As more tech oriented blogs look to expand their revenue base in light of weakening advertising dollars some are experimenting with specialized services for a subscription fee. GigaOM was among the first to go this route with their GigaOM Pro service which provided members with specialized market research papers.

Today Ars Technica is following in those footsteps with their just announced Ars Premier subscription service. For the $50.00 per year you will have access to

• subscriber specific content which will include news, analysis, interviews and in-depth technical articles.
• moderated live discussions with Ars editors and industry players
• full access to the Ars Technica PDF library
• membership in the Ars Editorial Roundtable where you will be able to discuss, refine and propose ideas for the editorial and community aspects of the site.
• special forum features including subscriber only titles
• banner free browsing of the Ars Technica site
• subscriber only access to full text RSS feeds
• promos, specials events and discounts.

As with GigaOM it will be interesting to see how this develops and if more tech related blogs will try and follow suit.

Ars Technica goes Premier is a post from: The Inquisitr

I could have just written this post up about yet another absolutely stupid use of technology and left it at that but this is one of those rare occasions when where you find the story can be just as interesting as the item that lead you there. In this case if was a post on the Crave Blog about a Hello Kitty Taser Gun that they had found on a blog called Hello Kitty Hell.

Yes folks a blog dedicated to everything that even remotely is associated with the Hello Kitty brand. However this isn’t exactly what you would consider to be a Hello Kitty fan site by any stretch of the imagination. In fact if you read the About for the blog you’ll see this is far from the case.

Feel free to contact me at hellokittyhell @ kittyhell.com unless you are going to ask where you can find some Hello Kitty item on this site — in that case, don’t bother because it ain’t going to happen.

And if you are even thinking about whining about it, read my special message to Hello Kitty whiners.

The special message to the Hello Kitty whiners is worth visiting the site to read let alone peruse the myriad items posted that have to do with Hello Kitty. Here’s a small sampling of some of the pictures that go with his most current posts on the blog.

Hello Kitty Beer

Hello Kitty Condom Keeper

Hello Kitty Bar

I do have to say though that I really liked the header graphic for his site as it explains it all so well

Get tased by Hello Kitty and visit one man’s pink hell is a post from: The Inquisitr

When one things of the Recording Industry Association of America, otherwise known among other names as the RIAA, is well known for questionable legal actions and suing old women and single mothers. The last thing that most of us would think when it comes  to the organization is that they would take up blogging.

Well they have and you can find their blog called Music Notes here.

This appears to be a fairly new blog as there are only eight posts but you can already see that this is just going to be another avenue for them to spin their crap. Here’s samples of the content that you will expect to find on the blog.

Here We Are

Jammie Thomas-Rasset Part Deux, Day 1. An encouraging first day. After a morning of jury selection, the jury was seated by lunch (five men, seven women) and opening arguments kicked off the afternoon. We’re very pleased with the jury. My favorite highlight of the day was the juror who, during jury selection process, noted that he used LimeWire once to get music illegally – but stopped immediately because he “didn’t want to get caught and be here.” How’s THAT for deterrence value of our lawsuit program?? Doesn’t get much better than that folks…

Posted: June 15, 2009

1700 songs later: The Thomas-Rasset II Verdict

By now everyone knows what the verdict was. It’s fair to say that the damages were unexpected given the size of the award in the previous trial. But when it comes down to it, the jury heard a case about Ms. Thomas-Rasset distributing more than 1700 songs to potentially millions of people – not merely downloading 24 songs. We will settle this case if she allows it. We’ve always wanted to settle this case. But she has consistently refused, which has led us to today’s verdict.

Posted: June 18, 2009

Sample Sizes (and Minnesota Juries)

Last week we got a chance to listen to one of these groups outside the usual circumstances.  It wasn’t a research project, and it wasn’t by sitting behind a two-way mirror.  This group of 12 industry outsiders likely hadn’t engaged in debates about long-tail sales theories, the effectiveness of DRM schemes, or consumption patterns of digital media when marginal costs approach zero.  Which isn’t to say they were disengaged – most of them had mp3 players, and at least some knew what peer-to-peer software was.  But overall, they were probably a good cross section of ‘real world’ music listeners.

Posted: June 23, 2009

Anyone surprised?

Surprise, the RIAA has a blog and yes it’s boring and biased is a post from: The Inquisitr

There are an estimated 54 million Americans alone that are considered to be physically or mentally disabled. In other words 19 percent of the American population who have a hard time wandering the byways of the Internet and technology.

AbledBody is a new consumer tech focused site geared towards this segment and officially launched Thursday. The site covers not just hardware and software of interested to the disabled community but also carries information on how the disabled can modify general gear to make it more accessible to them. As well it will cover news of trends and gadgets that can help the disabled at work and at home. The site will also post sourced news, personal commentary and contributors’ expert opinions.

Editor in chief Suzanne Robitaille–who lost her hearing at age 4 due to meningitis and now has a cochlear implant–has covered disability topics for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of a forthcoming book, "The Illustrated Guide to Assistive Technology." Other stories currently appearing on AbledBody cover a new touch technique that lets blind consumers use smartphones; Bookshare rebuilding its talking books library; and a new Apple iPhone app that manages diabetes.

The site isn’t just about informing the disabled about their options, but also about the growing disability market. Many companies make their money on health care products, and disabilities are a big part of that. AbledBody tracks the innovations from both sides, which is interesting.

Source: Crave Blog – CNET News

This is a great addition to the tech blogosphere and one we all should make sure to pass around as we all probably have some-one close to us who suffers from one type of disability or another.

The Able Bodied get a voice in the blogosphere is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to Kanye the paparazzi are delivering him a world of darkness, apparently his photos are only worth $1,000 each.

REGARDLESS OF HOW MUCH LIGHT I PUT OUT, THERE ARE PEOPLE WORKING JUST AS HARD TO ONLY DELIVER DARKNESS. IF YOU LISTEN TO MY MUSIC, HOW COULD I DELIVER SO MANY POSITIVE UPLIFTING MESSAGES AND BE THE MONSTER THAT THE MEDIA PAINTS. PAPARAZZI GIVE REAL PHOTOGRAPHERS A BAD NAME.  A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS, THEIRS ARE WORTH A THOUSAND DOLLARS…

According to Kanye the paps killed Kenny Princess Diana and his recent arrest was just a publicity stunt.

I AM PROTECTING MY PERSONAL SPACE SINCE THERE ARE NO LAWS TO PROTECT THAT FOR ME.

I PUT MY HAND UP TO THE CAMERA IN SELF DEFENSE!

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED…WHEN I LEFT THE CLUB, I WAS ENCOUNTERED BY A THIRSTY PAPARAZZI AS USUAL. HE FELT HE HAD MORE RIGHTS TO MY SPACE THAN ME, SO I PUT MY HAND UP TO PREVENT HIM FROM TAKING MY IMAGE. I DIDN’T ASSAULT HIM BUT MERELY PUTTING MY HAND UP TO COVER HIS LENS. MY SECURITY YELLED, “GET THE CAMERA OFF HIM.” I GUESS IN ALL THE COMMOTION THE CAMERA SCRAPED HIS NOSE.

THREE HOURS LATER I GET A KNOCK AT MY HOTEL DOOR. THERE WERE FIVE POLICE OFFICERS IN FRONT OF MY ROOM AND I HAD NO IDEA WHY. I HAD MY SECURITY GO SPEAK WITH THEM. THE COPS WERE VERY CORDIAL BUT TOLD ME THEY HAD TO ARREST ME BECAUSE A COMPLAINT WAS FILED. THAT WAS THE BOGUS PART. THEY PLACED ME IN HANDCUFFS AND DROVE ME TO THE STATION. THEY SPOKE ABOUT HOW THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY A PUBLICITY STUNT BY THE PHOTOGRAPHER BUT THEY STILL HAD TO GO THOUGH THE MOTIONS. WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE HOTEL THERE WERE PAPARAZZI HANGING OVER THE BRIDGE ABOVE THE HOTEL TRYING TO GET A SHOT OF ME GETTING OUT THE POLICE VAN. EVEN THOUGH I WASN’T CHARGED, THE DAMAGE WAS DONE. SURE ENOUGH THE NEXT MORNING, PLASTERED ACROSS EVERY MEDIA OUTLET… KANYE GETS ARRESTED. IT DIDN’T MATTER THAT I WASN’T CHARGED OR THE FACT THAT I HADN’T ASSAULTED ANYONE. ALL THAT MATTERED WAS THAT I WAS ARRESTED.

SIDEBAR, THEY QUOTED ME AS SAYING…”GET THE CAMERA OFF HIM!” LIKE I WAS TALKING IN THIRD PERSON. HE TRIED TO MAKE ME SOUND LIKE A CRAZY PERSON AND PEOPLE BELIEVED HIM. WHAT MERIT DOES THIS GUY HAVE THAT HE CAN SAY SOMETHING ABOUT ME AND PEOPLE TAKE IT AS LAW? THE FACT THAT HE COULD GET ME ARRESTED OFF A MERE COMPLAINT BUT I CAN’T ASK HIM TO STOP TAKING PICTURES OF ME IS VERY LOPSIDED.

WHO’S WINNING, ME OR THE MEDIA?

I’ll have a go at answering that Kanye. Its the media, you are famous, when you want to sell albums you suck up to the media in order to flog your wares.  You trade on your image and the publicity in order to make money.  We say suck it up.

Kanye West whines about the paps on his blog is a post from: The Inquisitr

Officially announced this morning, the site’s front page now features a post talking about celebrity birthdays and other noteworthy occasions on 9/29. Perusing the site further will uncover everything from food and nightlife-related news to holiday-specific content and even travel talk. Oddly, for a site with “local slant,” the site doesn’t let you enter your own city to find local information relevant to you (at least, not in any easily located way); rather, it presents a mish-mosh of stories that may or may not relate to random cities here and there. The goal, seemingly, is to have those stories appeal to audiences both inside and outside of the featured geographic regions.

Interestingly, the name Digital City comes from an old and no longer used AOL brand name. Maybe the new incarnation will eventually find its crowd, but my initial reaction is similar to The Social’s: The site seems a bit unfocused and all over the place as far as content and approach.

AOL, by the way, isn’t the only familiar name launching a new network this week. Former staffers from Weblogs Inc started a network called Crowd Fusion recently as well, with the first site — a gadget blog named Obsessable — trying to take a different angle from its competition. Read Duncan Riley’s take on the project here.

AOL Launches New “Globally Local” Blog Network is a post from: The Inquisitr

Magnify’s new player offers a pre-roll adserver integration option, letting you insert your own pre-roll ads before your content if you so choose. It can be linked with DoubleClick’s DART service for tracking purposes or can be used with Magnify as a pre-roll ad server. (In that instance, Magnify splits revenue 50-50 with you.)

The MVP, as it’s being branded, can be downloaded and installed with some options, such as color and size customization, for free. To get customizable logos and skins, though, you do have to pay for an advanced package.

So far, Magnify claims more than 42,000 video channels hosted on its servers. The company has been around since 2006 and is headquartered in New York.

Magnify Releases New 2.0 Video Solution is a post from: The Inquisitr

German-based FeedsR.Us lets you create an automatically-generated graphical signature that shows the last four headlines from an RSS-enabled site. Here’s one I just threw together for The Inquisitr:

The setup is incredibly simple. You enter in the URL of the feed you want. You select a few options as far as design, including the ability to upload your own custom background image to match your blog’s look and feel, as I did above. Then, you just click one button, and the site gives you HTML code to display the GIF image with a link to your site. You could use it in e-mails, forum posts, social network posts — most anywhere that’ll take a basic HTML image tag. There’s no embedding required, as FeedsR.Us actually just updates the image itself on its server whenever it refreshes the feed.

The default configuration only updates the feed a couple of times per day, which is why the sample I posted above may not be up-to-date with the latest headlines here. You do have the option, however, to create a free account with FeedsR.Us and set up a ping service, which would cause the image to update dynamically every time a new entry is posted. This would only work, of course, with your own blog, as you’d have to add a line of code into the WordPress “Services” list to have the pings be sent.

FeedsR.Us is still in beta, so there are some kinks in it. For example, you have to type in the “http://” front of any feed URL or you’ll get an error — something the instructions don’t indicate and I figured out by trial-and-error. It also seems to have trouble interpreting some feeds. A FriendFeed RSS URL, for example, won’t go through. Most straight-forward blog sites seem to work, though. Another oddity is that while the site is mainly in English, there are random bits of text here and there in German — which is a bit confusing from a user perspective. It might make more sense to have a fully English site and a fully German site, if the developers are trying to target both markets.

The startup comes from Diemedien Fabrik, a firm that appears to all sorts of multimedia marketing (from what I can gather via this Web site translation). It launched just within the past few weeks.

An Easy Way To Add RSS Into Your Signature is a post from: The Inquisitr

The feature will look familiar. Anyone with a Google account, it seems, can opt to follow a blog. Then the site owner can add a widget with all the followers’ mugshots to the front page.

Where Google gains an advantage, though, is with its integration into other properties: Any blogs you, as a reader, opt to follow will appear in a special folder in your Google Reader — and you can also click on any blogs already in your Reader and subscribe to them as a follower from right there. Google is also working on building a tie-in with FriendConnect, its social tool introduced this past May, so Blogger sites can use it to add another set of social features to their blogs as well.

So will the add-ons drive the masses over to Blogger for hosting? Of course not. But for sites already hosted there, it’ll add a new layer of interaction and some extra room for social growth. For the casual blogger content hosting his or her site with Google, at least, it’ll be an interesting option to gain.

Will “Following” Give Blogger a Boost? is a post from: The Inquisitr

A scan through the service’s available categories shows you the wide variety of content available. Almost any news/blog genre you can imagine is included somewhere. Within the technology tab, you’ll find everything from Apple news to gadget reviews, Internet blogs, social media discussions, and startup spotlights.

Most categories seem to have a fairly decent mix of material. Right now, for example, the “social media” tab leads off with Mashable’s morning story about the food service rumors within Google. Click onto the “top bloggers” tab and you’ll find audio of some recent Scoble posts at the top of the page.

The two downsides to the system are both time-related. First, turnaround time: Many of the top entries are several hours old and more recent postings have yet to appear. Still, the content that is present is easy to access and generally tolerable enough for listening. A male computer voice acts as the narrator and seems to be pretty accurate as far as pronunciations. Second, loading time: The service is a bit on the pokey side and a little slow to load, at least during the times at which we’ve accessed it.

The Inquisitr, incidentally, is not yet featured on Pimp My News. We’ve officially requested it, though — and the service makes it clear that it’s happy to make additions for anyone missing their favorite sites in the mix…so stay tuned. (Update: The Inquisitr is now featured.)

Pimp My News is free to use and ad-supported. The only real limitation is in building a personalized podcast or playlist: You are limited to 10 sources and a 10 minute daily program. In general use of the site, though — whether through the Web interface or the iPhone-optimized mobile interface — you are unrestricted in your activity.

Pimp My News: Turning Blogs into Mobile Audio is a post from: The Inquisitr

Should bloggers cover companies they invest in?

The majority of bloggers like myself don’t make enough money to contemplate investing in many companies, but for those who do, the conflict of interest has to be evaluated. While it seems obvious that no one would ever invest in a company they didn’t like or believe would succeed, what about continuing coverage? If a company starts failing, can an investor really cover that objectively? Can an investor really take the same hard look at a company as someone who has nothing to gain whether a company succeeds or fails?

Should bloggers continue blogging once they join boards, take day-job positions with a company, or start/buy a company?

Any type of employment can be just as much a conflict as investing. Board positions and ownership even more so. How can a blogger cover any other company competing in the same space as the company he or she is employed by/directs/advises/runs? What about fellow authors in multi-author blogs? Human nature would assume that friends would want to protect each other’s interests; enemies destroy them. Can one blogger’s interests impact an entire blog?

Should bloggers make friends with people from the companies they cover?

Friendship is probably the toughest conflict of interest. While it doesn’t involve money, it’s a lot harder to cover something objectively knowing that your friend’s feelings or bank account could be harmed based on something you write. Is it possible to work around it? To separate business from friendship? Can you go out to dinner with someone one day and report a problem with the company the next?

Bloggers are always quick to point out ethical transgressions of others, but the fact is that many times, we have issues of our own. Everything from accepting swag to offering advice to investing in a company you’ve covered have ramifications. And perhaps we should look out of our navels into a mirror before we accuse others of conflicts of interest.

Out of the Navels and Into the Mirrors is a post from: The Inquisitr

Zemanta is a Slovenian blogging tool that automatically suggests contextual photos and links for any post.

Webware describes Zemanta as “a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers” and it’s a fair description. The tool is offered either as a plugin for hosted blogs (WordPress and MovableType), as a browser extension (IE and Firefox) or with hosted platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal.

Image by Roebot via Flickr.

The video above walks through what it looks like on a Blogger blog, on a WordPress hosted blog I’m currently seeing a Zemanta box directly below the publish options on the right hand side. The plugin updates every 300 characters automatically, offering a gallery of context and legal pictures I can use on the this post. Below is a list of contextual articles I can place in the post at any time. Below the WordPress post box is a box labeled “links” with suggestions for links that can be inserted into the post base on words in it, for example with this post it’s showing Firefox, LiveJournal, WordPress, Zemanta and others. The tag box also gets contextual suggestions as well.

I’ve only just installed it, and have really got to give it a more serious workout, but my first thoughts: this is a really useful tool and I can see myself using it and even recommending it to others. Not having to dig around for pics (well at least less often), less stuffing around with link insertion, tag reminders, even related articles. My only two negatives: what are they getting out of this (where’s the catch) and secondly, it insists on inserting a Zemanta button at the bottom of every post every time you hit a button, so if you’re half way through you’ve then got to deal with code stuck directly after your last word. It’s easy to delete it prior to posting and ultimately it’s only a small annoyance.

Example of a contextual link below, the Zemanta button that the tool auto inserted, and the laptop picture above from their gallery suggestions.

One Word For Zemanta: Useful is a post from: The Inquisitr