European companies are behind the glide path when it comes to the usefulness of Twitter. Most European firms see the micro-blogging service as a ‘time waster,’ Forbes reported Monday.
Despite the growing number of U.S. firms that actively employ Twitter to answer consumer complaints and put out PR fires, few European companies are exploring the service - or even include it on corporate radar.
British Telecom doesn’t plan to use Twitter. Nestle’s said Twitter never comes up during meetings. European energy company Total hasn’t heard of the service, according to writer Melissa Bounoua’s “Twitter Not Loved in Europe.”
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Tuesday’s inauguration of Barack Obama will not only be a test of America’s next leader, but also a challenge for micro-blogging service Twitter. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the service will be “doubling our through-put capacity before Tuesday,” reports the New York Times.
Although Stone expressed confidence his service can withstand the pressure of some estimated 2 million people sending their impressions of the event, the Twitter creator also remembers election night, when the micro-blogging phenom was hit with 10 messages each second.
A number of news outlets, including CNN, the New York Times and others, are encouraging readers to e-mail or Twitter photos and comments as Obama takes the oath. The event could be a crucible for Twitter, according to the report.
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In the war for the hearts-and-minds of top bloggers, it is a split decision between Automattic and Six Apart, a survey found.
While WordPress and Moveable Type power 60 percent of the top 100 Technorati blogs, Automattic’s WordPress is tops among self-hosted bloggers while Six Apart’s free Typepad blog host service had more than triple the number of top 100 bloggers than WordPress.com, the free blog hosting service run by the San Francisco, Calif.-based Automattic.
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The BBC reported over the weekend that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has become a blogger, writing about sports and health.
Medvedev “has assured users that he himself would read the messages that come in at his address,” according to the report.
In one reply, a reader writes that transportation to sporting or health activities in Russia makes the activity out of the reach of most.
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In a nod to the power of Twitter to spread news faster than more traditional outlets, a Yahoo researcher has created TweetNews. The new service links tweets to Yahoo news stories.
A search on “Obama,” for instance turns up a Washington, DC Fox television station’s coverage, along with several tweets on President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s train trip from Philadelphia to the nation’s capital:
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Automattic has launched a new resource for bloggers, compiling videos explaining common tasks. The video support site, WordPress TV, includes clip from past WordPress developer conferences, or “camps.”
“I hope you’ll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but also a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community,” Automattic founder and chief spokesperson Matt Mullenweg explained in a blog post at wordpress.org.
Although the announcement was made at WordPress.org, the new site is billed as an “Automattic production.” Indeed, Mullenweg points out the site is devoted to both users of the Automattic blog hosting service WordPress.com and the self-hosted WordPress software.
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Please excuse any dust or hiccups you may encounter over the next few days as we consolidate our blogging news operations into the Blog Journal. Pro Blog News, Pro Twitter News and Associated Blogging will be folded into Blog Journal.
For the technically-inclined readers, we are accomplishing this using the latest build of WordPress MU. The consolidation will allow more frequent updates.
Canadian-based b5media has let go a number of employees, including Shai Coggins, Blog Journal learned Thursday.
In an internal e-mail obtained by the Journal, an unnamed b5 executive (possibly CEO Jeremy Wright) explained the decision to let Coggins go was “undoubtedly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”
We’ve reached out to Wright for comment.
Coggins, founder of AboutWeblogs.com before joining b5 soon after the Toronto network’s creation, explained the split at her blog:
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Despite more than two dozen celebrity Twitter accounts being hijacked, the microblogging service says the takeovers were not connected to a rash of weekend phishing ploys.
“These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck,” Twitter explained on its blog.
Twitter said before it took the support tools offline, 33 people fell victim to attacks. The accounts of CNN Rick Sanchez, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and singer Britney Spears were among the more notable victims.
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No doubt, many will live blog their New Year’s Eve celebrations in the United States. Live blogging, started to make unreachable events more accessible, has become over-done and risks becoming like analog TV in 2009: off-the-air.
We’ve all read live-blogs of tech announcement open to just the press or natural tragedies happening a world away, but providing blow-by-blow accounts of readily accessible goings-on “is almost entirely pointless,” according to Canada’s National Post.
“Those who can’t fathom watching something on television without another person’s witty commentary should just invite a friend over,” writes Rebecca Tucker.
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