Do you still use your Pownce account? I stopped using mine months ago. I don't even know if I remember the password. If you do still use Pownce, the Twitter-like microblogging service that just never seemed to capitalize on its early hype, start preparing to migrate to something new. Today, Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, announced that it has acquired Pownce and will be shuttering the service in two weeks. Lead Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone will continue on at Six Apart, where presumably some of Pownce's features will be rolled into Vox.

Hey, at least there is Twitter! Seriously though, Pownce's failure is proof that hype alone will not make a product or company a success. As our own Nik Fletcher pointed out, Pownce is the perfect example of how NOT having a useful API at launch or soon thereafter is a huge mistake. Especially if you are trying to do the whole microblogging thing.

Not to get all Valleywag, but didn't Six Apart just lay off 8% of its staff, like three weeks ago? I don't know the particulars of either situation -- but simply on the surface, that's cold. Did something miraculously change or was this part of the plan the whole time?

If you are worried about losing your messages once Pownce powers down its service, the Pownce team has created an export tool which will generate a file (I'm guess its XML. I haven't had a chance to look at it) that can then be imported into Vox, WordPress or TypePad.

Fittingly, the discussion of Pownce's demise is much more active on Twitter and Friendfeed than on Pownce itself.

On my list of 14 extremely useful Firefox addons I included ScreenGrab for capturing web pages to PNG or JPG images.

Today, I replaced it with Screen Grab to Wordpress. As you probably guessed, it's got the same core functionality with one major addition: the ability to send images directly to your Wordpress-powered blog.

Configure the URL, username, and password to all your Wordpress blogs an you're ready to go (just make sure you have XML-RPC remote publishing enabled).

Click the icon in your Firefox status bar to display SGW's menu and choose what to capture and where to send it. You can save locally, copy to the clipboard, or post directly to Wordpress.

If you're blogging a capture, you can enter a title, tags, body text, and even set your new post to publish - if you don't check the box, the post defaults to draft status. After successfully uploading, you're taken directly to the Wordpress edit page to put the finishing touches on your new post.

With less than 600 downloads to date, this one is a bit of a diamond in the rough. It's a tremendous timesaver for anyone blogging about items discovered while browsing with Firefox.

Bloggers and web publishers looking for a quick way to make some cash have long turned to advertisers willing to pay for text links on their web sites. Some text links hang out in a section of a web site clearly labeled as sponsored links. But others have a way of making their way into the body of a post, where they look like any other link on a web page. But typically when you scroll over a text ad placed by an advertising service like Vibrant Media, you'll see a pop up which makes it clear that you're looking at an ad and not necessarily a relevant link placed by the author of the article you're reading.

Now there's a new ad service called InLinks which automates the process of placing in-text links that don't look like ads on a web site. While this may come as good news for a handful of advertisers and web publishers who want to resort to this tactic, if the practice catches on, it could erode people's willingness to click any links at all. After all, if you can't tell the difference between a relevant text link and an ad, there's a good chance you'll err on the side of ignoring all the links.

On the other hand, the inLinks example image shown above leads me to believe that it won't be that tough to spot the fake links on a web site. After all, what blogger would really bother placing a legitimate link under the words "gadget" or "widget?"

What do you think? Is InLinks providing a useful service that will help bloggers make money, or is the company ruining the internet for the rest of us?

[via ProBlogger]

Less than two months after being acquired by WordPress's parent company Automattic, blog commenting system Intense Debate is again available to the public. The service had been in private beta for the last two months, not because the company was busy adding a ton of new features, but because it was busy scaling Intense Debate's infrastructure to handle the additional traffic that is likely to come when WordPress starts to include Intense Debate features by default.

For now, Intense Debate is rolling out a new plugin for WordPress that adds the following features to your web site:

• Threaded comments
• The ability to vote on comments and show comment reputations
• Simultaneously post a comment to a blog and Twitter
• Replly to comments and moderate comments by email
• Commentor profiles can include links to social networking pages
• Ability to add sidebar widgets with information on things like your top commentors

Intense Debate also works with Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr.

If you have a blog that gets a lot of comments, you might be finding that logging into your blog's administration panel to moderate comments has become a bit of a laborious process. If your blog runs on the WordPress platform and is self-managed, you might like to check out the Moderator plugin and associated Adobe Air desktop application.

The concept here is straightforward: install the plugin on your blog, then follow the instructions to install the Air application on your Windows or Mac machine. From there, you get a nice quick application from which to review comments and either approve, delete, or mark them as spam.

As the site currently warns, you might find a performance problem if your site has hundreds of unmoderated comments when installing Moderator. The easy and obvious work-around is to ensure that you are up-to-date in your moderating before installing the plugin.

While it's a fantastic start, I'm one of those insane people that runs a number of WordPress blogs, or at least caretake a few for friends. It would be wonderful if Morderator allowed you to monitor mulitple WordPress blogs and moderate comments for all of them from within one interface. You can change the site that you are aiming Moderator at, but support for multiple sites would be a great enhancement.

So you're trying to build up a following on Twitter, but things like sleep, work, and bathroom breaks are getting in the way of your goal to out-update Scoble? Jay gave you a look at Twuffer today - yet another web service with a goofy-ass name. I do appreciate that they decided to keep the e before the r, as it saved me having to throw up in my trashcan.
FutureTweets is another service that allows you to queue Twitter updates. But wait just a minute...A Twitter app that doesn't use your Twitter ID for logins? That's pretty annoying, because it means that you're going to have to set up your Twitter details manually. Not a huge inconvenience, but seriously, fellas.

OpenID is supported, which is a damn good thing: FutureTweets own signup feature crapped out on me three times. My OpenID worked fine, however, and I was good to go (after entering my Twitter info).

If 'Portable' blogging apps aren't your cup of tea, and you're looking for something that's a little more mobile, the Tumblrette application for iPhone and iPod touch might be right up your street. Tumblrette [App Store link] is a mobile client for the very excellent Tumblr tumblog service - if you're not familiar with Tumblr be sure to check out our previous coverage here.

Tumblrette not only allows you create entries in any of the post types allowed by Tumblr, but also allows you to save draft posts to come back to later as well as write posts using Markdown formatting. The latest release sees the addition of a nifty record-and-upload feature that allows you to use the iPhone or 2nd-Generation iPod touch's built-in microphone to record a message and upload it to your Tumblog.

The application is both well thought out and beautifully designed. Best of all, it's something of a steal if you need to be blogging on the go: costing just $1.99 in an App Store near you now.

I can't always get to my main laptop when I feel like putting together a blog post. If you've read some of my other lists, you probably noticed that I'm a big fan of portable applications for just this reason. As long as I've got my trusty USB flash drive, I'm always equipped with the programs I need to get things done.

Here are ten of my favorites (plus two alternatives). With these programs in my pocket, I'm always able to write when inspiration strikes - regardless of what computer I'm using.

1. Windows Live Writer is the best offline tool for composing blog posts, hands down. While Microsoft doesn't offer a portable version, it's a simple DIY project (Brad first covered it in September 2007). You can download the portable launcher from Scott Kingery's blog: it's over a year old, but it works just fine with the latest beta of Live Writer. With a rich feature set and support for Wordpress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, and more, it's a necessity.

2. Portable Firefox and SRWare Iron are both great browsers. I keep Firefox handy in case I need access to my favorite extensions, and use Iron when I just need to do some quick surfing. Why Iron instead of Chrome? For the added privacy.

3. GreatNews is a decent, portable RSS reader that's actually portable (no Java runtime needed, like RSSOwl). The download is under 1mb, and it formats feeds into a tidy newspaper-like layout. If I'm using a machine where I'd rather not log in to my Google account, I'll fire up GreatNews to read my feeds instead.

Automattic plans to release the next major version of its popular blogging client, WordPress, later this month. But if you're OK with running your web site on beta software, you can download WordPress 2.7 beta 2 today. It's relatively stable, and features a whole slew of improvements over WordPress 2.6.

Some of the most visible changes for your readers will be support for threaded comments and sticky posts. In other words, they'll be able to reply to individual comments without resorting to a silly @ symbol, and you'll be able to make an important post hang out at the top of your page even after you've written more recent articles.

But the really big changes are all in the administration area. WordPress 2.7 has a completely new interface that both saves space (by grouping a number of items together in a collapsable sidebar), and allowing you to customize the interface by dragging and dropping widgets.

But the new interface is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few of my favorite new features in WordPress 2.7:

• You can search for and install plugins directly from your blog's administration page. No need to find and download a plugin, upload it to your FTP server and then enable it. You can take care of the whole thing in just a few clicks.
• WordPress 2.7 includes an automatic upgrade script that will download the latest version of WordPress and install it for you.
  

Overall, WordPress 2.7 replaces at least two plugins I had come to rely on, Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu, and WordPress Automatic Upgrade. I'll be curious to see if the automatic upgrade plugin continues to work with future versions of WordPress though, as it does include a few features that the WordPress auto-upgrade utility lacks, like an integrated database backup tool.

Making a podcast can be a pain in the butt. Most of them are distributed via RSS or Atom, to make it as easy as possible for listeners to get new episodes. What if you want to save a bunch of audio as a podcast, but lack the technical expertise or the patience to make an RSS feed for it? Or what if you know how, but you just don't want to bother? Well, that's why there's Huffduffer.

Huffduffer will stitch audio files into a podcast for you, and put them into an RSS feed automatically. You can add your own styff, or throw together some of the great "inspiration" that's already on Huffduffer. They've linked some of the best free content on the web, like TED talks and This American Life. To make things even easier, there's a browser bookmarklet you can save, to easily Huffduff any interesting audio you run across. I'm already thinking of Huffduffer as the Tumblr of podcasting: good concept, great ease of use, definitely worth checking out.

Don't you just hate it when you sign up on a forum or blog comment system and everyone has cool avatars, but you don't? If you aren't too picky about it, why not just punch your name into Turn Your Name Into a Face, and let it come up with something for you out of 100,000 possible faces.

Now, granted, the options may leave a bit to be desired; they're all black pixel art on a random pale background color. But there are enough options to be somewhat entertaining. It's particularly fun to punch friends' and family members' names into it to see what they might look like, or at least what you can tease them with.

What I'd like to see is a WordPress plugin that uses this functionality to assign avatars to blog commenters that have not explicitly given themselves an avatar.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Blog comment company Disqus was built around one pretty simple idea: the comment systems on most blogs stink. Disqus offers advanced comment features for Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, WordPress and other platforms. Features like avatar support, threaded comments, and the ability to rank other users comments. The biggest difference between Disqus and the default comment systems on most blogs is that once you register with Disqus you can leave comments on any blog that uses the system without registering over again. And you can track your comment history across all of those blogs, or see comment history for other users.

But Disqus has faced a few challenges. When the service first launched, comments were not indexed by search engines. Or rather they were, but the search engine would find them on the Disqus web site, not yours. So while Disqus was adding value to your readers, you it could actually be taking some value away from your site in terms of search engine traffic. That issue was fixed in August and Disqus comments are now properly indexed by search engines.

Second, Disqus couldn't handle trackbacks properly at launch. Eventually the the developers did roll out a trackback feature. But in order for trackbacks to show up on your site, anyone linking to a post had to use a special Disqus URL, not the URL of your post. Last night, Disqus rolled out a fix for WordPress, allowing Disqus to display all the trackbacks or pingbacks to your blog.

With this latest update, I can't think of many down sides to using Disqus at this point. At least for WordPress users. But there's the rub: WordPress 2.7 will likely have many of these same features built into the platform. No third party plugin necessary. Last month Automattic, the company that develops WordPress purchased Intense Debate, a company that competes with Disqus. And if you can give readers threaded comments, commentor rankings, the ability to register once and post on many blogs without installing a third party plugin like Disqus, why would you? It'll be interesting to see how Disqus works to differentiate itself from Intense Debate once WordPress 2.7 is released.

OpenX is an open source ad server that you can install on a web server to provide a complete ad management package for your web sites. The software lets you create entries for advertisers, ad zones, and campaigns. You can also apply a whole slew of filters that will do things like show one ad to a visitor in the US and another ad in the same spot to a visitor from Germany.

The down side? Up until recently you could only use OpenX by setting it up on your web host. In other words, even if you have a web site hosted on a free service like Google's Bloggger, you still need to sign up for a web hosting account, which usually costs money, to use OpenX.

Earlier this year OpenX announced it would launch hosted version of its ad server. The service is still in private beta, but I got a chance to check it out over the weekend, and it's pretty slick. The hosted version of OpenX provides all the same features you'd get from the self-hosted version. But there's no setup required. You just request an invitation and wait (im)patiently for one to arrive in your inbox. Once you're in, you can start creating campaigns in a matter of seconds.

OpenX also recently launched the OpenX Market Alpha, which allows publishers to sell their ad space directly to advertisers. The Market is still pretty new, so there aren't a lot of advertisers just yet. You probably won't get rich by signing up during the Alpha. But it probably won't hurt either. Publishers can set a minimum rate so that your default ads, say Google AdSense, or Amazon Affiliate units will show up unless an advertiser meets that price. But if a member of the OpenX Market has a higher bid than your minimum, their ad will be shown instead.

Google recently rolled out its own hosted ad management service. But while Google Ad Manager is certainly much simpler to use, it doesn't offer nearly as many customization options as OpenX.

FeedDemon has been the best RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they bought FeedDemon. The best news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth every penny), it's now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is easy to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator's web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the ability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you choose to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

On Monday, AOL (Weblogs Inc.'s parent company) announced that they are shutting down the AOL Hometown and AOL Journals services. AOL Journals members will be able to migrate to a new service, but AOL Hometown users have been instructed to back-up their files and prepare to go somewhere else.

There have also been reports (but Wikipedia is the source, so keep that in mind) that Yahoo! GeoCties has removed or shut-down some of its UK web servers. With Google killing its Page Creator tool and migrating everyone to Google Sites, the free static web host is a dying breed.

So what can you do if you are an AOL Hometown user (or you use another older service that might be on its last legs)? Read on for tips on backing up your content and publishing options for the future.