This was hilarious. An NBC anchorwoman while live on the air ended up dropping the F bomb then later apologized for her OFFENSIVE language! I wonder if she is still employed?

MyBlogLog recently announced that they have improved the way in which users manage their contacts. When you click on the add/manage link that appears below your contacts, you’ll see the new screens. One thing I noticed immediately when checking out my own MyBlogLog profile is the large number of pending contacts. I had no idea that a large number of users added me as a contact. I wonder what the heck happened there. At any rate, you now have the ability to view pending contacts, contacts, and something called followers. Depending on the tab you select, you can add a contact, keep as a follower, block contacts and remove contacts.

As a side note, MBL has also lifted the 15 contact requests/day limit due to the new contact management features.

By the way, this blog and myself are on MyBlogLog and have been for quite a while. I use MBL to create and manage a community of user’s interested in the content of this site. If you would like to be a part of my MyBlogLog community, click on the link that says “Add Me To This Sites Community” within the recent readers section of this website. Or, click here and click on the Join Community link.

Kevin over at BloggingTips.com has asked the audience the following question, what gave you your biggest traffic burst? To start things off, I’d like to say that this blog has had a number of pages submitted to StumbleUpon as well as Digg.com. I know of one instance where a link to this blog was featured on Techememe as I had posted a conflicting post to something that was published on Techcrunch. While each one of these circumstances provided a big boost in traffic, nothing compares to the traffic I received inadvertently via reformatting my blog.

The graphic up above is from February of 2008. The numbers within the first column are the days of the month. After importing the content of my blog back into a fresh install of WordPress, this gave each post a new ID number. It also gave RSS feed readers a fit as the new post ID numbers made it seem like I had just published 400 new posts. I don’t know if the resurgence in traffic was due to everyone visiting the site from their feed reader or not. I do know that I witnessed a large amount of traffic from stumbleupon for articles that had already been stumbled some time ago. It was as if someone had resubmitted them. Out of everything that has happened to the blog within almost a year of it’s existence, this reimporting of content is what has generated the most traffic for the blog.

I really don’t recommend this method of getting traffic. I really didn’t think this was going to happen and I ended up posting an apology to all of those who had subscribed to my feed. In fact, if you were to reformat and then re import your content, generating new post id numbers to get traffic numerous times a year, you are definitely gaming the system and in my opinion, doing a dis service to yourself and your RSS subscribers.

Malevi4 of Malevi4.wordpress.com has compiled a pretty big list of free to use RSS icons. I can’t read any of the text on the website but I can tell you this, this compilation contains a number of RSS icons I have never seen before. Behold my new favorite!

I just think that image looks awesome. At any rate, if you are looking for some high quality, free to use RSS icons, better click that link up above. The hardest part will be figuring out which ones to use!

If you have visited this blog anytime after May 2nd, 2008 you may have noticed a pop up appear on your screen similar to the one shown on the right. Now, you might think this is a popup, an advertisement, perhaps even a malicious piece of code being executed on your system. The good news is, its none of the above. This notification is an invitation sent from my Woopra client, to you, to try and initiate a conversation between webmaster and blog reader.

Woopra is a sweet new analytics tool that goes a few steps above and beyond the Google Analytic offerings. One of those is the ability to initiate a conversation with the people who are browsing your site. So here is how this works.

If you use the WordPress Woopra Plugin, Woopra will have the ability to automatically tag visitors to your website. In order for visitors to go from being an anonymous IP address to name and email address, visitors need to leave a comment on your blog. When visitors leave a comment on your blog, they have to submit their name, email address and URL. Once this information is submitted to the website, Woopra strips that information and tags it to that IP address. Now you might be wondering if this is a BIG BROTHER snooping over you type of scenario. The truth is, it’s not. When you leave a comment, you are submitting that information voluntarily to the website. This is how Woopra explains it:

Virtually every site on the Web tracks users via cookies. Until now the only sites that had the resources to analyze and act on the data were large companies like Google and Amazon. Woopra brings this power to the masses.

So, if you visit my website and you previously left a comment, the following screenshot shows you what I would see:

My name is Jeffro on my own blog and that is what I have used to write a comment or two on the website. Also within this window of information is the ability to look up my browsing history on the domain, manually tagging the visitor, all of the information related to my browser, ip address ect, email address and you’ll even see my gravatar. That’s right, Woopra has built in Gravatar support which is pretty nifty.

So when a user browses jeffro2pt0.com and I initiate a conversation with you, this is what it is supposed to look like:

Two way conversation between web master/visitor. Now, I’ve gotten many reports that when user’s have clicked on the popup to initiate the chat, it doesn’t work. I have no idea why this is. It could be related to firewall settings on your computer or could be that, it doesn’t work. The good news is, the Woopra team is going to be reworking the chatting feature of Woopra. They plan on redesigning the Woopra popup as someone mentioned it looked like spam and they also plan on implementing a feature where site visitors can initiate a chat session with the web master instead of vice versa only. I think that would be pretty darn cool if that became a reality. That would eliminate the need for the shoutbox and it would give you one more way of getting in direct contact with me.

I hope that this information doesn’t affect your mindset in terms of commenting on this blog. If you don’t want this information to be available to me, you can always delete your cookies from your PC which will make you anonymous to Woopra. The personal identifiable information presented to me within Woopra is for my eyes only. So rest assured, your user data won’t be strewn across the net.

To be honest, I really can’t blame the guy for what he did. It reminds me of when I was in high school and as I’m trying to get my work done, some idiot is throwing things at me or flicking my error. Eventually, You Can’t Stands No More!

I have confirmed that Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame will be on Episode 17 of WordPress Weekly on May 23rd 2008 at 9PM EST. Matt will be hanging around for an hour and I have a wide ranging amount of questions for the guy. Here is what I plan on covering with my interview with Ma.tt:

• WordPress Trademark Usage
• Status Updates on all projects under the Automattic umbrella
• The new hire along with the scaling of WordPress
• The future of WordPress
• I’ll have Matt explain how the new 2.5 administration design became a reality
• I’ll ask him how the guy who doesn’t know PHP from their ABC can contribute to the development of WordPress

Those are some of the things I plan on getting Matt to cover, the rest of the time during the show will be dedicated to YOU. That means, call in with your questions and get the answer from the horses mouth so to speak.

This is going to be one hell of an episode and I invite all of you who are using or interested in WordPress to stop by and participate in the show. Oh yeah, tell everyone you know about this episode so that I feel like I’m under a bus load of pressure when I go on the air. Thanks!

So, there are a number of articles being published discussing the fact that they would pay for WordPress if it came bundled with a price tag. Most of these articles have been started in response to Ryan’s article entitled 15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Numerous people have claimed that WordPress is so good, they would pay for it. Would I pay for it? Maybe. But this question comes at a time where we actually have a bit of hindsight in which to make our decision. I liken this to the Butterfly Effect:

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the ocurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. Of course the butterfly cannot literally cause a tornado. The kinetic energy in a tornado is enormously larger than the energy in the turbulence of a butterfly. The kinetic energy of a tornado is ultimately provided by the sun and the butterfly can only influence certain details of weather events in a chaotic manner.

If the WordPress.org project would of contained a price tag, I can practically guarantee you that the number of themes, plugins, tips and tricks would be far lower than what they are today, simply because of the pricetag. It wouldn’t even matter if the price was as low as $5.00, the bottom line is that their would be a price attached to the product.

I’ll be honest and tell you that WordPress is a great piece of publishing software. And the fact of the matter is, if WordPress in its current stated would switch to a paid platform, I would most likely pay for it. However, let’s not forget that Automattic is a privately held company which recently received a massive amount of funding from large venture firms. This company makes money through something known as WordPress.com. Therefor, if WP.org ended up with a price tag, I think you would see an implosion of the WP.org user base.

I mean, there are so many different avenues we can drive down in terms of what would happen if WP.org became something you have to pay for. The best thing WordPress.org could do is to remain a free, open source community based project. I realize the tone of this article makes it seem like WP.org is coming down the line with a price, but that isn’t true. It’s just that, so many people have claimed that they would pay for the software, it might inspire the folks involved with the project to attach a price tag to the software. but alas, Matt has said in the past that WP.org will remain as an open source project for the foreseeable future.

A post over at ProBlogger.net is asking the following question: “Is syndicating content kosher or not…ie running someone elses content through rss into ones own blog?” And the answer to that varies depending on the circumstances. For starters, I feel that no website should be able to syndicate my full RSS feed while at the same time, displaying some sort of advertising on the page/site. This makes me think the webmaster of the site in question is trying to profit from my work. There is an exception to the rule however.

So you may ask then, what about blog scrapers who simply use an excerpt of the post but usually have the name of the post author switched around. Well, they actually link back to the original post most of the time and I’m not hard pressed to go after those that use an excerpt. Using excerpts is fine, using the full feed is not. I don’t syndicate anyone’s content without permission and it’s very unlikely I’d do so anyways.  However, I am completely fine with sites who syndicate my content, only after they have received my permission to do so. An excellent example of this would be Planet WordPress managed my Ozh. Before syndicating my WordPress related content, Ozh got in touch with me and asked if he could syndicate the WordPress category on my blog in which I gave him permission to do so.

So how do you feel about those who syndicate your full RSS feed without permission? Do you syndicate content from other people on your own site?

For you tech bloggers out their who consider themselves to be on the “B-List” or maybe even the “Z-List” you’ll appreciate this podcast. Hosted by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins who is a writer for Mashable.com, the Elite Tech News podcast serves up the best in tech news collected throughout the week by Mark and his panel of guests which include but are not limited to, Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com, Adam Ostrow and Sean P. Aune also of Mashable.com, Art Lindsey of ArtLindsey.com, Louis Gray of LouisGray.com, Frederic of the Lastpodcast.com and Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica.com

So far, the show has been a blast to listen to, especially once Steven gets on a topic he can rant about. Hearing the *BEEP* when he is on a rant is priceless and downright hilarious. Probably not as funny for Art who acts as the producer of the show and ends up having to edit those parts out.

I’ve really enjoyed their conversation in regards to making money blogging, how Twitter can become a profitable company, and how all of these guys express their independent opinions on various subject matter. I only wish I could call in and participate but my work schedule won’t allow it.

The Elite Tech News podcast has varied on start times but for the past few weeks, the show has aired live at 8:30 PM EST on Sundays. So if you’re looking for an intelligent group of guys that don’t mind having fun while speaking their mind, tune in live to the Elite Tech News podcast. If at all else, I highly suggest subscribing via Itunes as I have done.

If you would like to sample the show, click on the play button to hear their episode from last week.