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if you’re still running WordPress 2.3.3, now might be a good time to consider an upgrade. a recent exploit seems to turn your blog into a spamlink-farm, which might ultimately lead to a site-wide ban from Google’s index (as happened to Austrian proto-blogger Helge). to check if your blog is affected, look for the existence of the folder “wp-content/1″. more info on the exploit can be found at wordpress.org, as well as an upgrade-guide to 2.5 (highly recommended).

I’ve installed WordPress 2.5 on my blogs last week, and so far everything is running smooth. plus, the new backend-interface is really looking niiice. however, keep in mind that some minor plugins aren’t working on 2.5 yet!

ps: 2.5 finally features automatic update of plugins… however this doesn’t work on both of my installs - everytime I try to update, I’m just prompted for FTP-credentials - any ideas? thx!

pps: is there a tool to import UltimateTagWarrior-taggings into WordPress’ own tagging-system?

when Andy Pealting sold BuddyPress to Automattic (makers of WordPress) a month ago, buddypress.org went into maintenance-mode. now that Andy had a chance to bundle the code into a handy SVN-repository, the site is back up again, giving every developer the chance to toy with BuddyPress. But what’s BuddyPressm you might ask?

BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each plugin adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

got it?:) [note, this won't work with your typical Wordpress-install, it's for WordPress MU only!]

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just found a very cool Adobe AIR-based desktop-app for accessing Google Analytics…try it out!

YouTube just announced some major extensions to their APIs (see official blog-post), which finally enable uploading of video to their site. seems like my own hack, PHPTube, is therefor rendered obsolete, and for good… :). the new API (see the developer guide) seems to allow both user-triggered authentication (similar to what Flickr has been doing for ages) and direct uploading (similar to PHPTube). there might still be a future for PHPTube though, if I ever find the time to adopt the new API. compared to PHPTube, implementation of the new API’s process-flow seems rather complicated, so there might be demand for a simple wrapper. we’ll see… for now, well done Google!

update: Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch points out what the new API basically means: Google offering YouTube as a (almost) whitelabel video-platform (”almost” since I guess videos will still be watermarked with the YouTube-logo)…

very cool: 5.000 VR-panorama-shots in more than 40 cities: 360cities.net …

(via Google Blogoscoped)

here’s a little challenge for my fellow readers who are registered at Last.fm…

• log in to your (free) account.
• pull out your stop-watch.
• check how long it takes you to find the right link for upgrading to a premium account (2.50 EUR/month).
• please don’t use STRG-F, that’s unfair and probably not the way intended by the user-interface designer.

one has to wonder if Last.fm really wants users to pay for premium services… anyway, after 4 years of free-surfing & several minutes of search, I’m now a paying customer of Last.fm…rock on!

one of my current reads is The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (whose blog roughtype is a recommended read - and the place where I sponged off a advance reading-copy - thanks!). the book is all about utility-computing, drawing parallels between the surge of the electric grid in the early 1900’s and the rise of cloud-computing we are seeing today (or since the early days of the WWW, if you want).

I’m mentioning this, as of today, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS - E3 Storage, EC2 cloud-computing, and the transaction service whose name I forget all the time) has seen it’s first major outage (1-2 hours according to Sitening). sure, this happens all the time. I can’t think of many (any?) web-services which don’t have at least 1 outage a year (even Gmail breaks from time to time). but if clouds like AWS go down, it affects hundreds or thousands of sites at once. bad experience, if all your major services break down alltogether ;)… on the other hand, the numbers still speak for AWS: 1-2 hours downtime in 2 years (S3 was launched in 2006, I believe) is not too bad - a degree of availability most companies couldn’t provide themselves in a profitable way.

Update: Nick Carr has got a post about the outage already, as do lots of others (check Techmeme).

people search sure is a controversial topic…while some might find a search engine capable of automatically syndicating all available information on a person creepy, to say the least, others welcome the concept, arguing, that all this information has been online & and for the most part indexed anyway. I belong to the latter, so on the occasion of 123 people’s recent public launch, I took the chance and compared it to Spock, another people search service around since mid-2007. subject of matter - the good old vanity search…

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I’ve still got some invitation-codes for french video-startup Seesmic to share (thx, Hugh). Seesmic facilitates video-conversations among its users, similar to a Kyte.tv-channel or the video-reply of YouTube. while there’s currently no mobile client available, it’s quite easy to use Shozu to upload video directly from your cellphone - thx to an open FTP-interface on Seesmic’s side (details here).

If you’re a blogger and want to try out Seesmic, just drop me a backlink to this post and I’ll get you going (sorry, no comments this time).

if you’re a non US-citizen ever wanting to gain detailled insight into your personal genome and have 1.000 USD to spare, now is your chance, as of January 22nd, 23andme.com is available through Europe & Canada. it works pretty simple: order the spit-kit, send in a good portion of your slobber, and few weeks later you can start exploring your genome online.

but don’t forget that 23andme-director Anne Wojcicki is married to Google’s Sergey Brin (Google btw. investing in 23andme), so your genetics might someday be used to target your Google Ads… you’ve been warned!