Lemondrop, one of AOL’s new sites. Do you miss making out, too?

(Credit: AOL)

After letting them gestate in beta for a while, AOL has formally launched two new “lifestyle” sites: entertainment blog PopEater and quirky women’s lifestyle title Lemondrop. They’re the latest in a series of original blogs that AOL has rolled out, from men’s site Asylum to Web meme blog Urlesque, adding to the titles it absorbed when it acquired the Weblogs Inc. network.

Lemondrop is cute, fluffier than Jezebel but a little bit edgier than anything you’d see in the squeaky-clean Sugar Inc. blog network. When I loaded it up, the top story was a rant called “I Miss Making Out,” and further down was a gallery of sexy fictional murderers in conjunction with the recent news that the slasher flick American Psycho will be adapted into a stage musical.

As for PopEater, AOL already owns a phenomenally successful entertainment site, TMZ.com, so a new one may look a bit redundant. PopEater, however, looks like it’s more Entertainment Weekly than Us Weekly, focused more on how the fall TV season’s faring than which celebrity is staggering drunk out of which West Hollywood nigthclub.

But more importantly, both Lemondrop and PopEater are geared toward tasty advertising demographics: young-ish, media-savvy women with enough time on their hands to read entertainment blogs. Like all other AOL properties, their ads are served by the company’s Platform-A technology.

AOL is pitching its sites as prime space for advertisers: traffic numbers for these “programming sites” hit an all-time high in August, according to ComScore.

More: continued here

Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm, has signed a deal to acquire a $20 million stake in Telligent Systems, which specializes in social-networking software for businesses.

Intel is an existing client of Telligent.

The two companies have not disclosed a valuation for Dallas-based Telligent. Part of the $20 million stake has already been acquired, the companies said Tuesday, with the rest to follow within 12 months.

“This significant investment from Intel Capital will allow us to grow our team, our capabilities, and our reach during a time of market expansion,” Telligent CEO Rob Howard said in a statement. The investment will be directed toward geographic expansion, hiring more sales professionals, and increasing Telligent’s advertising and marketing budget.

Telligent manufactures a product called Community Server, which provides clients with blog, forum, wiki, and other collaborative and social software; the software is used primarily for customer relations and marketing. Those clients include the Associated Press, MySpace, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Visa, Honda, Dell, and the NFL.

More: continued here

With nearly 1,000,000 posts a day, the blogosphere is overflowing with content and now fully established as a mainstream rather than fringe phenomenon. Traditional media have adopted blogs as a complementary form of content to the traditional news and feature stories. According to Techhnorati’s latest report on the state of the blogosphere, many bloggers are making money. Technorati surveyed a sample of about 1,000 bloggers and found that the mean annual revenue for advertising is $6,000, but sites with 100,000 or more unique visitors are generating more than $75,000 in revenue.

(Credit: Technorati)

None of these results is surprising. Blogs started as a means of personal expression, and now offer more than a billion people the tools to self-publish. Traditional publishers and an armada of new, innovative publishers, as well as millions of readers, have embraced the blog format and ethos. Marketers, readers, publishers, politicians, and most people on the planet with access to the Internet understand the diversity of voices, as well as the cacophony, that blogs allow. The more savvy bloggers are getting sophisticated about search engine optimization, developing a niche, and making money. Technorati will dribble out more results from its survey this week, illuminating the what, why, and how of blogging.

More: continued here

Cool alert: If you feed your blog to Outside.in’s new GeoToolkit, it will monitor it for location-specific content, and give you a map you can embed in your site. It also gives you analytics, so you can tell later what locations you’ve been covering.

Previous coverage:
Outside.in Radar: Super-mega-hyper-local content.

The map widget gets more interesting when it brings in the geo-tagged data from other sources as well. If you’re writing about a happening at a particular location, you could, theoretically, ask your map widget to show related content from other sites or from advertisers.

I tried the automatic location-deriving function on Webware, and it picked up popular company names for which it knows the address. It also picks up popular venue names (airports, stadiums), neighborhood, ZIP codes, and so on. You can help it along by geocoding your blog posts explictly, for example, by inserting a Google Map link in a story (other methods).

The geocoding function isn’t relevant to all sites, especially those, like Webware, that are about apps that exist primarily in the no-place of the Web. But if you write about the real world, it’s a clever tool that helps readers see what your content is really about.

See also: Everyblock; Yourstreet.

Location flag for the post (Outside.in’s address): [where: 20 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY]

More: continued here

Women’s blog network Sugar Inc. has made a surprise move: it’s giving users access to its platform so that they can create their own blogs. The San Francisco-based company made the announcement through a post on its tech blog, Geeksugar.

The new system, called OnSugar, promises a “sweet and simple” alternative to services like Google’s Blogger and Six Apart’s TypePad. Powered by the Drupal open-source platform, it will give bloggers free access to Sugar’s tools for creating multiple kinds of posts: regular text posts as well as photo galleries, polls, quotations, videos, and the like (yes, this is a bit like Tumblr).

OnSugar bloggers can also take advantage of shopping widgets from the Sugar-owned ShopStyle, take a cut of the sales, and use images from Getty Images for free. They can also have Sugar import existing blogs on Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad into the OnSugar platform.

This is surprising, given the fact that the industry trend has been to create an ad network to pull in publishers, not a blogging platform. Sugar, which already has loads of user accounts through its social network, TeamSugar, will not be serving any ads yet but rather will let bloggers use the ad network of their choice. That includes the ad network of Glam Media, which is typically talked about as a Sugar competitor.

More: continued here

Widgetbox is one of many companies that jumped on the widget bandwagon, and now it’s jumping on the ad network bandwagon.

So far, the company has 135,000 embeddable objects and 64 million monthly consumers of its widgets, which live on blogs, social-networking sites, and other Web destinations. The most popular widgets are “The Fun Classic Super Mario Game In Flash,” BabyTicker: The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker,” “Cyber-pet,” “Bubbles,” and “Idiot Test.”

While Widgetbox claims 462 million widget views in a month across 500,000 discrete domains, the big numbers don’t add up to a big business. The majority of Widgetbox views are happening on blogs, which led Widgetbox CEO Will Price to become more than a widget supplier.

This week, the company launched the Widgetbox Blog Network, which catalogs widgets in 29 verticals, such as Autos, Music, Sports and Politics. “It’s a natural step in the process for us to move away from a pure technology story about widgets,” Price said.

The Widgetbox network, which is starting with close to zero unique users per month, will primarily appeal to the long tail of bloggers who lack distribution. Participants include the network channel widget on their blog pages, and Widgetbox applies algorithms to determine which content gets pushed up to the top of the network categories. It publishes leaderboards listing the top contributors.

Widgetbox is launching an ad network, categorizing widgets into 29 content verticals.

“To date, widgets don’t have the concept of a network effect. The more people who use them, the more utility is created for individual users. Given bloggers are one of our largest user sources, taking a blidget (RSS feeds turned into a widget) from a single source, and sharing it with the community, and showcasing it in the channel, and having leaderboard benefits bloggers, online content publishers, and advertisers,” he added. “The new channels extend reach, drive traffic, improve brand awareness for bloggers.”

The Widgetbox network also gives the company an improved business model. Currently, the majority of revenue comes from custom advertising campaigns for companies such as Intel, Wal-Mart Stores, and Apple. But the vast majority of Widgetbox inventory cannot be monetized, Price said.

The company is developing an ad network to take advantage of the categorization into verticals.

“We have 462 million widget views a month, but advertisers are not getting it. We want to target demographics and have a user story–64 million unique users broken into 29 vertical channels, each with 15 to 300 authors,” Price explained. “We have to (determine a) domain, categorize them into channels, and understand ad treatments such as drop downs, pop-overs, peel-backs, and rotations, in a way that satisfies users, publishers, and advertisers. It’s still early. There are no standard ad units or blueprints to follow, but we are trying to figure it out. The goal for the rest of the year is to answer questions and go into next year with some case studies.”

More: continued here

The popular microblogging site Twitter announced and launched a refresh of its interface on its company blog Thursday. Updated tabs, a new design customizer, and Ajax work on the back end are the major features of this release.

Twitter’s redesign sports a more attractive following/followers display and better tab placement.

The most noticeable UI change is the move of the smaller tabs that were on top of the timeline to the right sidebar, where they can occupy more space, making them larger clicking targets. They also moved the following/followers/updates stats to the top of the page and made them larger, so now I can really see how deflated my follower numbers are.

The Twitter Blog also notes that moving the tabs to the side was necessary to make room for future tabs since space was limited in their previous location. While Twitter doesn’t clue us in to what features might be housed in these new tabs, Summize (now Twitter Search) is a likely candidate for some sort of inclusion since Twitter’s old search box disappeared in this update.

The most important change, in terms of functionality is the addition of AJAX to the “Home” and “@Replies” pages. Their new implementation allows you to refresh the items in your timeline without having to reload the whole page. This makes for faster load times and less bandwidth intensive reloading of pages.

Twitter’s new design customizer.

Twitter also introduced a new design customizer with this release, which allows you to change the colors on your Twitter profile with the help of a color wheel. Instead of typing in color codes and hoping that you got all of the colors right, they are now reflected in real time as you change them on the page. This is an awesome implementation of this feature and makes it far easier to create a good looking profile.

Other than the new Ajax functionality, this update is purely aesthetic. Even though we have not seen any major features added Thursday, this redesign has paved the way for a larger future update, which Twitter promises is coming soon.

More: continued here