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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

blogging

The Guardian Releases a Newsfeed Plugin

The Guardian just released a news feed plugin for WordPress as a part of its Open Platform initiative, making it easy for anyone to post Guardian stories to their WordPress-powered site in full, images and all. They’re working on other platforms as well.

Oh, and did I mention ads? Because they’re including ads and performance tracking in the stories too.

This is smart on so many levels – when so many other publishers are trying to lock everything down, the Guardian sees the future and is going to make money from it.

If you aren’t familiar with The Guardian’s efforts on the Web, you should be. They have an absolutely amazing team of developers building out their platform, which includes a content API, politics API and curated data sets.

As they put it “Our vision is to weave the Guardian into the fabric of the Internet, to become ‘of’ the web rather than ‘on’ the web.”

Austin Blogs

Wired spreads word (Where The Bloggers Live: Austin?) of a new report from Scarborough Research stating that Austin has the “highest percentage of residents who read or write blogs.” About 15% of adult Austinites “had read or contributed to a blog in the past 30 days”, edging out Portland and other tech-heavy cities. According to the report (PDF),

The top cities for bloggers have tech savvy and youth in common. Thirty-seven percent of Austin adults are between the ages of 18-34; they are 20 percent more likely than the national average to be within this age range. Adults in Austin and Portland are attracted to new technology. Austin adults are 17 percent more likely than adults nationally to be a part of a household that owns a DVR and 51 percent more likely to be a part of a household that owns a PDA.

As an active member of the local tech community, I’m not surprised. Austin loves technology and as a whole, has an insane amount of energy, curiosity and love for life on the bleeding edge.

Simply put, Austin and its bloggers rock.

Photon

Photon “is the open source iPhoto plugin that gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.”