WordPress announced the launch of a new WordPress.com Chrome extension which gives you access to a number of WordPress.com features and notifications while you’re away from WordPress.com. This should prove to be pretty handy for a lot of bloggers. Users …

The whole “what makes a journalist a journalist”/”are bloggers journalists?” discussion is one that won’t go away, and we’ve certainly weighed in on it a number of times. While preparing a recent piece on the subject, I was perusing our …

A blogger in Syria, Razan Ghazzawi, was arrested on Sunday evening while attempting to cross the country’s border with Jordan in order to attend a media conference. Since the arrest, no news of her location or condition has been released …

During the State of the Blogosphere presentation at the 2011 BlogWorld Expo, Technorati CEO Shani Higgins discussed the sometimes tenuous relationship between professional bloggers and the brands they sometimes write about. While a great deal of bloggers do write about …

It’s no secret that there is an obvious disconnect between bloggers/journalists and PR professionals. Being in the media industry, we, here at WebProNews, have seen our share of bad pitches, as I’m sure many others can relate. However, I’m also sure that PR professionals detest when their requests go unanswered or when they get shot down.

AOL has been a fascinating company to watch over the last several months as it moves further and further away from its legacy as a dial-up ISP to a content machine. There have been internal tiffs, mass layoffs and general …

SocialDitto is a new tool designed to let content producers, such as journalists and bloggers, embed Facebook posts/status updates into their content. You can think about it like the Twitter BlackBird Pie tool, which lets you embed tweets. 

Here at BlogWorld, Demand Media launched the Demand Media Blog Network, to syndicate bloggers’ content across Demand’s own properties like eHow and Livestrong.com, as well as the company’s Content Channels partner sites.

Google’s Blogger has released new share buttons for users, which can be placed under posts to encourage the sharing of content. The buttons let users share via email and popular social networks.

Should mainstream media be held to different standards than bloggers when it comes to crediting sources? Mainstream media agencies have frequently turned their noses up at bloggers, essentially claiming that they steal and repurpose the work of their hard working journalists. While this may be true in some cases, it is hardly fair to say that this is true in general. In fact, this week, we’ve seen a clear example of the hypocrisy of this notion, because mainstream media publications are clearly just as guilty as blogs when it comes to improper crediting of sources.

Lots of bloggers and online reporters have experienced this at one time or another. We’ve certainly had it happen to us here at WebProNews more than a few times. You break a story, then it’s all over the web, but you don’t get the credit.

Back in January, the New York Times announced that it would be gravitating to a metered paywall system at the beginning of 2011. This would let readers access an as-of-yet unspecified number of articles for free each month, until requiring payment for further access. Meanwhile, print subscribers would have full access to content online.

Update: Twitter has made an update to tha post saying, "No, really. It’s very simple. Just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets like the one we used here."

Those new to blogging or article writing have often been told to focus on one very niche topic. One narrow vertical. That has commonly been considered the way to gain credibility, readers, links, and ultimately traffic, which assuming the blog/site itself isn’t your primary source of income, could lead to sales of your products/services. But is keeping it narrow really the best way to go?

Update 3: The new FTC Guidelines went into effect this week. A recent WebProNews interview with Wendy Piersall, Founder of the Woo! Jr. Network, looks at some interesting points about them that you may not have considered – some "gray areas" if you will.

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.

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) has launched the Online Media Legal Network (OLMLN) that will offer free legal advice to online journalists and bloggers.

WordPress has launched a couple of new mobile themes for bloggers who use WordPress.com. The themes are designed to display automatically when the blogger’s blog is accessed with a compatible mobile device.

Making moves to get blogs to display properly on mobile devices is a good move considering recent research, which found that consumers are generally not pleased with the way mobile web sites display.

Today Six Apart, the makers of TypePad, released a new TypePad PubSubHubub hub, which automatically promotes blog updates in real time. It’s a free feature for bloggers who use TypePad, and it automatically updates Google Reader, FriendFeed, SuperFeedr, and LiveDoor.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Google announced that it would be releasing a new operating system called Google Chrome OS this week. One mysterious blog entry popped up soon after, claiming to have snagged some screenshots of the OS as Google demoed the product to Acer.

Here’s an excerpt from that post:

The power of mommy bloggers continues to gain momentum. At least that’s what recent research from Nielsen Online appears to show.

According to Nielsen, the number of “Power Moms” online is rising (pdf).   Identified as those women aged between 25 and 54 with at least one child and who regularly participate in online activities, this segment now accounts for almost 20% of the active online population.