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.
Twitter being one of the fastest and only available links to the outside world, along with scant video from mobiles that have managed to go through the extensive information black-out has heeded requests by protesters from the opposition party to halt scheduled maintenance to allow a continuance of use of their services that apparently was used to organize the protest movement. Techcrunch and Gawker both have features on the developing story, most of which happens outside of the field of sight of the rest of the world in what is well known to be a suppressive society.
Even the religious leaders of Iran who have always resisted influence from the outside world has been forced to reconsider demands for a re-count of the votes, many of which have been rigged according to the opposition’s supporters.
The tides may be turning in a country that has just recently enjoyed a solid stance against the rest of the world, holding on to their ways of old. Change as President Obama has says, is a question of when rather than a question of how, the use of social media being one of the holes the government may have failed to plug, getting news (real news from the streets) out of the country where none should have ever gone through. This might be one of the most significant roles, social media has played since it was launched as WEB 2.0, and as we see, it is a flood that cannot be dammed by any walls nor blockades, linking humans to others like him with the same thoughts and feelings.

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.
On another avenue, TechCrunch tackles the moves of the new FriendFeed which they deem to be too fast, not in the speedy sense but in relation to their parent product FaceBook and Twitter. All three web services just happen to be some of the most popular services being offered on the internet (thank GOD Zucker’s gone) yet they see a common problem reminiscent of the good old days of Microsoft when they brought in technology from a little known firm, integrating it into their own product and then buying out the competitor even before the copyright infringement suits could be filed. they cite the fact that the functionality of all three services tend to be the same giving rise to the fear of them becoming one system in time. The newer version of FriendFeed goes on beta testing today before it hits the mainstream, to be unleashed into the wild that is the social net.
Google by the way gets a low blow from Billy Bragg who is a British Musician who just happens to hate Bebo.com and is now pointing the finger at the poor guys down in googling headquarters for lost profit, well what can we say, that is life in the net. Always new, always unexpected and always mundane (crazy even!)

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.
His second blunder was the FaceBook page re-do, which was likened to having your hair done by a mechanic. The page looked uglier than ever and people started to express disgust at the new design prompting the company to do another round of re-makes. Talk about cost cutting and dumb decisions. The last nail in his corporate resume was the utter corporate chaos that was brought on by the kicking-out of CFO Gideon Yu, who by the way is part of the major WEB 2.0 systems YouTube and Yahoo. The move by the company resulted in utter chaos, disagreements on focus and direction of the company as a whole and as a business entity. Zuckerberg remarked that Yu chose his family over the hectic corporate lifestyle with nobody listening (well more of snickering to be exact at the truth behind his words). He is finally out and the company can now re-focus on a re-make of the whole site and business (Hmmmmm…… like President Obama and the Recession ??!!??) to repair the damage that has been done.
The events at FaceBook clearly shows how much impact the decisions of one man can make or break a well-loved company. Maybe now, they can re-focus on getting back their lost following, victims of ill-corporate wisdom that doesn’t quite work on the social internet.

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.
Hailed as a joke by most but praised by his clients, the lawyer sends out email and letters to twitter headquarters and the erring twitterers who are using his client’s good name for no good such as fraud and other activities. In effect, this entrepreneurial lawyer creates a whole new field of law that is specifically aimed at these impostors and it is his job to take them off Twitter, one of the fastest growing social media outlets to date. His client lists are mostly people who cannot cope in timely manner to impostors who are using their names for illegal activities. This might just follow the move by the RIAA to halt music piracy and to enforce DRM which has all but collapsed with even iTunes, one of the largest electronic sources of music on the net to begin offering content that is DRM free. The first and only Twitter Lawyer to date (as if people would care) has announced his portfolio and has released a warning to Twitterers out there that they better watch out or they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if proven guilty.
Such is the amount of opportunity the social internet has created, with everybody trying to find and build a business even on a lowly mobile or 3G enabled device. one of his success stories is the one that had a fake televangelist doing dirty work in the name of the true one for Crystal Cathedral Ministries where he has successfully booted the impostor from Twittering in the name of the good man’s Servant. The expanding reach of the social web has been creating many such issues, like the claim by Face Book that it earned all content uploaded to it’s servers, much to the annoyance and complaint of all the millions of users who threatened to file suits. That was promptly followed by a retraction of the said site rules which were reiterated again and again on the various media forms to be an ill-thought of statement that has now been revoked. Just hope he can get those annoying celebrity blogs (the real ones) off-line for utterly annoying and useless content.