Celebrities using social media to communicate with fans has become so commonplace it’s no longer newsworthy when a big celeb jumps on the bandwagon –- except when they do so from prison.Lil Wayne is no stranger to social media –-…

I make my living writing, but I should get paid for talking. I do a lot of it. One freelance friend and I commiserate regularly (yes, that’s the right word) on the ills that befall the profession. We also chat…

Earlier this week, the FTC’s new blogger disclosure rules went into effect, meaning that whenever one of us receives anything that could potentially be looked upon as a conflict of interest, it needs to be disclosed in our writing.While I…

Location is quickly becoming all the rage. Twitter has started to attach location to tweets (and a host of applications are expected to soon support the functionality), Foursquare has quickly expanded to new cities, and Loopt continues to expand to…

Bloggers now have up to 11,000 reasons to disclose when they are being paid to review products.The FTC has updated its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising for the first time since 1980, and among the…

LiveJournal has never struck me as the blogging platform that users go to for serious commercial blogging.Nonetheless, the site, which was launched all the way back in 1999 and has been through multiple owners in recent years, is now allowing…

Users of WordPress hosted blogs (WordPress.com) received a new spell checking tool today, by way of parent company Automattic’s acquisition of After the Deadline, a tool that is “so much better than other checkers I’d used,” says Automattic founder Matt…

Google Blog Search has just added a few features that users of other Google services are likely familiar with.First, you can now subscribe to any topic via RSS or Atom, like you already can do in Google News. This means…

If you’ve noticed a big bump in your blog’s RSS subscription count recently, there’s a good chance that FriendFeed is responsible. The social aggregator explains that it has “started sharing FriendFeed subscriber counts when we crawl for the latest version…

WordPress has just released the newest version of their installable blog software: WordPress 2.8 – Baker.The most notable addition would seem to be the ability to browse themes from within the WordPress Dashboard. With the Theme Browser, you can specify…

Gilbert Arenas, one of the NBA’s most enigmatic personalities and until recently, one of its most prolific bloggers, is “retiring” from the medium. Arenas’ blog had been a hit with fans, as he often used it to talk trash about…