@NowSourcing.Com

As Friendfeed starts to get better and better, and people start to contribute more to the site, users will increasingly want to find ways to export that valuable data back to their own blogs.   After all, if you’re the webmaster of your own blog, your obvious first priority is to drive that traffic back to your own site.   More traffic equals more pageviews and more pageviews equals more Adsense clicks and more RSS subscribers.   So it makes sense that you would want that bustling Friendfeed activity to be moved over to your own domain.

Luckily a couple of Friendfeed users have been hard at work dealing with that very issue and if you have a blog hosted on either Blogger or Wordpress, then you are in luck.    The Blogger method is much easier as it is just a simple copy and paste.   The Wordpress method has a bit more to it.    But nevertheless, both methods have so far been receiving glowing reviews and I will shortly be installing the Wordpress version on my own blog to capture some of that Friendfeed magic for myself.

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Back in the days of Web 1.0 (along with hit counters), it was very trendy to have a guest book on your website and to invite everyone to sign it. The highlight of my 2002 was when the author Jeffrey Deaver came by my website and signed my guestbook. He and I had been chatting by email about one of his books and on impulse I asked him to sign the guestbook. But no sooner had he done so than the book began to fill up with spam and other assorted junk. [...]

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!