From Mashable: WordPress Goes Real-Time With PubSubHubbub

by Barb Dybwad | originally from Mashable

WordPress.com‘ 10.5 million blogs are about to get a whole lot more real-time, thanks to a new behind-the-scenes development.

The WordPress team has announced in a blog post that the company has turned on support for PubSubHubbub (try saying that fast five times), a move that will get blog content to RSS services (such as Google Reader and Bloglines) much more quickly.

Essentially it’s a way for hosted WordPress blogs to “push” content out as it’s published to the services, rather than waiting for the services to check in for new posts. It’s live now for WordPress.com blogs, while self-hosted blogs can go real-time with this plugin.

PubHubSubbub, or PuSH, is demoed nicely in the “cheesy” video (that’s WordPress’ choice of word, not ours) below. However those of you who want to find out more about the new protocol can do so over at the PuSH project site.

From Mashable: Has Digg Found the Winning Formula for Ads?

by Jennifer Van Grove | from Mashable

Digg took a big risk when they added in-line advertisements that users could digg or bury. Four months later, however, early signs indicate that DiggAds are a win for all parties involved: users, advertisers, and especially Digg.

This latest bit of information was shared in a blog post earlier today that details how the DiggAds system actually works and the results thus far.

Here are the key details from Digg’s comments:

- DiggAds is powered by a complex auction-based system that attempts to serve users with the highest quality ads — Digg assigns their own quality score to ads — while factoring in the advertiser’s bidding price. It’s like Google Adsense but with quality scoring. The idea is to reward high quality ads with lower CPCs; the more diggs an ad gets the less the advertiser pays.

- Feedback from users is mostly positive, but one of the biggest user requests is to be able to comment on ads. Users are also confused by buried ads that reappear, but Digg suggests that in this case it’s just advertisers experimenting with ad format and resubmitting.

- DiggAds will evolve to include comments and address the “long-live” ad issue where ads get misleadingly high digg counts.

- The system is working with Digg saying that, “From a revenue perspective, things have been great”.

What’s especially interesting is that DiggAds displays advertisements to site users in the same format as other Digg content — so ads are a part of the Digg stream like other stories — but for the most part users appear to be embracing the model instead of rejecting it (and Digg’s community has historically not been shy over voicing displeasure with things they don’t like).

As Twitter prepares to unveil its own alternative ad platform, we have to wonder if they’ll emulate some of Digg’s tactics and whether or not Twitter’s very vocal user base will be as accepting as Digg’s has been.

Mashable's Face-off Series

Mashable has been running polls for a couple of months now, pitting two (or three) apps/companies/technologies against each other and getting their readers to vote.

Here are some of the past weeks' results:

Week 1:
- Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome
- WINNER: Firefox, 4600 votes (Chrome: 3310 votes, Tie: 911 votes)

Week 2:
- Tumblr vs. Posterous
- WINNER: Tumblr, 1809 votes (Posterous: 1496 votes, Tie: 256 votes)

Week 3:
- Pandora vs. Last.fm
- WINNER: Last.fm, 1187 votes (Pandora: 1156 votes, Tie: 122 votes)

Week 4:
- Twitter vs. Facebook
- WINNER: Facebook, 2484 votes (Twitter: 2061 votes, Tie: 588 votes)

Week 5:
- WordPress vs. Typepad
- WINNER: WordPress, 2714 votes (Typepad: 267 votes, Tie: 357 votes)

Week 6:
- Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard
- WINNER: Windows 7, 3632 votes (Snow Leopard: 3278 votes, Tie: 121 votes)

Week 7:
- TweetDeck vs. Seesmic Desktop
- WINNER: TweetDeck, 3294 votes (Seesmic Desktop: 1055 votes, Tie: 260 votes)

Week 8:
- Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs
- WINNER: Microsoft Office, 1365 votes (Google Docs: 994 votes, Tie: 315 votes)

Week 9:
- Apple iPhone vs. Google Android
- WINNER: Google Android, 3323 votes (Apple iPhone: 1494 votes, Tie: 228 votes)

Week 10:
- AT&T vs. Verizon
- WINNER: Verizon, 1161 votes (AT&T: 538 votes, Tie: 118 votes)

Week 11:
- Google vs. Bing
- WINNER: Google, 2180 votes (Bing: 519 votes, Tie: 97 votes)

Week 12:
- iPod Touch/iPhone vs. Nintendo DS vs. Sony PSP
- WINNER: iPod Touch/iPhone, 704 votes (Sony PSP: 639 votes, Nintendo DS: 482 votes, Tie: 108 votes)

Week 13:
- Digg vs. Reddit vs. StumbleUpon
- WINNER: Digg, 14,762 votes (Reddit: 11,466 votes, StumbleUpon: 2507 votes, Tie: 1032 votes)

Week 14:
- Old versus new Twitter retweets
- WINNER: Old style retweets, 1625 votes (New style retweets: 699 votes, Tie: 227 votes)

Week 15:
- Gmail vs. Outlook
- WINNER: Gmail, 3684 votes (Outlook: 980 votes, Tie: 590 votes)

Week 16:
- Boxee vs. Hulu
- WINNER: Hulu, 626 votes (Boxee: 591 votes, Tie: 106 votes)

Week 17:
- Nexus One vs. iPhone 3GS
- WINNER: Nexus One, 6743 votes (iPhone 3GS: 2818 votes, Tie: 592 votes)

Week 18:
- Foursquare vs. Yelp vs. Gowalla
- WINNER: Foursquare, 1182 votes, (Yelp: 661 votes, Gowalla: 509 votes, Tie: 143 votes)

Week 19:
- AIM vs. GTalk vs. FbChat
- WINNER: GTalk, 2189 votes, (AIM: 1257 votes, FbChat: 511 votes, Tie: 203 votes)

Week 20:
- Music Ownership vs. Music Subscription
- WINNER: Ownership, 533 votes (Subscription: 299 votes, Tie: 237)

Week 21:
- Match.com vs. PlentyofFish
- WINNER: Plenty of Fish, 430 votes (Match.com: 334 votes, Tie: 187 votes)

Week 21:
- Google Buzz vs. Facebook Vs. Twitter

- WINNER: Facebook, 3353 votes (Twitter: 1828 votes, Google Buzz: 1298 votes, Tie: 651 votes)

This week's poll: Adobe Flash vs. HTML 5

Which will you vote for?