Why bring this up? Because, as some of you more social-media-savvy readers might already know, Mashable has opened its 3rd annual Open Web Awards. If you don’t know what these awards are about, there’s an international voting competition where major online communities (blogs, Twitter, Facebook fanpages, etc.) duke it out for the top spot. I think the winner gets cookies or something.

First round in the competition is the nominations period (NOW – November 15th). The top 5 nominees in each category will move forward to the voting round (November 18th – December 13th). Winners for each category will be announced on December 15th.

Here’s where you come in: please help nominate PlayStation.Blog in the “Best Corporate Blog” category! PlayStation fans are undoubtedly the most vocal on the Internet, so show your PlayStation love and nominate the blog, and we’ll win this thing for sure.

Nominating is as simple as a few easy steps:

• Go to http://mashable.com/owa/votes
• Sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account
• Once logged in, enter http://blog.us.playstation.com/ in the “Nominate Name or URL” section
• Select the “Best Corporate Blog” category
• Hit submit

…and you’re done! You can nominate once per day per category, so vote early and vote often. The nominations period ends on November 15th. Hopefully with your help, we’ll make it to the voting round. Then we can ask you for a bit more help :-)

We don’t ask for much, right?

The next time you head over to the blog from your PSP, Blackberry, or iPhone (or probably whatever mobile device you’re running, assuming it’s newer than a Star-tac), you’ll see a specially formatted, easy to read (and load!) version of the Blog. You can even comment; now you can tell us what you think from the comfort of your office restroom!

There’s no special URL to go to, just hit up the normal http://blog.us.playstation.com address, and our patented Internet Gnomes will do the rest. Please let us know if you’re experiencing any compatibility issues, and we’ll flog the Gnomes a little harder. It’s ok, they deserve it :-)

UPDATE: aaaaaaaaand we’re back. I really expected that to take longer. We’ve now increased our server capacity, which will allow us to continue to grow and implement new features to the blog. We’ll let you know what they are when we roll them out.

In case you missed it last week, Capcom’s John D. broke the Blog. Steaming pile of wreckage, it was.

So today, we’re adding another server. Truthfully, we had planned to do that anyway. I think Mr. Diamonon wants to take credit – and since they’re adding Trophies to Bionic Commando: Rearmed, I’ll let him do so.

Either way, if you try to log on to the Blog from about 2-3pm (Pacific) today and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean your internet is broken. Necessarily.

Note: the PSN is unaffected by this maintenance window.

thanks for the post i always feel better after i come home from football and read these blogs.

Well, that was a nice sentiment. The Blog Bean Counters (they’ll *love* being referred to like that) informed me that jskillzball also helped us reach a milestone. And by “us” I mean “you” – comment #100,000. Seeing as how we had published about 650 posts at that time, that’s an average of over 150 comments per post! Take a look around the internet – you’re not going to see such a consistently dedicated group of readers too often. It’s like everyone in Burbank, California or Cambridge, Massachusetts posted one time each! (I don’t think that’s what happened, right?)

It’s been an interesting ride, as you readers are just as likely to point out what you don’t like as you are to let us know what you enjoy. For instance, I believe roughly 78% of the comments were demands for In-Game XMB (I kid, I kid!). Seriously though, we definitely appreciate the constructive critiques, and when you see an often-requested feature show up in a game’s patch or firmware update, I believe it’s proof that “the system works.”

And I can tell you from experience that game developers have told me the feedback they’ve received on this Blog, from readers like you, has been incredibly useful to them – hopefully as much as the post you’ve commented on was to you.

So please, keep them coming, even if it’s just to say “trophies, kthxbai!” And please continue to keep them (mostly) on-topic, as that helps make sure that the right sets of eyes are reading your opinions. I’m sure we’ll reach comment #200,000 in no time. Thank you.

Oh, and jskillzball, I’ll be contacting you when I get back from TGS, I believe a schwag bag is in order.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: yet *another* company jumping (late) onto the blogosphere twitter social networking bandwagon. Like the title says, we’re on Facebook now – but we’re not there “just to be there.” We’ve re-created everything you find here on the PlayStation.Blog – news, pics, videos, links – all in one central location. We’re all about flexibility – find the PlayStation information you want in the way that you want – and here’s another easy option for you.

So you’re the type of reader who subscribes to the RSS feed, gets the email updates, and still drops into the site just in case… what does this page offer you? PlayStation Events.

Our promotions department will use Facebook to let you know every place they’re going to be (Coachella this weekend!), and in turn, you can let them know you’re coming through the app’s excellent event system.

Another reason to join us? To let everyone on your friends list know that you’re a loyal fan of PlayStation.Blog. Because you *know* they obsessively read your mini-feed. Find our Facebook page here.

PS – Keep in mind, this is our first go at this, and Facebook is pretty darn flexible. Any applications you’d like to see on the page? Should we build our own apps? Let us know.

“Of the more than 8000 entries submitted to the 12th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree.”

So the way I see it, that’s an 85 or so – a solid B. Not bad for a blog that’s less than a year old (other Honorees include Destructoid, GameSpot, GameDaily, GamesRadar), but certainly there’s room for improvement. Next year, it’d be great to see PlayStation.Blog in the more prestigious Nominees group (best of luck to this year’s noms: Wired Game|Life, Gamasutra and Zero Punctuation’s home, The Escapist).

So how can we make that happen? By serving you, the readers, better. In the past months, we’ve introduced a number of new features to make this site more useful: in-line commenting, faster loading, post tagging, and the aforementioned post ratings. I’d also like to officially introduce another new feature today: tag feeds. Here’s how it works:

See the tags at the bottom of this post (”awards, psb”)? They can be used to find all the posts this blog has ever put out there on specific topics – pretty standard in the blogosphere. But here’s something that isn’t: you can now subscribe to any of these tags. So say you only want to be notified when new Resistance info is posted. Just click on the Resistance tag, and all the Resistance-related posts will show up.

Now go up to the address bar, and just add the word “feed” at the end. You’ll be given the ability to then add a Resistance feed to your RSS reader (I use Google’s reader, but they all pretty much do the same thing). Now any time we post something with the Resistance tag, it’ll show up there.

This works with any tag on our site: Gran Turismo 5, THE EYE OF JUDGMENT, Firmware Updates, anything. Perfect for finding those title/topic-specific posts when your RSS fills up with hundreds (or thousands) of posts per day.

We’ve got some other nice features on the way in 2008. What would you like to see implemented?

At first it will display the current average rating, if there is one. To assign your own rating to a post simply move your mouse over the squares and click on one. One square is the lowest, five squares is the highest.

We’re always looking for feedback on the content we post here, and obviously your ratings will help with that. We get a lot of good comments here on the Blog, but the vast majority of them come from a very small percentage of readers. Hopefully this feature will help empower those who aren’t comfortable composing a full-on reply to our posts.

Thanks, and happy rating!

When we launched the direct response feature on this blog a few weeks ago we said that we’d be releasing some plugins to the WordPress community. Today is the day.

The full technical details/downloads for each of the plugins is available over at cnp_studio, the development shop we work with on this blog. Head over there to get your WordPress geek-on.

If you’re interested, here’s a brief overview of the two plugins we’re releasing:

Comment Replies

Think of it as a threaded response-lite. We wanted our authors to be able to respond directly to comments, but not create a completely threaded conversation. That’s the purpose of Comment Replies. You also have the option to style the responses in a number of different ways. Full details/download.

Image Rotator

On the front page of this blog we have a graphic banner that rotates (at the top) to feature different items with a corresponding link. Initially, we created a simple manager on the backend, but we quickly ported it over to a WordPress plugin. Just like the Comment Replies plugin, you can customize how the plugins works. Full details/download.

That’s it for now, we hope to share more in the future. Enjoy!

Currently, this feature is only available to the blog authors (you’re used to seeing their responses in red). We’ve debated opening up the option to everybody (and we may still), however, the question we always ask is, “Are we trying to replicate too many forum functions?” The other fear is that threaded comments would turn into this:

As for you WordPress geeks out there, we plan on releasing this plugin along with one other very soon. More on that in a bit.

If you’re an existing user, you can click here to change your password. You’ll need to enter your current username and password, then select a new password.

New users will still receive an auto-generated password, but you can update it upon first login.

We hope this feature helps enhance your PlayStation.Blog experience, something we’ll continue to strive for in the months ahead.