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Klout Adds Five New Networks

If you like to analyze influence using a service called Klout — or, you like to analyze your own Klout score — this might be a good news. Klout just added five new services to build (hopefully) better scoring. You can now add services like Tumblr, Instagram, Blogger.com, Flickr and Last.fm.
The additional services try to cover popular services for blogging, photo sharing and also audio. Those services make internet users become more connected each other.

I’m curious whether other popular services like WordPress, Smugmug and Google Plus will be added there or not. Google Plus does not have its API right now. Okey, we’ll see. How’s your Klout score?

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Are you using WordPress' Post Formats feature?

If you have upgraded your WordPress installation to the latest version (right now, it’s Version 3.1), you can take advantage of its “Post Formats” feature. So, what is it anyway? WordPress Codex explains:

A Post Format is a piece of meta information that can be used by a theme to customize its presentation of a post. The Post Formats feature provides a standardized list of formats that are available to all themes that support the feature. Themes are not required to support every format on the list. New formats cannot be introduced by themes nor even plugins. The standardization of this list provides both compatibility between numerous themes and an avenue for external blogging tools to access to this feature in a consistent fashion. In short, with a theme that supports Post Formats, a blogger can change how each post looks by choosing a Post Format from a radio-button list.

This feature might be useful if you want to “format” your blog posts, especially when you want to have different output format from your WordPress theme. Just think about Tumblr service. Tumblr is very easy to use when you want to make a kind of item collections. Sometime you want to embed a video, post a link, make a regular blog post, or even embed an audio file. If you want to create a new post, you will have something like this:

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Dear Yahoo! Meme, I think…

When I heard about Yahoo! Meme and looked its website, in brief I was thinking about tumblelog. Seriuosly, I couldn’t fine any new features, compared to similar service like Tumblr (my Tumblr) or Posterous (my Posterous page). That was before I got a chance to try Yahoo! Meme.
Yahoo! describes Yahoo! Meme as “where you share everything you find that’s interesting”. If we go to Yahoo! Meme page, Yahoo! tells us about these following details:

  • Things have to be quick, easy and simple to do
  • You should be able to share whatever kind of content you publish or find in the web
  • Your posts should get around without you having to be a part of any specific social network
  • You keep the credit for your discoveries and creations
  • You should easily find what’s drawing everyone else’s attention

I’ve been using Tumblr for few months, and when I firstly logged in to Yahoo! Meme (after got an invitation), I see nothing but similar features — like Tumblr. This is Yahoo! Meme’s dashboard when you’re ready to post/share something:
Yahoo! Meme Dashboard
Currently, it supports some post types: text, photo, video and music (audio). For non-text contents, you can directly upload (only images) or embed external contents. So, some contents should be “somewhere” on the internet first. Anyway, Yahoo! already has a video service called Yahoo! Video, but its videos can’t be inserted? Yahoo! Meme only supports YouTube and Vimeo now. What about other video sharing providers like blip.tv or Metacafe? Or, what about any video files that can be inserted using embed codes?
Now, let’s compare it to Tumblr. Tumblr offers more type of posts. And it’s so easy. We don’t need to deal with complex post customizations. For example, we post video embed codes, it will be automagically processed by Tumblr system. Neat.
Tumblr Dashboard
And, let’s not forget about various features including theme customization, custom domain, and more. I know, Yahoo! Meme is still new. They might have improvements in the future. Or, it will be closed down just like Yahoo! 360? Anyone can give me a good reason to use Yahoo! Meme?

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Lunch Bag Art

Lunch Bag Art is one of my favorite Tumblr-powered tumblelogs.

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Tumblr New Features

I’m using Tumblr for Blog Pemilu and my other collaborative tumblelog, Orangescale Tumblelog. So, if you don’t get updates from this blog, I might posts in those two tumbleogs.

Recently, Tumblr added some new features. Some of them are few things that I really like, because I find them useful. Here they are:

  • Save posts as drafts.
  • Set a post to be published at a specific time.
  • Queue up posts to be published automatically on a configurable interval.

Okey these are useful. There is another new feature about audio-related content. We can post an audio content directly from a phone call. Of course, it uses international rate. I haven’t tried it myself. Anyone? If you want to try it, configure the settings from the goodies page. Just in case you need it, you can do it now.

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Blogpemilu.com

BlogPemilu.com
Last year, I bought a domain. It was blogpemilu.com. I wanted to build a site related to General Election in Indonesia. But, I haven’t figured out what to make.
In the last few weeks, I decided to use it as a tumblelog using Tumblr with custom domain service. Why not using self-hosted blogging? The answer is simple and straight forward: I do not want to get busy preparing the tecnical stuff like themes, etc.
There are many Tumblr users from Indonesia, and since a Tumblr-powered tumblelog can have multiple authors, it’s just perfect. I started writing some texts, quotes, photos, etc. Then, I invited some Tumblr users I know — from Twitter — to contribute. So, here it is now: Blog Pemilu. Big thanks to all contributors!
If you want to contribute, you can. You only need a Tumblr account. Just contact me directly or by email — the information is available on the site. Other requirement? Well, you want to share Pemilu-related stuff. :)

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Tumbleweed: Tumblr Desktop Client

Tumblweed Screenshot
After I decided to start a tumblelog (again), the first thing I did was finding a desktop client. For now, Tumblr does not support XML-RPC protocol, but they do have API.
I’m not familiar with API, so I searched for solution. Luckily, I found Tumbleweed. Login using Tumblr account, and you can start writing. If you have web camera, you can also capture using it, and post it as photo. What I like from Tumblweed:

  • The interface is clean, easy to understand.
  • Support multiple tumble format — of course!
  • It also support tags and timestamp modification
  • Support multiple tumblelogs from Tumblr, using Tumblr domain or custom domain.

But, there are some limitations (it’s more about my personal preferences):

  • When writing a “Quote”, there is no textarea to write the description. It’s only an “input” type.
  • Entry history. If you have many contents, you only see your last 20 entries.
  • Inline editing. All posted contents can’t be edited from the interface.

Those features seems not available for now — based on my observation. But, I’m fine with that since this is the best Tumblr desktop client I found so far. If you have any recommendation, please share.
Anyway, if you want to install Tumblweed, you need to have Adobe AIR installed first.