Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
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Some weeks ago it was announced that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally has acquired the Washington Post. Now, another e-commerce billionaire is getting serious about journalism: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, plans to launch a new online media outlet, focusing on independent, investigative journalism. One of the first members of his team is Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who is widely known for having helped the Whistleblower Edward Snowden to leak his stories.
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Speaking about Jeff Bezos and Amazon: Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone is about to publish a book titled “The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”, describing in detail how the e-commerce giant became one of the most powerful companies in the world, and how Bezos made all this happen. Businessweek has published a (lengthy) excerpt from the book describing how Bezos forced diapers.com to sell to Amazon.
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The US startup Square, run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has become known for its smartphone credit card dongles and payment processing tools available for small and medium retailers. Now users in the U.S. can use the newly launched Square Cash service to send money to each other in the most simple way: by email.
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WordPress is a great blogging system. But it also can be used to set up a neat online store. Practical Ecommerce shows 4 popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress: WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, Jigoshop and Cart66 Lite.
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To make a living with blogging – that’s a dream of many. Swedish blogger Emma Sundh has managed to do that. For the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter she explains what’s needed to turn a blog into a part- or even full-time business. Here is the Swedish version and here one automatically translated into English.