blogging

It’s almost the weekend, and you’ve been invited to your roommate’s band’s show tonight. If the cheap beer isn’t a good enough incentive, maybe a byline at the Village Voice is.

As the most open section of the Voice, the music section is vibing for offbeat culture stories with a humorous yet hard-hitting tone. Music editor Maura Johnston wants to know what is happening around New York: an artist with an interesting backstory and NYC ties who’s releasing an album, a micro-scene coalescing, and so on.

For more on word count and editor contact info, check out How To Pitch: Village Voice.

MediaPass, a subscription manager for websites, announced that it has raised $1.75 million in series B funding. Established to offer monetization solutions for online content, MediaPass offers web publishers, big or small, a simple way to implement paid content models. While developing and applying a paywall can be complicated and time consuming, users of MediaPass simply need to copy and paste a few lines of code. The service is highly customizable, and allows users the options of metered paywalls and choosing specific content that requires subscriptions. Read more

Although the entertainment and gossip site Young, Black and Fabulous is reeling in 15 million hits a month, it had its humble start as a simple site on Blogger.

Back in 2005, Natasha Eubanks noticed major online outlets weren’t discussing African-American celebrities, so the former law student decided to take matters into her own hands and launch her own site.

“I didn’t make a penny off of anything because I didn’t have any readers. I didn’t see any money until two years, and I only saw a few dollars even then,” the blogstress said in mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do?. ”But I saw [Google AdSense], and I think that kind of sparked it in me. I was like, wait a minute. There’s an ad platform? What does that mean? You can make money just by writing what you think? That’s insanity.”

For more on how The YBF became the go-t0 source for Black Hollywood gossip, and Eubank’s personal advice for aspiring bloggers, read the full interview here.

Today the latest incarnation of the iPad will be unveiled to the public in a big event in California.

There are many people who are interested in learning about what this new iPad will feature. Will there be 4G? Will it have a retina display? Those questions and more will be answered today.

But since there won’t be a live video feed of the event, how will people find out?

The news will be delivered by people who are liveblogging the event.

Saying that you’re going to live blog an event, and actually live blogging an event are two different things.

Read more

BuzzFeed has launched a new tech vertical, FWD. Yes, it is another tech site to bookmark. Yes, the market is getting pretty crowded with them. But please don’t ignore this new kid on the block.

Here’s why: FWD starts off acknowledging how important the social is. It wants to do more than just share news about Apple and new tablets. FWD is trying to turn the tech news niche into something personal and personable, and perhaps most importantly, social.

“FWD is a way to share things. To pass them on. To nudge the conversation about technology in a different direction–maybe not the next level, exactly, but at least a different one. It’s fundamentally social, which is simply the way more and more of the web works now. Social is the web’s new reality,” the site’s editor, Matt Buchanan, writes in his introduction of FWD. Read more