Blog News Watch

From Bloggers Blog comes this review of Feedjit’s new stats widget which sits quietly in your sidebar and tracks your readers. The interesting thing is that it also creates a list of the geographic locations of your readers, and with the addition of another widget, can even create a little map of your last 100 readers based on their location.

You can get the Feedjit traffic widget here, and read more about Feedjit the startup here at Startup Squad.

Update your files, kids. For those of you on Fantastico servers, lucky you - for the rest of us, check out these instructions. Thanks to Blog-Op for the tips!

Via Mashable comes this sad news from the Des Moines Register:

Authorities in Minneapolis say they used a former Iowan’s iPod to learn his identity after he was struck and killed by a school bus last week. Investigators with the Hennepin (Minn.) County medical examiner’s office say they tried for nearly two days to identify the man, who had only the iPod and some keys in his possession when the accident happened Thursday. With help from Apple employees, they used the digital music player’s serial number to trace the device to Adam Ray Finley, 30, a former Des Moines man who moved to the Twin Cities five years ago. His worried parents, who live in Auburn, had not heard from him for three days. “They didn’t know who he was or where he came from,�? his father, Terry Finley said Saturday. “It was a bad enough for a day and a half. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had it been longer.�?

Finley was well known as a regular contributor to TV Squad, who posted this special tribute to their colleague today.

Tragic loss.

If you’re a fan of Mashable’s many helpful lists (as I am), you really ought to head over and checkout the mother of all such lists - 5000+ Resources To Do Just About Anything Online. It would have been awesome to have been downloadable, or exportable as XML to feed readers, but I’m good with what we get. One page, all those lists. Very convenient.

The Federal Election Commission has ruled in two recent opinions that independent bloggers - those unaffiliated with political action committees (PACs) and campaigns - are not subject to the restrictive campaign laws that apply to candidates and their organized supporters. ZDNet story here; Ars Technica report here.

John Bambenek (presumably the same who writes at parttimepundit.com) filed one of the complaints against well-known Democratic-loving DailyKos.  Ars Technica reports:

Bambenek seized on statements that the blog was out to “elect Democrats” and that it contributed at least the equivalent of $1,000 per year (in hosting fees and salaries) toward this goal. Thus, in his view, DailyKos was a political committee. “Can a political committee avoid campaign regulations by simply organizing in the form of a blog?” he asked. “Surely not.”

The FEC said, “We think not.”

It’s going to be an interesting campaign season, kids.

Thanks to The Net Is Dead for a funny blast from the past! And the Bill Gates part doesn’t just apply to web design, of course.

Anyone else find this amusing in the extreme? China- the folks who are “strongly discouraging anonymous blogging” - will be the site of next year’s Olympic Games, which will make the first time the IOC has (as far as we suspect will happen soon) approved athlete blogging.

Heh.  Irony.  Love it.

This hasn’t been approved yet, but according to this article from Keith Austin writing for the Sports section of the Sydney Morning Herald, it’s on the verge of transpiring.  Austin has a fascinating recap of athletes and blogging in his piece that’s definitely worth reading, and I won’t repost it here (because I don’t do that sort of thing).  But you should definitely check it out for the historical perspective, just to get a sense of how big a deal this is.

How will this play out, I wonder? Will Chinese authorities try to impose their own highly restrictive rules on the athletes, given customary deference to host country law? I dunno. It’s a soap opera that will be interesting to see played out come next summer. I wonder how many athletes will blog, though. If it were me, frankly, I’d be leery of blogging in China, no matter that I was (I guess) technically on international soil.

Can’t get enough stats? Performancing released a new WordPress plugin for your Dashboard last week. Called pMetrics, the plugin was deemed a “major step forward in WordPress plugin technology” by  Ryan Caldwell in the post at Performancing.com’s blog announcing the development.

The new plugin features automatic updates (which can be turned on and off), one-click installation and removal, display of recent searches, ranking, and automatic installation of the javascript code. Future goals include affiliate banners in the sidebar, a blog sales page with detailed stats, and Feedburner integration.

To download the plugin, visit the Performancing.com post. Let us know how you like it, or don’t, in the comments below!

Thanks to 9:01AM for the tip.

Technorati Tags: performancing, pmetrics, wordpress plugins

Hola, folks - we’re back after a brief summer recess, with more link lovey-yummy-goodness and a new Monday schedule! On with the countdown roundup - eat up!

9:01AM: Bold pronouncement - “Blogging Enters The Mainstream“! Film at 11 . . . About Web Logs: Deb wants us to consider the poor underestimated blogroll . . . Better Blogging With Michael Martine: Michael teaches us some stuff using The Next Internet Millionaire Show as visual aide . . . Bloggers Blog: “Microsoft Launches Hackers Blog” . . . Blogging Basics 101: Full post versus excerpts in feeds . . . Blogging For Dollars Blog: Newsflash - meta blogging (blogging about blogging) gets boring after awhile (tell me about it, hon) . .. The Blog Herald: Has some great tips on a subject near and dear to any good blogger’s heart - protecting cornerstone (pillar, flagship) content . . . Blog-Op: A great how-to on fixing broken links and avoiding readership fatigue and frustration (always a good thing to avoid) . . . DoshDosh: “How to Easily Get More Members for Your Niche Community” . . . Fight! Not really - just a bonus bit of drama - start here for a Scoble rant, then proceed to rebuttals here (SEOMoz) and here (Social Media Maven) . . . Instigator Blog: New idea? Read this post from Ben Y. and take a deep breath before processing that feedback you’re getting . . . Lifehacker: Doing some investigative blogging and need access to banned sites? Try these tips . . . Lorelle on WordPress: “Understanding the WordPress Post Title and Post Slug” . . . Performancing: Explores the “one versus many” approaches in niche blogging . . . Problogger: Darren shares some productivity tips . . . Search Engine Roundtable:  Points us to a really interesting perspective on “life as a Google AdSense Publisher” from Webmaster World . . . Successful Bloggers: Liz’s SOB Business Cafe for 8/31/2007 is particularly interesting . . .

There you have it. Enjoy. Clean your plate when you’re done, ‘kay?

Technorati Tags: blog news watch roundup