“Clicking Reply automatically approves a comment and displays an area for you to type a reply in,” says Greg on the WordPress.com blog. “When you’re done, just click Reply and you can get back to whatever you were working on, without having to navigate to the dashboard to manage your comments.”

If you use threaded comments, you’ll see when a person responds directly to you in the notification.

Comments can still be managed from the dashboard, of course.

This is just the newest in a series of recent improvements to the WordPress.com experience. A couple weeks ago, they launched a Chrome extension, giving users the ability to use WordPress.com from other sites.

Last month, they upped the storage limit.

Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo.

Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!

Interesting monetization strategy. A buck for a customizable sticker.

I’m not sure how much this will help items stand out. Tumblr already gives you options to create very visual posts, with images (including animated gifs) and videos.

I guess anything you can do to stand out will help. Tumblr is getting 15 billion pageviews a month these days, so you might as well do what you can, if it’s worth it to you.

Here are the options Tumblr gives you:

Users will get notifications anytime they get a new follower or like.

When you have the extension installed, it will display a follow button whenever you’re on a site with RSS feeds, so you can easily follow it from your WordPress.com account. This includes not only WordPress sites, but blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, etc.

There’s a “press this” button, which lets you quickly post content to your blog without having to actually go to it. This gives you a box that looks like this:

It will even let you post an excerpt of text with a link by highlighting what you want to post before you click the button. Like I said: handy.

With that in mind, it’s clear blogging still has a great deal of value, but what does your favorite blog say about you? What does it mean if your favorite blog is the Huffington Post or any of Rick Denton’s products? Thankfully, over at Slacktory (via Boing Boing), Nick Douglas tackles this pressing issue and the results are a lot more accurate than the blog fans would ever care to admit.

While I’m not going to reprint Douglas’ entire list, here are a few of the gems that stood out to me:

Gawker: You tell your friends jokes about their ethnicities and sexual orientations. They grin and say “Bitch!” and pretend to smack you.

Huffington Post: Most of your pleasures are guilty pleasures.

Daily Kos: You own a “Disappearing Civil Liberties” mug.

Kottke.org: You read all the liner notes, even if you bought the album as mp3s.

Perez Hilton: You were bullied in high school.

Consumerist: You have some sort of fact sheet, like the Bill of Rights or some measurement conversions, in your wallet.

ReadWriteWeb: You are the only person who actually called your representative about SOPA.

Douglas’ list continues on with about 15-20 more blogs being added to the fun, and like the subtitle suggests, I found the list to be incredibly accurate. Other blogs pointed out on the list include Deadspin, Think Progress, Neatorama, Serious Eats and Mashable. If you are one of the folks who frequent these or similar blogs, you should check out the Slacktory list. Just be sure to leave your “easily offended” pants at home.

Pretty impressive. In September, it was at 12.5 billion pageviews per month, according to Quantcast data. Back then, Pingdom put out some other stats: 434 posts per second, 26,000 posts per minute, 1.56 million posts per hour, 263 million posts per week, 1.1 billion posts per month, 13.7 billion posts per year.

It’s probably safe to assume that these have gone up as well.

Tumblr’s newly released numbers highlight the significance of some other stats the company shared on Friday, regarding SOPA protests:

The additional space can be used to store photos, documents, audio files etc.

Here’s how the plans are changing:

5GB → 10GB
15GB → 25GB
25GB → 50GB
50GB → 100GB
100GB → 200GB

Pricing per year is now:

$19.97 for +10GB
$49.97 for +25GB
$89.97 for +50GB
$159.97 for +100GB
$289 for +200GB

“If you already subscribed to one or more of these upgrades ( yes, they are cumulative ), your total available space has been automatically updated as you can see in your Media Library,” says Paolo Belcastro on the WordPress blog. “If you don’t have a Space Upgrade yet, or need to add more, the new levels have been implemented in the Store section of your dashboard.”

WordPress.com will store your files for as long as your blog exists, and will not limit bandwidth.

In addition to the extra storage, WordPress.com has taken off the limit (previously 35) for users allowed to access private blogs. You can now authorize as many people as you want.

I don’t know that a stock image bank reflects society’s opinions on bloggers and journalism, but I found the search results amusing, and thought it would be fun to share.

If you search “blog,” “blogging,” or “blogger” you get these results:

That’s it. Really. That’s literally every result that comes up.

For “journalist,” there are seven pages of photos. I’m not going to include them all, but here is a sampling:

So, what are the takeaways here?

Bloggers are basically teenage girls with computers. Journalists don’t use computers. They use typewriters, paper, or appear on TV.

I guess the line between blogger and journalist isn’t so gray after all.

“We’ve completely redesigned the look and feel of the app, now placing the actions you want to make with your blog all in one place: The Dashboard,” says WordPress mobile engineer Dan Roundhill. “You have one-tap access to create new posts and pages, upload media, view your stats, read blogs and more! There’s also now a beautiful comment count ribbon to show you how many comments you have in your moderation queue.”

“The Action Bar up top allows you to quickly get to other areas of the app as fast as possible,” he adds. “You can tap the blog name to switch blogs, refresh your content, and call up the dashboard from wherever you are in the app at the time.”

The post editor has a new formatting toolbar that displays above the keyboard while you type. The post editor goes ful screen, which should be nice. You can also now insert images anywhere among the post text. Tapping an image will bring up options to set title, caption, placement and size.

“We paid special attention to tablets for this release, adding special layouts just for Android Tablets,” says Roundhill. “From Galaxy Tab to Xoom, we’ve got you covered.”

Here’s a video showing off the new app:

It can be downloaded from the Android Market.

Essentially, Boards just lets you post whatever content you want on your profile. Of course, others can already follow you. As far as I can tell, it pretty much just makes Quora more social network (if it wasn’t already a social network).

With Boards, users can write new posts, repost questions, answers, topics, etc. that already exist on Quora, and post links to anything on the web.

“In this way, a board works like a lighter-weight version of a blog,” says Quora CEO and co-founder Adam D’Angelo. “But you can use them for organization, to make lists of things, as mailing lists, or anything else you want. You can add multiple authors to a board to make it collaborative. We support private boards as well.”

“As a contributor, boards give you a context so you can focus your posts for the specific people who are interested in them,” he adds. “As a reader, boards let you control what you see in your feed with more granularity. You can follow boards in addition or instead of following people, letting you focus in on just what someone thinks about a specific subject, their profession, or one of their hobbies.”

When a user follows a board, they get everything posted to that board in their feed. When a user createws a board, they can add any of their own followers to follow that board. Anytime you write an answer on Quora, you have the option to post it to a board.

One of the main attractions to Quora has always been the people who use it. It has been embraced by numerous executives and product managers in the tech industry, who often share interesting bits of information or pieces of advice that are harder to come by from other sources.

1. The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.
3. The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.
4. Newspapers and magazines.
5. An academic course training students in journalism.
6. Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal.

How do you define journalism? Let us know.

To me, the most prominent section of this definition is part 3, which essentially points to the objectivity aspect of journalism. However, when you think about this, how many mainstream journalists or media outlets does this aspect describe? And, if this is the definition, should it be enforced? Should journalists set themselves at a higher standard than they currently are?

On the other hand, is this definition even accurate today? Or, has it evolved with the advent of blogging?

These are just a few of the questions that are being raised after Crystal Cox, who calls herself an investigative blogger, was charged with defamation and ordered to pay $2.5 million after an Oregon court recently ruled that she was not protected under the state’s media shield law. As WebProNews covered here and here, Cox was sued by Obsidian Finance Group earlier this year after she accused the firm’s co-founder, Kevin Padrick, of fraud, dishonesty with shareholders, and abuse of his position as the company’s chapter 11 trustee.

Cox, who defended herself in court, said that, because her content was based on information from an inside source, she was protected through the media shield law. The court, however, said that she was not associated with an established media outlet and was therefore, not a journalist.

In the above interview, Cox told us that she does consider herself to be a journalist, saying: “I have taken depositions, I’ve interviewed people, I have over 400 sites, I’ve researched this case, I’ve watched insider meetings… I’m not just any blogger on it.”

“I don’t have one blog… this is what I do all day, everyday, [and] have for years,” she added.

Cox told us that she does not, however, consider all bloggers to be journalists. In addition, she does not think that the perception people have about journalism is correct and said that it wasn’t about getting both sides of the story.

“I think it’s about digging in documents, reading depositions, reading court cases, watching videos – really doing deep investigation,” Cox said. “Real journalists should actually investigate and be willing to read it and be passionate about the story.”

As far as her next steps are concerned, Cox told us that she is still uncertain. She has been in talks with First Amendment experts and other groups to weigh out all her options. She is trying to decide if appealing the court ruling or stepping down will do the most toward encouraging equal rights for bloggers and journalists. If she does appeal, Cox said she would not represent herself.

Ideally, she would like to see her story result in a federal shield law and “for all bloggers to have rights as journalists, if they do what journalists do.”

Is Crystal Cox a blogger or journalist? You decide.