Pope Benedict XVI has been the Holy See for almost five years, and during that time, he (and the Catholic church along with him) has become more and more involved in social media. Last year, he launched a YouTube channel, social media outreach initiative, and apps for Facebook and the iPhone.

Thomas Edison famously remarked that genius was "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." For bloggers this means that if you put your effort into it, you can create a blog that gathers a following. If you look at a group of bloggers, one with a worldwide following and the rest with small audiences, the former will not necessarily be the best writer, the funniest, the smartest or even the one with the most inside info or useful tips. The great bloggers you follow yourself could have varying amounts of these characteristics.

According to Technorati’s 2009 State of the Blogosphere report, 70% of bloggers talk about products or brands on their blogs, eMarketer reports. And obviously some of these mentions would be prompted by free sample products, etc.—a practice popular enough to draw the notice of the FTC, which now requires disclosure on such review products.

The term has become so common that most people don’t know that “blog” is a condensed version of “weblog.” It is not a new form of communication, by any means. People have been blogging since man began painting on cave walls, really; it’s just that the tools have changed and the definitions of writing styles have evolved a bit (but just a bit). When the Internet was still without its graphic interface, the World Wide Web, there were the bulletin boards and file-sharing services that allowed the distribution of text files.

I know it may appear I go looking for trouble, but I promise you I just like to share with you my concerns. In the case of Twitter’s update to its Terms of Service, I started thinking about what the changes could mean to us users.

Twitter, media sweetheart and microblogging service extraordinaire, has another coup to add to its list: they’ve now beat out MySpace in terms of most visits in the UK.

Let’s say you own the most popular microblogging service on the Internet. Let’s say you want to grow that service and make it more valuable to your users (and maybe make money. You wouldn’t complain.). So you’re going to feature third party apps, but you want to feature the best ones.

If you’re a blogger with WordPress.com, you’ll be happy to learn that you now have the capability to shorten your URL’s within Wordpress.com with the new WP.me service. You can see an example of a WP.me link below.

Original
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/shorten/

Shortend Version
http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten

This past Friday we told you about the new Twitter homepage that was just days away. Well,  now @Biz has updated the Twitter blog informing us that the new design has been launched.

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username, a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to:

"Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it."

Posts for pay, reviews for cash or whatever you want to call them are a part of the blogosphere and have been for quite some time. The amount of attention that it gets is often directly related to the amount of other news that is happening in the space at the time.

How long has it been since we’ve heard about Technorati? When did you last visit the erstwhile-preeminent blog tracking site? And even then, didn’t you get the sense they were going downhill? While that may just be what happens to every media (or blog) sweetheart, Technorati has seen a decline. Many have attributed this to a lack of features, innovation, relevancy of results, etc. 

In the wake of the run-in with St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa last week Twitter has officially launched its verified accounts beta. The service was mentioned over the weekend in Biz Stone’s blog post that made it known that Twitter would bow to no one on legal concerns that they viewed as frivolous.

I know what you’ve been thinking: man, I’m tired of reading unfounded rumors reported as news. Yeah, me too. Really, I am. So let’s fix this. Let’s stop reading blogs—I mean, you know all they do is just post anything that comes into their heads, foundation or not—and stick to the venerable guardians of all truth, the mainstream media.

Are you one of those people who have a Twitter account, but doesn’t use it? If so, you’re not alone. Fresh statistics from the prestigious Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter account holders hardly every Tweet, retweet, follow, or are followed.