LiveJournal on the Verge of Collapse

At the midst of the terrible recession, on the day, when Microsoft announced 5,000 employees workforce cuts, information on the 12 to 20 employees lay offs by LiveJournal does not look neither surprising, nor unexpected. However, if think about the total number of employees in the LiveJournal San Francisco office as 28 employees only, you understand that this cut might be really fatal for the LJ bloggers platform functioning. Valleywag reports that the social-media pioneer laid off all of its product managers and engineers, “leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers - which speaks to a website to be left on life support.” Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, has also left.

Founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way to keep his friends from high school updated about his activities, LiveJournal was among the first blogging services and social networks. The company was bought in 2005 by blogging-software company Six Apart and then sold two years later to Russian online-media company SUP.

According to the statement from LiveJournal, the company’s servers, technical operations, administration and customer-service teams will remain in the United States. However, global product development and design now will be coordinated out of the Moscow office.

Andrew Paulson

The company’s Moscow-based management has told employees it blames the "global economic downturn" - the kind of pat excuse every boss is giving for layoffs, even when mismanagement or a bad business plan is really to blame.

The brutal, abrupt cuts suggest something different: That Sup founder Andrew Paulson (above), who paid an estimated $30 million for LiveJournal a little over a year ago, has realized his expensive mistake in buying at the top of the bubble. Someone familiar with the company tells us Paulson lost the CEO job last summer to Annelies van den Belt, a former News Corp. executive, and was given the meaningless title of chairman; he’s essentially out of the company now.

Smart Blogger Assistant for Simple Blog Publishing

Developer Description:
Smart Blogger allows centralized management of your all diaries and blogs regardless of its Internet location. The software has a single universal interface for reading and sending messages to all blogs; it makes text formatting possible. With this application, you can monitor your friends' diaries checking their blogs for new postings. You can also look through commentaries to your postings as well as other peoples, place comments in blogs, and leave answers to threads.

The software supports three web-blogs:
- LiveJournal
- Blogger
- WordPress

Disadvantages:
This post has been made in Smart Blogger. I already see several disadvantages of using this free software for blogs publishing:

1. No possibility of the text alignment options.
2. Very basic text formatting: color and bold/itallic/under only.
3. No spell checking option.
4. No advanced features as horizontal lines or tables generation.
5. Small publishing field, not very convenient for big posts.

Advantages:
1. Nice and pleasant interface.
2. Easy to use.
3. Portable software exists, so you do not need to install the software on your PC

Developers WebSite: http://www.smartpctools.com/smart_blogger/index1.html

Assessment: The software is good for the light operations, small notes in your Journal, but is lacking functionality for serious blogging.

Software carries rating 3 of 5 in the RateItAll List of 29 free software titles:
http://www.rateitall.com/t-24825-blog-publishing-freeware.aspx

If you have personal experience using this software, you are welcome to leave your feedback in the rating widget below:

Blog Publishing Freeware on RateItAll

CellSpin Adds Palm OS to List of Supported Mobile Operating Systems

Blogging itself is not a very old and established trend, but it looks much more mature in comparison with mobile blogging (so called moblogging). Yes, mobile blogging is spreading around, getting attention of the software developers. Cellspin Soft, Inc. provides a free, one-click GUI-based mobile application for capturing images, audio, video and text, and publishing them to a user’s favorite community site. This could be a blogging, social networking, and photo sharing or auction service. Among the supported sites are MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Blogger, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Live Journal, Live Spaces and eBay.

Until recently, the software was available for the following mobile operating systems: Symbian, Windows Mobile 5.0, Windows Mobile 6.0, and Blackberry. As of yesterday, CellSpin added Palm OS to the list. Overall, the software is now available on more than 300 mobile phone models worldwide.

Bobby Gurvinder Singh, chief executive officer and co-founder of CellSpin, said "The affordable Palm Centro smartphone has become very popular, and now with CellSpin Palm OS application users can stay connected, blog and micro-blog on leading social networks with just one click. CellSpin is about combining Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 technologies and giving end-users a seamless and easy Internet 3.0 experience."

Company announced that more operating systems will be supported soon. I guess, its time to connect iPhone OS and Android…

Application is very user-friendly and limits the mobile phone operation need for this application by several clicks. Review the company video presentation at Demo 08 Conference in January 2008 (http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2008/124662.html)

CellSpin Presentation at Demo 2008

Additional Reading:

http://www.intomobile.com/2008/06/23/cellspin-brings-mobile-blogging-to-palm-os-audio-video-pictures-and-text-posting-with-ease.html

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/06/24/cellspin-adds-palm-its-mobile-blogging-platform