Okay. Here’s a really simple question for everyone.

When you look at the image above do they even come close to looking like the same site?

Like would you mistake Facebook for being ReadWriteWeb, or how about the other way around.

No, I didn’t think so but apparently there are a whole bunch of people out there who can’t tell the difference. According to a post by ReadWriteWeb writer Frederic Lardinios over on his personal blog a recent RWW post title Facebook Wants To Be Your One True Login brought in an unexpected number of readers.

The problem is that the readers where looking for their Facebook login page and as such the stupidity ensued. From Frederic’s personal blog:

We saw an interesting phenomenon on ReadWriteWeb today. My colleague Mike Melanson wrote a post about Facebook Connect, which now shows up as the #1 search results on Google News and also as a new result on Google’s main search engine.

That – by itself – wouldn’t be something out of the ordinary, but here is what happened: suddenly we got an influx of tens of thousands of confused Facebook users who thought that ReadWriteWeb was Facebook. These people actually thought that somebody had either bought or redesigned their precious Facebook and now Facebook got so hard to use that they couldn’t get to Farmville. There are now over 200 comments from confused Facebook users on this post.

Here are a few sample comments that Frederic included with his post

• This is such a mess I can’t do a thing on my facebook .The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can’t even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!
• Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this. I recently moved from MN to SC Myrtle Beach and facebook was a great way to keep in touch with family and friends but this is getting to be to difficult.
• I don’t like the new facebook. Why fix something that isn’t broken. this really sucks..
• I LOVE FACE BOOK CONNECTED W/PEOPLE I WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL W/ESPECIALY ONE CLOSE FRIEND.KNOW LET ME LOG IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• WHAT THE HELL IS GOIN ON WITH THIS FACEBOOK.. FIRST YOU WANNA CHARGE NA YOU WANNA NOT LET US LOG IN….. UGH STOP CHANGIN IT I LIKE THE OLD FB…. IF YOU ARE THE NEW OWNER YOU SUCK AND I WISH YOU WOULD CREATE UR OWN SHTY AND LEAVE FB ALONE LOSER………
• I hate all this changing. Just looking for a way to log in.This is very frustrating!! This is ridiculous. Are you looking for people to get disgusted and use another site

Now Jodie O’Dell followed all this up with one of ReadWriteWeb’s Open Thread type posts that basically suggested that maybe we aren’t making the web easy enough for people.

That’s a nice warm and fuzzy type thought Jodie and kudos to you for being egalitarian about this but the simple fact is that anyone who thought for even a moment that RWW was the new look of Facebook is a flaming idiot.

Seriously.

An idiot.

There is no other explanation.

The scary lesson here is that all these idiots were looking for their Facebook login page, which means they are your neighbors on the service.

Now that is scary.

There are some seriously stupid people on the web is a post from: The Inquisitr

The new white look in blog designs jettisons content borders in favor of no borders at all. Content, advertising and background share the same uninterrupted white, or with some limited background changes/ lines. Visually the designs offer a clean look that reduces visual clutter and presumably helps speed load times by reducing the number of CSS elements required for each page.

Here’s some recent examples of tech blogs embracing white.

GigaOm

In GigaOm’s current template, all lines are removed between background, content and advertising. The header in maintained as a block, a common element in this type of design.

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb goes for a full width block header, and a thin line between content and advertising, but blends the rest.

Mashable

Mashable is an interesting mix. The current template embraces horizontal lines, but ignores vertical lines. The sidebar ad elements get gray individual boxes.

VentureBeat

VentureBeat has taken minimalism differently to the others, embracing it with their header as well as the rest of the site. The sidebar gets a background, but there are no other dividers.

Is white right for your site?

Just because white is in at the moment doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s right for your site. There are advantages, including the potential of increased CTR if you’re not dividing your ads and content. The theory there goes that by not providing a visual barrier to ads, visitors are more likely to see them, therefore click on them.

The problem though with white is that if you do have a lot of sidebar items up that aren’t great to look at, white may actually highlight their nature more than a traditional side.

Also white can appear to be stark visually and may be a turn off. For example VentureBeat has combined white with a gray text color, so the white appears very, very white. It actually hurts my eyes, but that might be a thing with me only. Always keep in mind that you need to maximize readability on your site.

Conclusion

There are many more sites not mentioned embracing white at the moment, so there’s no doubt that it’s a trend that is well and truly in place. It’s this years take on Web 2.0, and it will probably spread a lot further until the next design trend is embraced.

White is the new black in blog design is a post from: The Inquisitr

As we end 2008, the year ahead offers the biggest challenge ever in the history of blogging.

Although blogging dates back to the beginning of the first dot com boom, it truly came of age as the second bubble grew. From the rise of the political bloggers in 2004, blogging became mainstream, and with that came money and commercialism.

Blogging is more than its commercial endeavors, and as a non-commercial platform for networking, global communication and sharing blogging has many great days ahead of it, and may actually boom in 2009 after a dip in popularity over 2007 and 2008 as social networks became a first choice of communications and networking outlet for many.

But the commercial side of blogging is facing a difficult year. The same issues that face the broader Tech and Web 2.0 spheres face blogging: a dearth of VC, declining ad revenues, and even tougher competition as many try to compensate for lower ad revenues by driving even more traffic.

The dangers for commercial blog owners come on a number of fronts, but there’s one trend we’ve already seen begin.

The rise of the Uber Blog

Some may moan at the use of the word uber, so feel free to substitute it with big or large, because the meaning remains the same. An Uber Blog is a blog that combines different content streams into one large blog, with one primary top level url. The Huffington Post is an example I’ve used before. The blending of content can be in related fields, or non related fields; for example, you might blend specialties in tech into the one tech blog.

It has already begun

In a post asking whether the blog network model is dying, I made similar observations on a number of companies, some I’ll repeat here

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb has gone from a traditional blog network in to the uber blog model. Owner Richard McManus gave away or sold the two blogs in the network, at the same time he was launching new blogs under the ReadWriteWeb brand. The reason given by Richard: a focus on the core brand.

Silicon Alley Insider

Henry Blodget merged the two blogs outside of Silicon Alley Insider into sub-urls on alleyinsider.com. While each blog maintains their own name and heading, they are now all parts of alleyinsider itself as opposed to standalone blogs.

Gawker Media

In between selling blogs, Nick Denton merged Valleywag into Gawker on a sub-url. Valleywag keeps its header and name, but is now a column of Gawker.

b5media

b5media hasn’t yet started blending blogs into larger blogs, but has instead undertaken a variation of the theme: branded portals. Content from b5media’s business and celebrity channels fall under the banner of a larger site, which also acts as a gateway to the content.

Why one large blog?

The reasoning behind the move is remarkably simple: it’s easy to sell ads on one blog vs many blogs, for a couple of reasons. The biggest is simply traffic: having one big blog means increased traffic to the core blog making the sales pitch more appealing. Second, advertisers will often want to target the one blog and not buy the subsidiary blogs; maybe not always, but none the less common in my experience. If you have one big blog with various streams you’ve got better odds of getting high value advertising against all the content.

Expanding outside the niche

Having sub blogs within a large blog, or amalgamating smaller blogs gives commercial blog operators the ability to broaden their content range outside of a specific niche, often with the advantage of not necessarily polluting the core product. The content for example on Silicon Alley Insider and ReadWriteWeb’s sub-blogs is complimentary, and allows both sites to increase content outside the core sites focus, driving growth and new visitors to the product as whole.

Three companies that haven’t blended blogs but could or should

TechCrunch

Michael Arrington followed the typical blog network route with the TechCrunch blogs, launching new sites on new urls. The problem with the network is that it has never produced a hit that has come close to TechCrunch itself. Excluding the country specific sites that site on the techcrunch.com url (except Japan), sites like CrunchGear haven’t delivered (for reference, with a yearly budget that wouldn’t cover one months wages at CrunchGear, we have more traffic according to Quantcast). CrunchGear though isn’t a bad site, it just lacks for eyeballs because it’s not part of TechCrunch itself. Perfect candidate for a sub-blog, like crunchgear.techcrunch.com. The same goes for Mobile and Enterprise. Despite his dislike of me, Arrington is a smart bloke, and I’d bet we see at least one of these sites blended this year, if not all of them.

GigaOm

Om Malik has been buying blogs in a tight market, expanding his network at a time most others aren’t. The unique thing about the network is that gigaom.com doesn’t dominate it, accounting for 31.7% of traffic vs second place TheAppleBlog with 26.9%. However, a number of small blogs would appear to be struggling alone, and would make prime candidates for folding into the leading site.

AOL Weblogs Inc

AOL has continued to go wide, aggressively expanding the network they acquired from Jason Calacanis 4 year ago. AOL does have a couple of obvious strengths: the ability to sell ads across the network, and the leverage of AOL.com to pump new sites. They have already though started to group sites around key brands such as Engadget, and I’d suggest in a tightening market that grouping, being it masthead or subdomains/ sub blogs could come into play in 2009.

Conclusion

In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one url.

The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media. The thing holding back new media to date has been its obsession with niche plays that didn’t naturally lead to scale that sets them up well to compete with old media titans that went wide online as they did offline in print. The new media uber blogs of 2009 and beyond will offer real substitution of old media like we haven’t really seen before, and with lean structures that are best placed to last the recession, could ultimately emerge on top.

2009 Will Be The Year of the Uber Blog is a post from: The Inquisitr

AltSearchEngines covers search engines, with a particular interest the hundreds of alternative search engines that compete with the big guns like Google and Yahoo.

The site hasn’t been shuttered but appears to be handed over to Editor Charles Knight, who writes on the blog that “AltSearchEngines is now an independent blog, although I doubt that you will notice any changes.” Allen Stern notes at Centernetworks that the traffic for the blog was relatively low, with Compete showing 40,000 page views for the site. Quantcast, which directly measures traffic on the site shows 35,700 page views a month.

I’ve asked ReadWriteWeb owner Richard McManus for comment, and if I get a response, we’ll update the post. From the outside though it would appear that the days of going wide in a blog network with multiple sites as a business model is starting to decline.

ReadWriteWeb is currently on a growth path, with key new hires (including occasional Inquisitr contributor Zee) and new blogs, so shutting one would seem a little strange, traffic aside. Notably, the latest blog ReadWriteWeb Jobwire exists as a sub-blog off the main site as opposed to a fully stand alone blog (with its own URL), so it would appear that there may be a focus on the key brand and site at ReadWriteWeb as well, and it’s a sound business decision…least it works for us.

UPDATE: email from Richard McManus: the ReadWriteWeb blog network was disbanded November 1. Richard will have a post up shortly about it, and we’ll link when its up. He did note in his email that the move was about refocusing on the core brand.

UPDATE 2: Richard McManus has a post up on ReadWriteWeb here. McManus notes the move is to focus on the core brand, but he maintains a stake in both Last100 and AltSearchEgnines.

RWW dumps Alt Search Engines (update: RWW blog network shuts) is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Ask.com owned RSS reading service has had a chequered history since being acquired in February 2005. The service was ignored for over a year at a time Google was driving innovation with Google Reader, and many long term users (including myself) switched. Last year the light bulb was switched on at Bloglines, and the site started rolling out changes and new features, some of them industry leading, delivering a more interesting, and somewhat different service to Google Reader.

Although some users have continued to switch to Google Reader, Bloglines has maintained a loyal base of users, and has managed to attract news users; Compete data shows traffic on Bloglines in September 2008 being nearly equal to the September 2007 figure, demonstrating that for the users it has lost, others have taken their place. Bloglines remains a great gateway RSS service for first time users vs Google Reader, which is more barren and functional, vs the more user friendly and inviting Bloglines.

The need to push Bloglines under a bus due to a weekend glitch, and a glib comment from the sites founder, isn’t supported by facts. Companies have problems from time to time; yes, Google Reader may be more reliable, but so are most things from Google, and even Google has outages from time to time.

Bloglines is also good for competition. We need Bloglines to keep Google honest, and to continue innovation in this space. I’ll let Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb explain:

Google Reader, despite its market dominance, superior feature set and burning love from user/advocates, should not be the end of RSS reader development. Google’s control over huge stores of information, including your reading history, isn’t an unconditional good….

Do you really want Google to nail down complete dominance over the world of RSS? We sure don’t. We want to see a multitude of viable companies offering competing feature sets, being responsive to their users’ needs and innovating. In other words, Long Live Bloglines!

Marshall shared his passion for Bloglines in his original headline on that post, but perhaps site owner Richard MacManus, generally regarded as a nice guy who doesn’t like upsetting people changed it, because the headline on the site is different to what it started as. I liked the first one more, but maybe that’s just me

Bloglines fixed, and why they’re good for competition is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ve never bothered putting ads on our feeds here at The Inquisitr because I just couldn’t be bothered trying to make pennies per month from the ads. We could direct sell them, and if you’re interested in buying RSS ad spots, contact us, but I some how know that we won’t be rushed off our feet with offers.

ReadWriteWeb is tackling RSS advertising in a completely new way. I’m not sure when they first started the new spots, but I first noticed them last week. Instead of a footer ad at the end of the feed, ReadWriteWeb are rotating one 125px ad from their existing advertisers in each post on the feed. Here’s an example of what one looks like viewed through Google Reader.

The 125px ad appears right of screen at approximately the same spot for each post. I asked ReadWriteWeb’s Richard McManus about the spots, and although he wouldn’t disclose why they’ve starting running these ads, or their results so far, he did provide some information on how they’ve implemented them

In terms of setting them up, I can tell you we’re using OpenX to serve them – just like we do our on-site ads. It did require some custom development to set it up, in both OpenX and MT.

We can guess that serving them in feeds is a value add for existing ReadWriteWeb advertisers, presumably delivering a high view count for the ads, helping the site make more from advertising.

Credit to ReadWriteWeb for being willing to give something different a shot. I’m betting they won’t be the last site to implement ads in RSS feeds this way in the future.

ReadWriteWeb tries something new with RSS ads is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google has relaunched Google Blog Search today, taking the nearly forgotten service into a new realm: meme tracking.

The new Google Blog Search takes some of the tech from Google News and groups blog posts into clusters based on story popularity on the front page. Users can get a whole of blogosphere listing, or are able to view popular stories based on topic, including technology. On the break down page, users can view each blog covering the story, and also get a trend graph showing the number of blogs running the story when.

The end result is traditional Google sparsity in aesthetics: lots of white, and lacking visually, but it’s the results that count, and Google Blog Search does it well.

Is Google Blog Search a Techmeme killer? Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks that it may be. For the first time we see a real Techmeme competitor, with a wealth of advantages. Scope is the biggest selling point: Techmeme only tracks a few thousand blogs at most, possibly less, where as Google Blog Search includes all blogs. Then there’s the question on fair and reasonable results: Techmeme results a weighed in favor of certain sites over others, and the results can also be subject to manual interference, where as Google Blog Search doesn’t delve into petty personal politics, instead delivering results based on actual relevance and link juice.

I’m agreeing with Marshall that this is a Techmeme killer, but with the one proviso: there isn’t much traffic on Techmeme to kill anyway. Quantcast puts Techmeme’s traffic at 12,000 unique visitors a month, and Alexa shows a long term decline in traffic as well. Even if we presume Techmeme’s traffic is 10x bigger again, it’s still a case of an elephant squashing an ant.

Google Blog Search: so long Techmeme, and thanks for all the fish is a post from: The Inquisitr

The offers from both WordPress (WP) and MovableType (MT) are positive steps forward in the evolution of the self hosted blogging platform, but availability doesn’t equate to takeup. Some social networks in the future may well use MT or WP, but the next wave of social networks will NOT be powered by WordPress and MovableType.

The reason is remarkably simple, and the evidence is already apparent. Time.

Time on two fronts. People are becoming time poor and are finding it harder to split their time between competing services. A new wave of social networks based on WP or MT will only add to the noise, and unless there is a compelling reason to join, most will simply ignore these new networks. The move is on to aggregation, not separation. Then there’s the need to maintain separate logins on each install. There are some OpenID solutions for WP and MT, but they are neither commonly installed nor is OpenID yet commonly used. There appears to be no interoperability between installs like Indenti.ca, so each install will be a walled garden of content, unique to the site, but unable to communicate with other installations.

The second time point is administration. The ability to add guest blogs or forums to blogs has been available in various forms for years, but how many installs do we see? A full blown social network is an administrative nightmare for all but large blogs with a lot of money to throw at staff to take care of that side of the business. And even then, is there a compelling business case to be had in administering these installs? Then there’s the real possibility that these social networks will be spam honey pots. Even in 2008, most still face comment spam, imagine dealing with spam across a full social network.

Of those sites who currently run social networks or even forums, how many are truly successful? Mashable is the only blog I can think of in this space who runs a remotely successful social network, and even then, it’s not exactly a hive of activity. TechCrunch runs a forum that at least while I was there was prone to spam and wasn’t heavily used, at least when considering the traffic of the site itself compared with the activity on the forum.

The Ning Solution

The true success story in the hosted social networking space is Ning. The site has 370,000 social networks as of July, but only manages 3.5 million to 4 million page views per month, or roughly 10 visitors per social network. That traffic aside, the selling case between a local MT or WP install vs Ning is strong. On Ning, your login works across every social network on the site, it is fully hosted so you don’t have to worry as much about spam and abuse, it’s tested, and for the basic service it’s completely free. There are plenty of Ning competitors out there as well, so choice isn’t lacking. You can also pay to map the Ning social network to your own domain and to show ads, so the control argument with a self install is negated some what. If your site did have a compelling case for including a social network (and few statically probably do) I don’t see why you wouldn’t sign up with Ning or a similar service.

Conclusion

I don’t want to sound to be too harsh on either WP or MT for these features being available. They are a positive progression in the evolution of blogging, and no doubt that some will seek to add social networking features to their blogs. However, given these features are in the most part already available both externally and within each site (BuddyPress isn’t new), and similar features such as forums are old school but are not widespread, there will be no rush of MT or WP powered social networks. Nor perhaps should there be.

The Next Social Networks Will Not Be Powered By Blog Platforms is a post from: The Inquisitr

Online predictions market Hubdub has opened up a market on which blog will be acquired next after the news of PaidContent being acquired by The Guardian broke Friday.

Based on a report from Kara Swisher, one blog is out in front with a 50% rating. Nigel over at Hubdub though tells me that the smart money is on VentureBeat. Users rank the chances of The Inquisitr being acquired at the same level as ReadWriteWeb and Centernetworks, so we’re in good company.

Full details in the widget above, or if you’d like to make your prediction, visit Hubdub here.

4% of Hubdub users think The Inquisitr will be acquired next (50% think it’s some other blog) is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you’ve not jumped in to QBase yet, it’s a great place to discuss the latest startups, contribute links and information, and even get some traffic back.

New to QBase

Where the Locals Eat – At Where The Locals Eat, we’ve assembled a hardy band of certified foodies — passionate gourmands to near-omnivores – who eat out a lot and know the difference between a restaurant special and a special restaurant.
MyGallons – Save money by pre-purchasing gas at today’s prices, then fill up with your MyGallons Card when prices rise.
Identi.ca – Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool. If you register for an account, you can post small (140 chars or less) text notices about yourself, where you are,…
51.com – 51.com is the largest social network service provider in China. 51.com is committed to offer its users stable services to store their personal data such as photo and blogs
fring – fring is a mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (mVoIP) application that allows users to make free calls and live chat over cellular data networks or a Wi-Fi connection.

Top discussions

Quant Doerr Scoring
A reader of my venture scoring blog wanted me to start a thread about Quant Doerr.

Well, its a proprietary stat regression analysis of past venture successes, and essentially I am trying to predict and score early stage venture funded companies. I have setup a virtual fund which has invested in over 10 deals since last October.

Where Locals Eat – Is it different enough?
There seems to be lots of sites for selecting a place to eat, yelp, chow hound, etc. Where Locals Eat adds the new feature of combining GPS and the new iphone to literally direct people to a restaurant in real time. Do you think this app and the tons of content on their site will keep users coming back for seconds?

Remember, if you’re a startup, and you’re not on QBase/ Tradevibes yet, you are missing out on eyeballs from The Inquisitr, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, so get moving, and click here to sign up.

What was hot on QBase last week is a post from: The Inquisitr