WordPress Offers Content Encouragement with Plinky

In an effort to relieve writer’s block woes, Automattic (news, site), the company behind WordPress, has acquired a content encouragement service called Plinky.

Essentially, Pinky provides writers with prompts aimed at inspiring content.

The solution was kicked out last year by Thing Labs, a company founded by ex-Googler Jason Shellen. Sadly, in April it was announced that they were too consumed with work on another solution of theirs, Brizzly, to continue updating Plinky.

“We put a lot of work into [Plinky], and we think it’s a great site,” said the company’s announcement. “At the same time, we feel we have much more to offer with Brizzly than we ever could have with Plinky.”

Enter Automattic. The content-loving company purchased Shellen’s discarded solution (for an undisclosed amount) hoping to provide WordPress users with a way to get back into the writing game.

“We’ve all been there — those days when the light bulb seems dim, if not burned out,” said Automattic’s Joy Victory. “To give you a little creative push and get that writerly mojo flowing again, we’ve added a new service called Plinky.com. Each weekday, Plinky provides a prompt — like a question or a challenge — and you type in an answer.”

Whether or not it will actually inspire posts remains to be seen, but, in any case, it’s nice to see one man’s digital trash become another man’s digital treasure.

The solution has already been implemented, but you have to have to sign up for a Plinky account separately if you want to use it. Then, add your WordPress.com blog to Plinky and start creating.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta Released!

Microsoft unveiled the beta version of Internet Explorer 9, which the company hopes will allow it to maintain its market-share lead against Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Microsoft claimed in a Sept. 15 presentation in San Francisco that Internet Explorer 9 provides the best performance on the Web, leveraging both HTML5 and Windows 7 to deliver rich content faster.

“The Web is about sites; the browser should be, too. People go to the Web for sites, not the browser; much as you go to your PC for apps, not Windows. Today, Websites are boxed in. The box is the browser,” Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Windows Internet Explorer, explained to the audience during the presentation. “We asked ourselves: how could we put sites at the center of the experience? How can IE make sites shine. Our approach here is to use the whole PC.”