Technorati means business with Wordpress Blogs, and rightfully so. With all the potential vulnerabilities of older, unpatched versions of Wordpress out there, many blogs have become fair game to spammers worldwide.

If you have not upgraded Wordpress since 2.3.2, and have a claimed blog on Technorati, you probably received an email from Technorati architect Ian Kallen, who writes:

“…Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern…”

The NowSourcing blog was a couple versions back and noticed a couple spam links creeping up here, so we bit the bullet and upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. For those of you that have not done so yet, be sure to at least be on 2.3.3.

The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin was surprisingly bump-free (be sure to check all the backup files, we noticed that the wp-content folder didn’t backup automatically).

Technorati has often been criticized of not being on top of things, but this time around I must say good job, Ian and crew! Granted that many will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off

Before you say “hey, you write about social media. Where’s the social media?” I was just getting to that Technorati authority and blog search coupled with Wordpress blogging is at the heart of social media. If you woke up tomorrow and your or your client’s blog was dropped by Technorati, there could be some serious ramifications. Conversation is quickly becoming the new form of metrics in social media (sorry pageviews), and without a guide like Technorati, we’d be up a creek without a paddle.

But what if Technorati removed thousands of authority blogs en masse? Best upgrade soon, all!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

This post isn’t going to be inflammatory, walking you through the ABC’s of why Twitter is good and why you should use it (although you should).

Rather, the post is here to make you think about Twitter in a way that you might not have before - to use as a scouting and hiring tool. What better a way to find the latest new influencers in social media?

And now without further ado…I give you - Patricia Mayo.

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I’ve probably just become the envy and bane of every desk-chained slave of the corporate world… (please don’t hate me!)

Hi! I’m Patricia Mayo, and I get paid to do the stuff most get fired for doing. Officially, my title is “Social Media Strategist.” But really I just stick my head in the clouds, pull out great ideas, and play with those sites you probably need a proxy to visit at work.

My apologies in advance if I end up getting you fired… *sheepish grin*

How did I get such a great gig? Well - chances are you have already seen my work.

Blazing a Trail in New Media

I have ghostwritten countless search engine optimized articles, copy for websites, ebooks, and ever so infamous five page sales letters. As “Miche” I problogged at Audeamus for Creative Weblogging, which snagged a front page on The Issue and was named a top Social Entrepreneurship blog a few times.

I have also edited Master New Media’s articles, videos, and newsradar. ProBlogger recently featured my guest post “Tired of (Promoting) Your Blog? Flip It” as one of 13 submissions picked out of over 100 submitted in response to his open opportunity for guesting.

Nowadays I’m just a few inches away from launching ComHacker, a blog to help you get what you want out of what you do online, and co-host the Wordpress Weekly podcast. Of course, that isn’t the end-all be-all to my story. For more, you can read Dan Pennington’s interview of me on Associated Content.

Yep, I’m pretty much everywhere all at once. The sad part is, that’s not even a quarter of the stuff with my name on it But honestly, I owe the majority of my recent success to Twitter.

I <3 Twitter

Follow me on Twitter

Why do I love Twitter? Let me count the ways…

Thanks to Darren Rowse of ProBlogger tweeting about the open guesting opportunity as it was posted, my submission was the ninth one completed, and one of the first to get picked. The early bird gets the worm!

Brad Williams - Mr. SnapFoo (yes he’s so awesome he deserves a Mr. before the site name) - tweeted about the Wordpress Weekly podcast. I tuned in, and ended up being grilled in the after show. Apparently they liked what I had to say.

Of course, I’ve gotta send some love to all the tweeple who saw my tweeted works in progress and sent paying freelance work my way. That’s just plain awesome And I’ve been able to fulfill those orders because I found a few great developers through my gig post at the Startupers site, prompted by Startupers following me on Twitter.

And interestingly enough, apparently going from 3 followers to over 200 followers in less than a month is notable - because that’s pretty much how I qualified for this gig at NowSourcing.

You wanna know the kicker though? …I’m 23. Just goes to show ya how far a little ambition can take you.

Best of luck in all your endeavors - and I’m certainly looking forward to helping you be a raving success too!

Here with me is Dan Milward, CEO of Instinct Entertainment LTD – makers of the E-Commerce plugin for Wordpress. Thank you for taking the time.

1 – What made you decide to go out and write an E-Commerce plugin for Wordpress?

Years ago I wrote a WordPress wish list on my blog. One of those wishes was for a Shopping Cart plugin - months later when a client asked me to build them a shopping cart application for WordPress I positively jumped at the opportunity. The only other option at the time was EzStatic Micro Shop and that was not a plugin - i.e. too hard for me.

2 – There are lots of good Wordpress themes out there, but I haven’t seen a lot of them that are geared for E-Commerce sites specifically. What is your favorite Wordpress template for E-Commerce?

At present K2 because it is easy to use - even then though it has its quirks and a lot of my developers find it difficult to customize I still like it because it is quite powerful as far as themes go - especially when coupled with the modules plugin (which extends the widgets functionality).

I think the simpler the theme the better - people want to be able to customize their sites as much as possible which is why it makes sense for us to make as many widgets and tag includes for WP e-Commerce as possible.

Back to the point though. I don’t think that there are any really good themes designed specifically with e-Commerce in mind. This is something we have recognized and it is something we’re working on - we’re especially excited about the next generation of DropShop that we are working on with Nick La from n design studio - here is a sneak preview:

3 – Looks like you guys have been rolling out some nice new features (for those of you that haven’t tried out the drag and drop shopping module, try it out here). Care to tell the audience about any upcoming features?

Well if you like the live search feature in the Apple.com website then you’ll like the new enhanced search form coming soon. DropShop is about to get another visual overhaul, product tags are on the way in, product zooming is being planned, and future versions will be heavily optimized and we know that the next version of WP e-Commerce will load more then 70% faster then before.

4 – Are you taking appropriate steps are to make sure that your E-Commerce system is SEO ready?

Of course. This is very important to us and we have already integrated WordPress Permalinks with WP e-Commerce to make URLs more human readable and search engine friendly - plus we are about to release the new product tags feature.

I’m not sure if this is the right place to mention it but the ’share this’ social networking feature is also integrated with WP e-Commerce and we have RSS feeds for all products and product categories.

5 – I’m under the impression that blogs are overtaking the web by force. They are indexed by search engines faster, can be a news authority, have most all of the features that a content management system (CMS) has, and now they also have the ability to do E-Commerce. How to you envision the future of blogging?

Funnily enough I was thinking about this today.

You see I use WordPress for everything, there is not much that it can’t do (and if you can think of something it can’t do then I’m sure you can make a plugin to make it do it) and so it struck me that I haven’t refereed to or even thought of WordPress as an actual “blogging tool” in years - so although you are right in that blogs are taking the web by force (I think that they always have been) I think that in some funny way the word blog is becoming synonymous with the word website. Strange huh…

But you asked about the future of blogs not WordPress. Blogs are here to stay. It is as simple as that.

Here’s a thought. When I was studying New Media one of our tutors told us that the porn industry drove website design and technology I think that now possibly it is blogs and blog developers that are changing the face of the internet. We are the new driving force…

6 – Since your E-Commerce software is a plugin, are there things that you think you will never want it to do as compared with a full scale E-Commerce system?

WP e-Commerce is becoming more and more full scaled all the time - we have OS Commerce, Zen Cart users, and e-Junkie users migrating to us all the time. I think this is because the first two pieces of software are legacy (old school) and e-Junkie users would prefer an all in one WordPress experience.

To be totally honest I believe that the only missing features in WP e-Commerce that would stop it from being called a “full scalle” solution would be UPS / Fedex shipping integration. And these are in the planning stages now. In fact if there are any readers reading this now who have experience integrating UPS etc that would care to lend a hand we would love to hear from you!

However I also think that for the average e-commerce user this does not matter - especially if you are in the business of digital downloads then it does not matter at all.

[Editors note:  more product info for the E-Commerce Plugin can be found on Instinct's Wiki located here.]

Wordpress version 2.3 has officially been released. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, is even going so far as to throw an upgrade party at his apartment.

This is a pretty major update for the Wordpress blogging platform. It has added some great new features in group publishing - users can now not only save drafts, but can also save posts for pending review.

Full tagging support is now provided as well.

Read more about the latest changes in my previous post.

Keep in mind that this upgrade is for bloggers that have a self-hosted, or Wordpress.org blog. Be sure to download the new version, but remember to back up all posts and database first (useful tips on how to do so here):

Last week, we discussed the new Wordpress Beta version. Wordpress announced that it will release an updated beta today, along with weekly updates until the September 24th go live date.

If you are a beta tester, you should definitely install this update, as several bug fixes are being addressed (you should join the WP-testers mailing list).

After kicking the tires on the latest Wordpress release, here are some highlights worth talking about:

As discussed in the version feature list, there are some much needed user updates. NowSourcing has done the work for you, so you don’t have to wait until the final release comes out.

Tagging support

Other blogging platforms already had tagging options for some time now, so this is a welcome upgrade:

This feature plays nicely into other tag cloud plugins and integration with Technorati tags.

Improved Workflow

This improvement speaks volumes to the future of blog platforms. Content management systems (CMS) once were thought to be the answer for non-technical users to manage their websites. With blogs becoming more powerful in both features and community reach, blogs will likely steamroll over CMS and the traditional website.

What this update allows is a key piece of the blog publishing cycle. If you have multiple authors on your blog, let’s say that you work on lots of different blog post ideas that are not yet ready for publishing. If you’re like me, you probably save them as drafts (and a local copy, just to be safe). Now, what if you have an author / contributor that wants to show you something before they post it. Where do they put it? Drafts again. So, the drafts area gets crowded.

Not anymore. Now, simply classify your post status as Pending Review.

Then, you will see a post waiting for pending review:

Keep up the great work, Wordpress! Looking forward to seeing this version make its way into production!