College Blog Network recently announced that it has transitioned into its new site CollegeBlender.com.

According to CollegeBlender’s Spencer March, the new site will still have all of the blogs visitors have come to love and are faithfully following in College Blog Network. But the blogs have also undergone major improvements in terms of tagging, advance comments, and an iframe toolbar. Other improvements include new ranking algorithms. The blogs have also shifted focus to enable it to grow into an online community, especially with the addition of updated profile settings and other features.

The guys at CollegeBlender hope that the new site will evolve more from College Blog Network’s initial objective of being a home for college bloggers. The goal for CollegeBlender is to become the online home for all things connected to college media.

CollegeBlender still maintains a strict registration process. Only real students can register in the site and this is enforced by requiring registrants to provide a .EDU email.

Some people think that the internet has had enough of celebrity blogs, because a new one is being set up.

The LA Time is launching a new blog that will deal with celebrity news and rumors. The new blog, which will be on latimes.com, will be manned by blogger Christie D’Zurilla.

This blog looks like it’s going to be a good read though, considering D’Zurilla’s background. She was a stand-cup comic and a card carrying SAG member. The stand-up comedy experience could translate to very irreverent entries from her. Aside from writing for the celebrity news blog, she will also be responsible for editing submissions from contributors.

Wordpress, the world’s most popular blogging platform is set to make formatting for mobile phones easier.

Wordpress will release a new mobile theme that is turned on by default. This new theme does not have most of the formatting embedded on normal Wordpress themes. This makes loading the mobile theme-enabled sites easier to load on mobile phones. The new mobile theme is an optional “improvement”. Bloggers can opt out of the new setting and not implement it on their sites.

The mobile web theme is seen as a step towards making the mobile web more accessible to surfers. The present environment of the mobile web leaves much to be desired and improvements are very welcome at this point.

Disney is one of the biggest companies in the world. It has a lot of different interests that make it the largest companies in the entertainment industry. But it’s surprising to know that despite being a huge company, Disney is not at the forefront of some emerging technological trends. For example, Disney didn’t have a blog for its parks, one of its biggest money making ventures.

Finally, though, the company has wised up. It recently announced the creation of a new blog for Disney Parks. The new Disney Parks blog is the newest kid on the blogging block and it looks like it is going to be a promising new addition to the blogosphere. Expect to see informative posts from the leaders in the field of amusement parks (a big business worldwide), a great social networking feature where you can participate in forums (moderated, of course). You’ll also get standard features like an RSS feed and permalinks. Of course, you can expect PR fluff from the site as well. But It’s a small price to pay for a blog that will finally give us the latest news on one of Disney’s most well known ventures.

There’s more and more reasons to blog — and one of them is a growing number of people devoting most of their online time reading blogs and visiting social networks.

Based on a study conducted by Nielsen, Americans are using 17 percent of their time visiting blogging sites like Blogger and social network sites like Facebook. This was a significant rise from the six percent that was calculated last year.

The Nielsen study also showed that spending for ads on blogging sites and social networks has doubled from last year, with spending amounting to $108 million a month. What’s more significant is that the increase was posted even when ad spend on other industries have decreased.

Twitter may be the hottest thing on the internet right now but even with its popularity the microblogging platform that has become the platform of choice for many celebrities and artists has yet to make money.

The people behind Twitter are now trying to make the venture profitable by changing its terms to potentially open itself up to advertisers.

In the Twitter blog, Biz Stone the co-founder of Twitter, said that they are trying to “keep our options” open.

There were no exact details given about how to open Twitter to advertisers. But the company has been studying different ways to generate revenue from the service that has seen phenomenal growth since it went public in 2006. Some of the other ways being thought of is to charge for commercial accounts.

Also recently, Twitter started giving out authenticity badges as a sign that the person who owns the account is who they say they are. This has been seen as something that corporate entities may be interested in buying.

As expected, the recent elections have sparked anger over the blatant disregard of personal freedom for supporters of the opposition leader Moussavi who say they have been cheated. As expected, the closed state tries to silence protests and other forms of civil disobedience by blocking or interrupting mobile phone services and of all internet-based services Twitter which has been one of the best sources of information, responsible for the organization of protests in the capital Tehran that has managed to go through the information blockade. The portability and effectivity of Twitter to bring instantaneous news out to the rest of the world has put supposedly elected President Ahmadinejad mad as hell at attempts of what he calls are Western powers who have been giving the Iranian political system a shaking it should not have been subjected to. read on

From GreenOptions.com’s Sustainablog, a feature on the government’s drive to get people to trade in their old clunky cars for newer more efficient ones is underway. The post started with an idea from a child who suggested that everybody with old cars trade them in for new hybrids to solve the whole global warming thingy’. Bright idea right, well somebody in Washington thought of that too and the “Cash for Clunkers” program was born. The program is designed to make the world a cleaner place by giving incentives to people who trade in their old inefficient cars for newer cleaner cars that use alternative energy for fuel. The program is beginning to catch on and every family who opts to avail of the program helps mother nature and also gets a new car in the process making the approach a viable one that is good for the earth and the US auto industry as a whole.
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From the networks, Gawker’s Valleywag tackles the resignation of founding FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who resigned from the company after a threesome of disastrous corporate decisions. The first nail in his corporate coffin was the revision of the FaceBook TOS debacle which angered so many users they flooded the site with negative publicity and everything in between. It even got the attention of lawmakers who informed them that the move as an utter disregard for their initial statement. The company revised their view of owning everything that was uploaded to their servers after, well, a ton of headaches, calls, email and some bottles of aspirin maybe.
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From the Gawker Network, a job they call as one of the most annoying ones so far from the social web, the job which we would gladly coin as the “Twitter Impostor Terminator” or a lawyer who does just as it says, takes down twitter users who are pretending to be celebrities. Well, as if these people need more publicity, it seems the transparency of the social web is still the main detrimental factor which makes the internet dangerous. From sexual predators, spam and impostors, they all use the internet for their dastardly deeds.
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