It's been a while since I last posted about Marqui, the marketing software company that pays a group of bloggers to mention and link to it on their blogs. That's because under my new contract (pdf) with Marqui, I'm being paid to do so only once a month, rather than the once a week that prevailed in the "salad days" of the company's "blogosphere program."

So what's new with Marqui? A fair amount. They announced a short while back that they've picked up 30 new clients. And Marqui's own blog has hit its stride. Good for them.

Personnel-wise, Mark and Lisa Canter, the folks who introduced me to this heavenly gravy train, have moved on. Farewell to them. I hope they'll call again when a similarly nice opportunity appears. Meanwhile, the lovely and talented Janet Johnson has taken over the helm of the Marqui paid bloggers show, and she's been doing her thing, keeping us posted on the latest goings-on at Marqui.

The biggest of these is the release of the latest version of Marqui's software, version 4.8. And hey, you'll be pleased to know --

While, at present, all content publishing is done via DOS command-line batches and the DOS FTP command, the new version of Marqui will upgrade to using an FTP API for .NET to remove our dependency from DOS. This will provide improved capability for handling FTP error conditions and reporting progress.

Starting with this release of Marqui, we will be using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for secure FTP instead of SSH2/SFTP2. This protocol is typically referred to as FTP over SSL, or FTPS.