Reports had it that Twitter Japan’s latest move to differentiate it’s service from its global counterpart is a tierred payment model that will charge Japanese Twitter users for viewing tweets from Premium Twitter accounts. How’s that for Twitter being a free online communication tool?The paid subscription model for Twitter Japan will start rolling out in January 2010. By then Twitter users who have probably amassed loyal Twitter follower will have the option to charge their followers for viewing their Tweets. Sounds like Twitter suicide to me.

The premise is that these Twitter users who will opt to charge their followers have so much valuable links and perhaps thoughts in their tweets that justify the charges.

Those who are willing to pay the subscription fee may pay the subscription cost on a monthly basis or they can buy prepaid tickets that can be found at convenient stores in the streets of Japan. Another payment scheme is through pay-per-tweet option which will be charge through the user’s credit card or deducted from their mobile carrier billings.

Such a well-designed income generating scheme, right? If this kind of deal will be offered by Twitter globally, do you think it will succeed? Are you willing to pay for a tweet?

However, new startup TweetBookz has decided there must be enough Twitter fanatics who would like to do just that.

Cofounders Jacob Schwirtz and Asael Kahana said that the service offered a “fun way to look back on your favourite tweets and capture all the emotion of those moments to keep forever.”

For $20 (softback) or $30 (hardback), a 5.5×8.5-inch 200 page book can be printed in one of four customisable designs in either English, Spanish, French or Hebrew.

Of course, if you really want to print your tweets, and maybe make them even more visually appealing, you could use other book publishers and design the book yourself, but TweetBookz is another interesting third-party application potentially making money from Twitter.

Would you put 200 of your tweets in a book? Would you give it as a gift to someone else? Are your archived tweets that scintillating?

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One feature that I love about both Blogger and WordPress.org is that I can redirect my default RSS feed over to FeedBurner in order monetize my blog feed.

While this option is available via plugin for WordPress.org fans and baked in for Blogger users (ever since Google purchased FeedBurner), WordPress.com users seem to be left out in the cold (unless you are part of the VIP Hosting club).

Although WordPress could just simply open themselves up to Feedburner, it may be wiser for them build or buy something similar to FeedBurner like Pheedo.com.

WordPress Feed Ads? Are you serious?

WordPress.com is one of the largest blogging service platforms out there, second only to Blogger (at least as far as traffic is concerned).

While I am not sure who has the larger “feed eyeballs,” I would not be surprised if WordPress’s feed count was close to Blogger’s.

If WordPress decided to partner with their users with feed advertising, they could easily boost their revenues and not have to solely rely upon premium features in order to help keep the lights on.

So should WordPress buy Pheedo?

While Pheedo is an excellent alternative to FeedBurner, their asking price is probably well over $50 million, which may not make sense to purchase (at least during this recession).

Creating their own feed ad network from scratch may be wiser (not to mention cheaper), and would give their fans one more reason to stay within the Automattic family instead of outsourcing to Google.

So aside from the recent geotagging feature that was rolled out recently, WordPress.com has also introduced another important feature – email subscriptions. Yes I know, like me you are also wondering why WordPress.com took this long to have this feature. But hey, better late than never, right?

Anyway, to add email subscriptions to your WordPress.com blog, you need to add the blog subscription widget to your blogs. Fortunately, it’s just as easy as clicking a button once you logged on to your WordPress.com account.

Once activated, your readers can easily subscribe to your blog updates and receive them through email. The email sent to your blog subscribers will be in HTML format, so images and formating will be retained, giving your readers the same look and experience as when reading your blog updates from your WordPress.com site. Your blog readers can also opt to receive email updates in text format.

In addition, your readers can also control their email subscription to your blog – that is set frequency of receiving emails as well as cancel their subscription anytime they want to. They really don’t need to inform you that they want to cancel their subscription to your blog updates. They can do it themselves. In addition, you need to approve all new subscription to your blogs before your subscriber can receive your email updates.

Regardless of whether you are a web designer, journalist or “Joe the Plumber” (note: I say that in love), your tools can define whether you succeed or not on your job.

The same is true for blogging, as having the proper software can help determine the difference between success and failure–or at least separate the pro bloggers from the rest of the noisy crowd.

But when it comes to the iPhone, there are a few apps that I have found that every serious iBlogging pro should have, regardless of what blogging platform you have (at least for the most part).

So without further ado, here are 7 must have iPhone apps for bloggers on the go.

BlogPress (Price: $2.99 USD)

I know what you are thinking. Why should I use BlogPress when I can use the free WordPress 2/Typepad/LiveJournal/BlogPress Lite app for my blog? (note: you Squarespace fans are off the hook on this one)

Answer: Because despite the awesomeness of the apps (whether official or anointed), none (with the exception of the LiveJournal App) support multiple image posting and positioning, and none of them allow you to upload and post multiple videos.

While I would encourage users to also install the free versions as well, BlogPress is a must have app for iBloggers everywhere.

Photogene ($2.99 USD) & iRetouch ($1.99 USD)

There are plenty of great photo apps out there, and as someone who has (foolishly) spent money on many out there, I would recommend users only purchase Photogene and iRetouch as they will handle 99.99% of your photo editing needs.

Photogene I heavily use, mainly because of its intuitive features that make editing an image simple and fun. Users can easily crop, resize, add text, speech bubbles or convert images into black & white easily (among other affects).

For more advanced functions like cloning, smudging or “Photoshop like effects,” iRetouch can satisfy most (if not all) your blogging needs.

PicBrowser ($1.99 USD)

While editing images is great, finding one that can match your blog post can be a little difficult.

PicBrowser helps you resolve that problem by providing an easy to use image search across Google Images, Flickr, Ask.com, NASA JSC (which is great for space geeks like me!), Google Books and free iPhone wall papers.

You can also link to where the image was discovered (which is a great as it can help you avoid using copyrighted images).

ReelDirector ($7.99 USD)

If you have an iPhone 3GS, ReelDirector is a must have app, which allows video bloggers to “stitch together” videos filmed separately on your iPhone, with transition affects in between.

ReelDirector also allows you to insert credits before and after the entire film, allowing bloggers to insert copyright notices of their videos, as well as acknowledge the creators of the flick (just in case it is stolen and uploaded to YouTube).

Oceanus Web Browser ($0.99 USD)

(Image via App Shopper)

Let me be clear–the native Safari browser on the iPhone is a JOKE!!!

That being said, there are a few browsers out there that are worth downloading, although I would highly recommend Oceanus Web Browser because it has the best user interface for tabs (making it easy for those of us with basketball fingers).

Oceanus also supports an array of other features (like bookmarks, image downloading, “incognito” mode, in page search, themes, etc.), as well as the ability to easily change your default search engine (as not everyone loves Google).

Facebook (Free!!!)

Okay, this is definitely a must have app since practically everyone ranging from your niece to your grandma is on this social network.

Facebook is also a great way to connect with readers and fellow bloggers, and despite its low price is probably one of the most valuable apps out there in the app store.

Total Price: $19 USD (minus a few pennies)

While there are other apps out there that can enhance your geek/blog life (especially for Twitter), these 7 above are probably “must have” apps for any serious blogger, as they can not only help save you time, but enhance your blogging as well.

Teracent specialises in machine-learning algorithms which have been put to use on the image ads of Google and its partners.

The example given in the announcement shows a standard, human created ad (left) and a similar ad that’s been picked in real time from thousands of different creative elements by these algorithms.

Exact details aren’t given (not only are they proprietary but also likely to be highly complex) but the desired end result is clear: advertisers get to show better converting ads, and the publishers (including bloggers) who display them can earn more.

The algorithm uses a range of selectable factors such as geographic location, language, website content, time of day and past performance of previous ads.

Google already attempts to optimise the ads displayed based on the visitor and the website content, but has had little control over the ad itself. If this goes through, presumably as an opt-in for AdWords and other Google-affiliated ad networks, it could allow for even greater variation.

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So what is Pixazza really? In their own words:

Pixazza is a new platform that allows shoppers to buy products from photos seen on websites of our web publishing partners. Our unique capability allows these web publishers to generate incremental revenues by “visual commerce enabling” the images that already exists on their websites.

So what is it again? It’s an internet service that serves interactive and engaging online ads through blog images. The visual ads are activated once a user hover on any picture on a particular blog or website.

In short it’s like AdSense, another blog income generating scheme for us bloggers. For blog readers, it could either be a useful service or just mere annoyances.

But unlike AdSense which generate targeted ads through search advertising algorithms, Pixazaa does it manually with its army of photo taggers. Yes, it is possible at this early stage of Pixazza with around 100 photo taggers who identify relevant products to serve on blog publishers’ sites.

Will it still be possible once Pixazza goes mainstream? We will know by then. But then, are bloggers willing to use Pixazza on their blogs?

According to Pixazza, there are already a dozen sites using their system. Will these publishers earn? Will users actually use blogs to as a shopping tool?

Want to see Pixazza’s ad program in action? Check out this sample site.

• A lot of work to get the dynamic publishing in sync with the static publishing.
• Updates to the Professional blog templates
• Unbundling of Motion and Action Streams
• The Entry/Page “previous” and “next” container tags now account for entries/pages with the same date-time, rather than skipping them.

The item on that list that catches my eye is the “unbundling” of Motion and the Action Streams plugin. This is the first I’ve heard of this. If you download the release candidate you’ll see that, sure enough, the Motion template set and the Action Streams plugin are gone. One has to wonder if this is the end of Motion or if it will be back as a separate plugin. If anybody’s heard more about this, let us know in the comments.

Over at the Melody Project, they’re making progess toward an initial release. To give people a sneak peak, they released a list of planned 1.0 features. Some of the more interesting ones include revision histories, a full-screen editor, and a smaller core. It’s good to see this project gaining momentum.

We’ve got one new plugin to talk about this week. Byrne Reese has developed a plugin that “provides integration with Stumple Upon’s URL shortening service and iframe viewing window.” On top of that, it makes it easy for you to host your own shortened URLs.

One of the scariest jobs you’re likely to have to do with your MT site is move it to another server. There are lots of ways to do it, each with its own advantages. Larry Sampas documented his latest server move. He did it using rsync, which is a great way to move the files between servers without downloading to a local machine.

Finally, Beau Smith has a tutorial on adding edit links to entries and pages. This method checks the user’s cookies to see if they’re logged in before displaying the links.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Though I am a heavy WordPress user, running it on half a dozen blogs and writing for three other sites that use it, I wasn’t particularly blown away by the feature list. Though some things struck me as nice, such as post thumbnails and a “trash” can, and others seem to have great long term potential, such as comment metadata and custom post types, many of the much-touted features didn’t seem to be that useful to me.

Image editing is a nice idea, but I already have more image editors than I can count. Likewise, the easier media embedding seemed odd as I’ve never once felt it was too hard or too time-consuming to embed a clip into my site. Copying and pasting a few lines of code just is not that intimidating to me.

But my friends then pointed out something to me, these features weren’t intended for me. Old hats such as myself might grow to find these features convenient, but they certainly aren’t necessary.

They aren’t tools for the people who are blogging vets, but for those who want to start blogging, will be soon or just started. New blogging users, especially those without a lot of technical expertise, have different needs and they are changing the way CMSs, including WordPress, design and build their systems. These changes will affect all of us but, in the long run, will have a positive impact.

The History of the Personal Web

When I first started designing and building sites in 1996, a personal Web page was just that, a personal Web page. You got a few MB of server space from either your ISP or a service such as Geocities and you built a site from scratch.

This was an unforgiving environment. You had to learn HTML to do anything and, even once you mastered the code there was no hand-holding to make these sites look good, thus why so many of the old Geocities sites caused temporary blindness.

But as comical as Geocities is today, even in closure, it was the type of environment that many current bloggers cut their teeth on and it came with some valuable skills, comfort with HTML, basics of image editing, etc.

However, as time moved on, the Web itself became more approachable to less tech-savvy user. Services also sprang up to make it easier for those new to the Web to have their own pages. HTML became a true four-letter word and sites touted heavily how you could build a page without ever looking at code.

That, in turn, expanded into blogging. Services like Blogspot sprang up to make blogging easy, making it possible to create a blog by just signing up for an account, choosing a theme and typing your entries. The trend continued into WordPress, who tried to bring a similar sense of ease with their products, both WordPress.com and their self-hosted WordPress.

In fact, with one-click installs, automatic updates, a theme directory and the WYSIWYG editor, you can setup a blog, on your own domain, without any knowledge of HTML, FTP and, soon enough, an image editor. For just a small fee, you can have your own “.com” blog without any real Web expertise.

However, though it is tempting for old hats such as myself to decry this type of advancement, it seems to be having a positive effect on the Web and, over time, on our CMSs and blogging applications.

Why It’s Important

Though its easy to accuse these tools of “dumbing down” the Web. They make access to blogging easier and that, in turn, has a lot of positive effects.

Consider the following:

1. Experts Can Be Experts: Previously, if you wanted to build a site about rose gardening, you had to learn HTML, master FTP and become a guru with images. That’s time away from writing about your passions and is a distraction from creating great content.
2. Experts Help Non-Experts: Not only does it mean you don’t have to be a guru at HTML to make a blog, but you can help actual gurus help you out, through theme directories, widget galleries, plugins, etc. This lets people have better-looking, more feature-rich sites than would ever be possible otherwise. Even us “old hats” need help from the real experts much of the time.
3. The Web is a Prettier Place: Since bloggers don’t have to be designers to have attractive sites, the Web is a prettier place all around. Compare WordPress.com blogs to old copies of Geocities for proof of that.
4. More People Can Blog: With being tech-savvy no longer a requirement for blogging, more people can blog, including experts in other fields. I know that many of the law blogs I read would not be possible without these new tools.
5. Blogging Becomes More Mainstream: Finally, as more people blog, they also read blogs and that, in turn, makes them more mainstream and more of an accepted form of media. This can be a boon for those who build solid reputations with their sites.

In short, a rising tide lifts all boats and this is a clear example of that. The easier blogging is, the better off all bloggers will be.

The Future of CMSs

Of course, all of this is going to have a major impact on the way that CMSs, such as WordPress and Joomla, design their interfaces. In short, they are going to get simpler and easier to use.

While that means that the most basic and common tasks will be come easier and faster, it also means that some of more powerful features will be more hidden and outlier situations won’t be as easy to handle.

WordPress, on that front, does a great job with customization and extensibility. You can really make your WordPress install do what you want, but increasingly the default setup is no longer aimed at the long-time user and power blogger.

The WordPress experience has been built from the ground up to make blogging as easy as possible. Power users will need to adjust accordingly. However, it makes much more sense to start with a user-friendly and slightly less feature-rich setup and have users build up than to have users install plugins to simplify things, as was the course of action in many areas, including embeds and image editing. Power users are much better able to make such adjustments.

So, as frustrating as it can be to have your CMS altered to cater to novice users, especially as power-user oriented issues seem to go largely ignored outside the plugin community, it is not a bad thing nor is is unnecessary. It’s an important part of blogging’s future.

Bottom Line

For blogging to grow, thrive and survive in the coming years, it needs to continuously reach out to new people and one of the important elements of that is to make it more approachable and a large part of what makes blogging approachable is the platform or CMS.

Fortunately, one does not have to trade ease of use for power. WordPress has done a decent job at balancing the two by providing a lot of customization options. However, it is clear that the defaults will be geared to those who are novices, mainly because they are the ones least comfortable with changing the settings.

Though it might seem to be an invasion of newbie bloggers, it has been going on for some time, as Blogspot is evidence of, and it is a good thing, increasing the diversity of bloggers and helping to grow and strengthen the medium.

That, in the end, can only mean better things for all bloggers.

Though precise details haven’t been announced yet, Stone’s interview with the BBC suggested that additional pay-for features could include advanced analytics and information about their accounts and who is visiting them.

There may also be the possibility of Twitter striking revenue deals with a number of media companies, claiming a “wonderful partnership” could be struck between the wider context and expertise that news outlets provide with the real-time, user-generated nature of Twitter updates.

Biz Stone was also critical of News Corporation’s plans to add a paywall to a large proportion of its online properties, suggesting that “they should be looking at this as an opportunity to try something radically different and find out a way to make a ton of money from being radically open rather than some money from being ridiculously closed.”

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