagging and finding optional third-party resources for inspiration.

Word on the street and from a trusted source is that the Calais team has something new on the horizon – their own CMS. A release of a CMS that has semantic technologies built right into is a powerful addition to the marketplace. Many blogging platforms and CMS products available today have stagnated under the weight of their own popularity.

It is hard to innovate when you are leading the pack or trying to figure out how to make money from your product that is free. Time and resources become devoted to maintaining the status quo, patching holes and community relations and support. Not to mention that many of these tools have crept out from the minds of developers and not publishers.

The same can’t be said for Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative. With a business model built in from the inception of the project they have the ability to create value from the wealth of content that is entering their system. It is treated to some natural language processing, machine learning and prepared to link with other content. As the initiative currently exists it is the side car to better publishing as there is no status quo or hole patching. They realized this.

Throwing a CMS on top of this type of foundation is a logical move for OpenCalais to extend development and create publisher relations. There has been so little innovation in core CMS offerings that most rely on third-party developers to create additional functionality or implement API’s like OpenCalais, Zemanta and other discovery products.

An OpenCalais CMS, blogging platform or whatever comes from this group is going to be a welcome addition to the choices that publishers have available today. The closest opportunity today to creating a true semantic experience in a publishing platform that is readily available would be to install the Zemanta plugin in WordPress. It transforms the writing experience. An offering from Calais could transform the writing and CMS experience.

Update: Krista Thomas (@kristathomas) from OpenCalais got in touch to say that there is a fully integrated CMS based on Drupal called OpenPublish available now.

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CMS Innovations from Thomson Reuters? is a post from: TechStartups.com

WordPress release a beta version of its blogging software earlier this week and I thought that I would give it a go. I installed it on my server having read about new features on other blogs a few days ago.

I was hoping to see some of the changes in effect. I did. But I’m not excited.

This release was more about patching things up and plugging some holes on the code side. It isn’t at all about the UI and display layer. It would have been great to see some Admin changes to the grouping of features or a more robust media uploader.

The current one isn’t bad, it’s just too many steps to get to the advanced features for formatting around the images or video. Sizing them is still fine and linking them up to the post or a larger image of the image being inserted are still options are easy to get use.

I was able to install plugins and themes without many issue. Of course all of them displayed messages letting me know that they weren’t tested with this version of WP and they could blow up the universe if installed. Not really on the universe part but it would have been cool if they said that.

Themes were another story. I’m guessing that there are some hooks that have changed that threw off quite a few that I tested but a couple made it through with flying colors. The most frequent problem was the main body column area not displaying.

This goes without saying, but if you’re not as adventurous as me and seeking thrills in new features or a challenge managing an upgrade, then this version of WordPress is for you. You can do the upgrade and won’t even notice the difference. That is until your theme flakes out.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

WordPress 2.9 beta Review is a post from: TechStartups.com

I’m a big believer in the Fremium model for internet businesses. There’s no better way to get people to trial your product or service than to give them a feature-limited version for free. That said, the premium features (stereotypically called the “Pro” account) had better be unique and worth every penny or your startup will crash and burn or at best, flounder.

More importantly, do your research: if another company offers the same or similar service with even greater benefits for free, how many people do you think will actually convert to premium?

The “online socially connected business card” category is a perfect example. (There are at least two companies with this model, so it’s now officially a “category.”)

The two companies to which I’m referring are Magntize and Card.ly.

Both allow you to create “Online Business Cards” that include your basic contact information along with links to your social media profiles and both provide neatly displayed streams from some of your social networks, all wrapped up in a sophisticated, well-designed theme. If you’d like features such as use of your own domain name, a different theme, better SEO, and perhaps inclusion of your resume, you’re going to have to pay.

In the case of Magntize, it’ll cost you $9/month while the less feature-complete Card.ly will only charge you $2.99/month (or $24.99 year).

Now, if you’re not savvy about the interwebs and you need an online presence, I can see how these would appeal to you. Magntize in particular is very slick and looks great.

But there’s a third option that’s absolutely free and comes with a bonus that you can’t get with either of them: an audience. LinkedIn, known among social networks as the “suit and tie” social network based on its professional focus, provides you with the equivalent of an online business card, resume and home for all things that represent you professionally. Want to be a more casual and social? Try Facebook.

After all, what you really want on the web is to be found and both of the social networks mentioned above provide you with that benefit. They’re optimized for search and just as importantly, Google places a high priority on these networks in terms of the their authority on people.

If those don’t work for you, how about a free Wordpress blog? Sure, if you want to use your own domain name you’ll also have to pay for it and Wordpress.com will charge you $9.97/year to use it, but the capabilities are so much greater.

Bottom line: if you’ve decided that you must have a branded online presence that you can call home and you want absolute simplicity and good design, give Magntize a try. If all you want is to be found in a context that’s favorable to your professional skills and experience, set up a LinkedIn account.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Make Sure Your Premium Features Are Indeed Premium is a post from: TechStartups.com

Artisteer is a product from Exensoft. A company that codes by the 3M tagline – “We didn’t bring you Blogger, we made it prettier.”

Artisteer has been on the market for some time to help non-design and non-technical folks navigate the world of web design for pre-built software packages like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. They recently added Blogger to this mix and I am sure to the delight of the PM’s of Blogger at Google.

Blogger is a huge ecosystem of global bloggers but has for many years been passed up on features by smaller more nimble competitors like WordPress. I would say MovableType but they too have languished a bit to catch up to the robust features that open systems like Drupal and WordPress have gained from code submitted by users.

This is a great direction for Blogger to go. The more tools that it can offer users the better chance it has at increasing its non-spam user base. I kid you Blogger. There is real opportunity for them to lower attrition rates as their current users now have an option to begin creating customized layouts with ease.

Artisteer is designed as a WYSIWYG editor for people that want to create these customized layouts and apply them to their Blogger blog (that just sounds weird). The application lowers the barrier both technical and financial over other programs aimed at professional users that create designs for multiple types of media. Artisteer is focused on allowing users to design, chop, export and upload their designs and have them working immediately.

I wonder what else the Blogger team has up its sleeves?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Artisteer Now For Blogger is a post from: TechStartups.com

Blogs.mu has been around for a while but I’d bet you haven’t heard of it. I’d also bet that if you have heard of it that you forgot all about it. If you fall into this latter category then consider this a refresher about the easiest way to run a WordPress blog network without installing WPMU yourself.

For the uninitiated, WPMU stands for WordPress Multi-User. It is the same WordPress that you can download from their .org site except that it allows you to create unlimited blogs from one upload to a web server. It is powerful and built from the same code that runs WordPress.com. Though I highly doubt the out of the box ability to run millions of blogs form a single installation without countless hours of coding.

The folks at blogs.mu have come close to doing exactly that for the end user of their service. They have taken an off the shelf version of WPMU and spent the hours coding, hacking, theming and delivered it as a product that anyone can use with all the bells and whistles build in.

I’ve run a couple instances of WPMU over the years on my own servers and if I needed to run it again I would go about doing it on my own. However, I am a tech masochist that stubbornly decides that sub domains are the the best way to run these installs and then spends days hacking around Apache and other config files. Blogs.mu has taken care of all of this.

They have even taken care of themes, plugins and advanced user management for you. Believe me, this is a big deal when you want to run a network of blogs. Being able to manage bloggers, themes and plugins effectively can leave you more time to create editorial or your own blog posts.

Blogs.mu is a ‘free’ service but one that I would recommend that you pay for. Partially, because their business model and your ability to unlock some of the best tools depend on it. You can use their free version to get your feet wet and create a couple blogs to use as demos for the decision makers at your job or within your group of friends. Then upgrade to the paid version once you are comfortable and ready yourself to blog like a pro.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Multiple Partner Blogs is a post from: TechStartups.com

Today we’d like to announce the inclusion of the WPTouch: WordPress on iPhone, iPod & Android plugin to our arsenal. It’s been making Tech Startups look great on your iPhone or other touch smart phone since 10:38 am today.

Instead of stripping down each blog post to it’s bare elements the WPTouch plugin beefs it up with theme that presents the content as a native application on the viewing device. This goes a long way in conveying to the user that, as a publisher, you get it.

WPTouch creates this experience through integrated Ajax libraries and theme graphics that match the platform that is being viewed on. Another feature that is handled well by the theme is search and subscriptions. See below.

Filtering by tag or category is awesome too (a great way to access your favorite topics on mobile tech startups) :

The final great piece to using WPTouch is that when combined with Flavor Studios iPhone icon generator some extra magic happens when the site is bookmarked and saved to the home screen:

If you’re running your blog on WordPress come get some WPTouch and mobile Tech Startups version.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Mobile Tech Startups Views is a post from: TechStartups.com

Happy Monday morning! This post came to me after thinking about the easiest way to ’stream’ a content library to nearly every audio piece of software available. The M3U file type is one of most widely supported across platforms as well.

If you’ve got yourself an audio startup and are looking to make a ’streaming’ playlist you would think this would be a simple thing to do with PHP and MySQL . . . nope. WordPress users might find this handy and if you’re on a another development platform – take the concepts and run.

Here’s how I got it done:

1) Add a mod_rewrite line to your .htaccess file that ends with ‘.m3u’ like so:

RewriteRule ^playlist/all/playlist.m3u$ http://www.yourdomain.com/yourscript.php?type=$1

2) Create the PHP script to generate the M3U data structure:

a. connect to your MySQL database
b. query your audio (the ones in your cms like WordPress not labled draft. You’ll most likely need to know the data type it submits to this field in the database like ‘0′ or ‘1′)
c. pull up the post id, post title and podcast file

3) Lie to the browser in your PHP script by writing a header for an M3U file:

header(“content-type: audio/x-mpegurl”);

4) Write this line without ‘echo’ or ‘print’:

#EXTM3U

5) Create a loop to write your podcast id, podcast title and podcast URL

6) The M3U output, which you shouldn’t see in the browser if you do this right (I know I saw it for about an hour) looks like:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:001,Title of the Audio file

http://www.yourdomain.com/audio/001.mp3

#EXTINF:002,Title of the Audio file

http://www.yourdomain.com/audio/002.mp3

I am not a super coder but this should be enough to get you going.

In case my directions gave you indigestion – look below for the exact (well, nearly exact script that I am using).

<?php // first connect $go = @mysql_connect(“localhost”,”dbusername”, “dbpass”); $db = @mysql_select_db(“db”); if ((!$go) || (!$db)) { echo “Can’t connect to database”; } $query = “SELECT postid,title,media FROM posts WHERE active = ‘1′ && media !=” ORDER BY Date DESC”; } $result = mysql_query($query) or die(‘Query failed: ‘ . mysql_error()); header(“content-type: audio/x-mpegurl”); ?><br /> #EXTM3U<?php echo ” \r\n”?><br /> <?php while($row = @mysql_fetch_array($result)) { ?><br /> #EXTINF:<?php echo $row['postid']; ?>,<?php echo $row['title']; ?><?php echo ” \r\n”?><br /> http://www.yourdomain.com/podcast/<?php echo $row['media']; ?><?php echo ” \r\n”?><br /> <?php }?></p>

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Dynamic M3U For Audio Startups is a post from: TechStartups.com

The semantic web is well on its way and one of the startups that has taken an early lead is Zemanta. They have taken a unique approach to linked data and the science that powers their ability to create structured content from it. They aimed their service at publishers, not the IT crowd.

Typically, semantic technology companies rely heavily on their colleagues with computer science degrees not the actual publisher. They will deliver products as API’s or server side solutions with a hefty price tag. Zemanta has created the right relationships with CMS and blogging platform owners to integrate their tools within administration sections.

They offer AJAX’ed out components in these platforms that reads from the main content box as a publisher types a post and updates linked content like photos, links and tags that are appropriate for the post. By doing this it allows the publisher to focus on their post and actual release content faster.

The core of their service is to intelligently eliminate the need for the publisher to start research from ground zero. They offer points of direction inside the administration interface to guide the publisher to resources quickly. I am most impressed with the way that Zemanta handles tags and the relationships between them.

Zemanta does offer an API, I have used it in the past. The API returns data quickly and an even more robust set than the plugin style for CMS’s. A sample request returns maps, categories, links, excerpts and more. The only problem that I encountered was one that all semantic companies have right now, context and sentiment for breaking news.

Semantic services rely on hefty algorithms that need sample data to create the links between data and develop sentiment. As a result of this issue, it makes it very hard to implement solutions that work with real-time data and syndication of that content. Most times, once something has hit a feed or been released to a partner site it cannot be updated with linked data. I’ve been told it is something that the Zemanta team is working on.

Zemanta makes it easy to Zemify your content in WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type among others and possibly Blogger in the future.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Zemify Your Content With Zemanta is a post from: TechStartups.com

Ning is a powerful social network tool that allows people to setup custom websites with most of the same functionality that’s available in other larger social network websites. There are a variety of different options involving both functionality and promotion. For those that are interested in completely self-branding, you can purchase premium levels of membership that suppresses components of advertising and the standard Ning branding.

Ning has now released even more functionality through the use of various applications that can be integrated into your Ning site. These apps bring functionality from other websites to be embedded within your Ning site.

Right now there are over 90 new Ning apps that you can use on your site, with more to be developed as developers jump onto the development bandwagon. Similar to Facebook apps, Ning provides the open platform and lets developers build whatever functionality they want into the platform.

Some of the bigger apps available now that I can see are apps for WordPress, Hulu, Twitter, and even Tungle (which we covered here before).

Just checking out the apps I added the WordPress option to my Ning site, right now it looks like it only pulls in your WordPress.com account if you have one.

This will cause me to start looking at Ning more as an option for some clients who are wanting even more social network like functionality and needing a website solution they can manage without needing to know HTML coding.

Ning Expands Functionality With Apps is a post from: TechStartups.com

I’ve got a serious question to ask. It may come across as whining or at the very least just being ungrateful for what technology exists out there for the masses. I’ve been blogging for a few years and have owned a cell phone for just a bit longer than that. The majority of my blogging time I’ve even had a smart phone with full Internet access available at my fingertips.

My question is why has no one created a worthwhile application to allow me to blog from my phone? My phone is basically a more powerful computer than my first real desktop PC was at the time. I can run mobile applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF readers, databases along with a variety of browser based or Internet applications.

I’m not expecting my mobile blogging experience to be quite as efficient as getting things done on a full-blown laptop or desktop PC with my preferred blogging application, Windows Live Writer. I’m just shocked that I’ve got nothing available as an option, that I’m aware of, other than logging into the standard WordPress admin interface through the browser. The challenge to that option though is the cramped screen real-estate that just doesn’t work with the user-interface.

If you’re aware of an option, please let me know. I’m very willing to give just about anything a try. Then instead of playing Bubblebreaker while I’m killing time waiting for people or things to occur, I can get my blogging groove on while on the move!

Somebody Needs To Start This Startup – Mobile WordPress Blogging App is a post from: TechStartups.com