While chief executives of many US giants - such as GM and Sun - blog regularly, it remains unusual for a British company to have a blog. Recent research found only two FTSE 100 companies running blogs. This reluctance is backed-up by a survey published in September 2006 by web hosting company Fasthosts, which found only 3 per cent of UK SMEs intending to start blogs. This is despite there being 54 million blogs on the web, with another 75,000 created daily.

GRS Sign Company - which produces commercial signs - is therefore unusual. It started its blog in June. "It allows us to talk among ourselves, about our business," says Richard Dows, a signwriter at GRS with responsibility for its web, having previously been a web designer. The target audience is "anyone who reads blogs," he says.

As a new blog, it is still building its hits and responses from customers, suppliers and the public. But - unlike some blogs - it seeks comments. Recent blogs have included a discussion on alcohol-related accidents at work, the challenge of disposing of old computers, conducting fire risk assessments, the design of braille signs and, of course, the growing demand for no smoking signs.

We show a little fire icon next to Top Searches, in case you want to write a blurb about something that's super hot.

Here's how we talk about; hope you love it!

Where's the Fire? What's Hot and Why.

Ever wonder why something is sooooo popular? Or want the whole story without having to dig through a zillion blog posts looking for the hot video or juicy pictures? WTF tells what's hot - and why - and where the good stuff is. Vote for your favorite WTFs to help the community bubble up the best ones. Jump in!

Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

That's not to say im any better, but it is true. As a group , most bloggers are only a small step away from the flashing, rotating logos of 1997 or the neon pink backgrounds and blaring teen pop auto play bollocks of your average 17yr old MySpace user -- and I include myself, though i dont use SPA, im as guilty as the next blogger of "bling envy".

Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, the dynamic duo behind the web's most deadly source of advice, Ask a Ninja, have struck gold with a Federated Media payday, which includes a $300,000 upfront payment along with 60 percent of ad revenue, according to our sources. In a phone conversation today, Nichols declined comment on the monetary terms of the deal beyond confirming what's already been reported by Heather Green at BusinessWeek.

A $300,000 payment alone makes Ask a Ninja (which we profiled in December) the best-paid online video show in the business, topping the $250K Andrew Michael Baron says Rocketboom made last year.

I don't have a great deal to say at this moment other than to state the bleeding obvious that we are hugely excited about how we can use the cash to develop Shiny.

We started Shiny with nothing other than some great ideas and a passionate belief in the potential of blogs. We now attract almost three million readers each month to our 22 sites, employ over thirty bloggers (some full-time, some freelance) and regularly attract big name advertisers.

We have come a very long way in a short space of time with no money. The investment will help us make some of more ambitious dreams realities.

HuffIt lets you decide which news stories should get the most attention. You can submit and select news from anywhere in the world and the most popular stories will appear on the front of the Huffington Post.

Photolurkers spent most of their time online flicking through photograph albums posted by strangers

Then there are photolog sites like Flickr. While most of us would rather die than be caught surreptitiously browsing through someone else's photos, there need be no such qualms about the private pics people put up on these sites. Haliyana Khalid and Alan Dix at Lancaster University in the UK have studied this new practice of "photolurking". Most people they interviewed who used Flickr and similar sites spent time each day browsing albums owned by people they had never met. They do this for emotional kicks, Khalid and Dix suggest: flicking through someone else's wedding photos, for example, allows people to daydream about their own nuptials.

Blog streaking: Revealing secrets or personal information online, which for everybody's sake would be best kept private.

"Welcome to DarynKagan.com," Kagan says in one of her daily videocasts. She's wearing a cream-colored sweater and sitting in front of a cozy fire. "Today, we are dipping into the love bucket."

After years spent presiding over the world's tragedies, Kagan now brings news from over the rainbow, tapping America's love for hero dogs and spunky grannies. On television, these tales are usually shoved to the end of the newscast, but on DarynKagan.com (tagline: "Show the world what's possible!"), it's all dogs-'n'-grannies, all the time.

Kagan brings us a mountain climber who's blind and a Wichita judge who's still hearing cases at age 99. ("You go, Judge Brown!" Kagan says. No word from the defendants.) She goes running with a man who has no legs. She brings in her kitty as a special guest star. She visits with a guy she calls the "love editor" who just happens to have his own Web site, where he sells men on the idea that they should pay him to figure out how they'll propose to their girlfriends.

Kagan won't talk about her old flame, Rush Limbaugh, from whom she parted ways last year. "I don't discuss Rush," she says. But she is eager to share the "freaky amount" of good things that have happened to her since she started her Web site.

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google.

The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

The audience of the YouTube website will not have to put up with overly long "pre-roll" adverts. Mr Hurley said a clip of three seconds length was one of the options, although the details had not been worked out yet.

No doubt you will have heard the news by now that David and I are going to be moving to America. This is a really exciting move for us and the children, and one which we have thought about carefully. I know David is excited about promoting football in the USA and playing for L.A. Galaxy.

I'm really looking forward to making new friends and enjoying the sunshine in California. But I will be back often and will keep everybody here up to date with what's happening. Keep your eyes peeled for more news, which will be posted here on the DVB site.

Thanks
Victoria x

Soon we'll launch the official blog of HillaryClinton.com, a crucial part of our exciting national conversation about the direction of our country and the place to go to learn more about Hillary.

We know our readers are going to have a lot to say, so we want to give you the first word.

We're looking for your ideas on how we can work together for change. If you'd like to write the very first guest post on the HillaryClinton.com blog, submit your entry in the form below. And if you already have your own blog or other website, please post your entry there and let us know about it. We'll select one entry as the first guest post on our blog.

20th Century Fox served YouTube with a subpoena Wednesday, demanding that the Google-owned viral-video site disclose the identity of a user who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of "24" and "The Simpsons."

The subpoena, which first came to light on the blog Google Watch, was granted by a judge in U.S. District Court in San Francisco after being filed Jan. 18 by the News Corp.-owned studio. It is not yet known whether YouTube has complied with the request.

In addition, lesser-known video site LiveDigital was served with a similar subpoena. A spokesman for LiveDigital confirmed the company received the subpoena and intended to comply immediately.

A Fox spokesman confirmed the subpoenas were filed and served but declined further comment. A spokesman for YouTube declined comment.

Unlike familiar sites such as myspace.com, friendster.com or blog.com, which place intrusive and distracting advertisements on the user's personal blog pages, ShoutPost.com reserves the user's space for the user's content only. Additionally, ShoutPost.com provides a unique syndication system, which enables members to create their blog on ShoutPost.com, and instantly syndicate it on any other website that they have control over. This is the first time that a free-blogging site has offered syndication of this type.

"We wanted to give bloggers a free personal space to share ideas without having to worry about their message being corrupted by the latest DVD release, or the newest network sitcom," said ShoutPost.com creator, Taylor Bayouth. "With the new syndication system, we also offer the first free method for any website owner to easily syndicate their ShoutPost blog anywhere on the web. We think this feature will play a large part in ShoutPost's success."

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer - Rick Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of Sydney computing company Topologi, based in Pyrmont - and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an "open document format" and a rival put forward by Microsoft.

Doug Mahugh, a technical expert for the Microsoft format, Office Open XML, has identified himself as the Microsoft employee who contacted Jelliffe requesting his services.

In a comment posted on the popular Slashdot technology website, Mahugh published what he said was an excerpt from an email to Jelliffe, detailing "what I asked Rick to do".

"Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections," reads the email Mahugh apparently wrote to Jelliffe.

"Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today."

The email also encouraged Jelliffe to disclose his deal with Microsoft in his blog at oreillynet.com, and reassured Jelliffe that Microsoft did not have to approve any of his Wikipedia edits before they were made.

The wait for Gravatar 2.0 is almost over. The new site will be released in early February with an all new interface and some great new functionality.

When the new site goes live, I'll send a one time email notification to all account holders. If you don't currently have an account, then leave a comment here (with your correct email address) and I will send you the notice as well.

Over the coming weeks I'll be posting screenshots and other tidbits to keep you updated during the final phases of testing and deployment. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you don't miss anything!

ICANN is pleased to provide its first annual report in accordance with its commitments established under the Joint Project Agreement signed in September 2006.

As part of ICANN's commitment to greater transparency and accessibility, we have posted this annual report for review and established two means to facilitate public comment. The first is a forum for the community to submit comments and suggestions, which is available at 2006-ar-comments@icann.org. Comments can be viewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/2006-ar-comments/.

The second is a new blog on the ICANN website that allows members of the community to exchange their views about the report. The blog can be found at http://blog.icann.org/.

We invite feedback on this inaugural annual report to better inform its development and ensure that it reflects the views and interests of the community.

A major advance came Jan. 22 with IBM's announcement of a new product called Lotus Connections. It wraps five social networking technologies up into one integrated package—similar to what Microsoft's Office does for traditional desktop productivity software such as Word and Excel. And, if IBM handles this right, its package could rapidly spread the use of so-called Web 2.0 applications in the business world. "While social computing software is perceived as being at the fringe of most large businesses, it's actually moving to the center fast—because it's about how the next generation of employees communicate, and create and share ideas," says Franks Gens, senior vice-president for research at tech market research IDC.

The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries. "The business market is showing a lot of interest in using social networking tools to improve productivity. It's about helping people find experts and the information they need to get their jobs done," says Steve Mills, the general manager of the software group at IBM (IBM). The commercial version of the package is to be delivered in the second quarter.

Is it any coincidence that IBM announced new social networking software and Getafirstlife, a Second Life parody, debuted within a few hours of each other?

Of course not, IBM getting into social networking is the equivalent of the cab driver touting stocks and the dunce down the street trying to flip real estate. The appropriate response to those aforementioned signals: Sell! The top of the market is here.

IBM launching social networking software (just for those corporate types that just can't wait to produce MySpace-ish pages) is the same as the cabby and the real estate flipper down the street. Translation: The social networking run is over. Goodbye. It's kaput.

The study shows that 100 percent of mothers have watched TV, been online, listened to the radio or received a direct mail promotion in the last week, while 91 percent have shopped at a retail store, 88 percent have read a magazine, and 86 percent have used a cell phone.

Mothers are also using emerging media, though not as often: the study shows that in an average week, 33 percent of moms watched video-on-demand, 32 percent have read a blog and 17 percent listened to an iPod.

Interestingly, 27 percent of moms would pay to eliminate online advertising, 24 percent would pay to stop email advertising, and 23 would do the same for TV, radio and blogs.

At Jimbo Wales' directive, all external links within the English language Wikipedia are now coded "nofollow" -- this should help cut spamming immensely once word gets out in the SEO community.

The sources cited in Wikipedia, many of which are original sources, will no longer get credit for their appearance there, which should cause at least a little downward pressure in their own search rankings (hence providing a little more upward pressure, relatively speaking, for Wikipedia's articles). Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any.

First off, I am not a Second Life hater. Let me say that again: I am not a Second Life hater. I'm on record as saying that there's something important going on inside the game.

That said, I've been bemused by the amount of hype and attention the game...er...virtual world thingee has received over the past three months. The media has been on SL like white on rice. I've only written about SL a couple of times on this site, but I've probably received five enquiries from sundry Canadian news outlets asking if I played, or knew anybody who played, or knew anybody who was making a six figure income from playing, and so forth.

THE internet could become even more difficult for governments to regulate with a new website, Wikileaks, promising to provide a safe haven for whistleblowers to upload confidential documents.

Australians are among the volunteers behind the site. "Your country's support for the underdog and for a fair go is showing through," a spokeswoman said.

Comparing themselves with the leaker of the Pentagon papers that damaged the Nixon administration and eroded US public confidence in the Vietnam War, Wikileaks' creators say they will uncover unethical behaviour by developing "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis".

Wikileaks was founded by Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Our advisory board, which is still forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers.

There are currently 22 people directly involved in the project and counting.

You won't even feel it: you tag your image, we send it to the e-commerce website that send a list of possible itens related to your image. Each image tagged gets a booBox icon over it to show your audience where to click.

Since sites will be using their own affilate codes, booBox won't be able to directly take a cut of transactions. It isn't clear if they are launching this for free, or charging for the service. Pending their position on that, as well as details on how difficult this will be to integrate with websites, I'm giving this an early thumbs up. This may be quick acquisition bait for Amazon or eBay.

How Much Does It Cost To Use The BooBoxes?
For you, nothing. We want you to earn a lot of money with your blog.

The wizardry of contextual advertising and blog publishing platforms will allow internet publications to flourish in a thousand niches. Well, that was the theory. The practice? AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from entrepreneur-provocateur and Valleywag staple, Jason Calacanis, in 2005. The bulk of AOL's ad revenues from its blog network, running at more than $1m a month according to Calacanis, come from a few star brands such as Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. They're in traditional broad categories: consumer electronics, autos and video games. The Time Warner internet unit has told editors of smaller and unprofitable sites that they will be shuttered at the end of the month. So far, we're hearing lesser-known titles such as BBHub, Divester, DV Guru and PVR Wire; do let us know about others, so we can establish a count. Grounds: budget cutbacks. The new publishing? Much like the old.

My guess is they would consolidate DVGuru and PVRWire into Engadget and EngadgetHD, BBHUB into EngadgetMobile, and Divester into Gadling.

Niche blogs are great, but when you're running a scale business like AOL is you're better off focusing on your HUGE winners like Autoblog, Engadget, Joystiq, etc.

NBC News World Blog aims to provide a dynamic look at world events and trends -- both big and small -- from NBC News correspondents, producers, and bureaus around the world. Online entries -- from text to video -- will explore news events and how they are shaping our world.

Regular contributors include NBC News correspondents, producers and staff based in bureaus across the world and on assignment.

The market share of US visits to Bloglines was 3 times greater than Rojo, its nearest competitive web-based feed reader. The chart below shows the traffic trend over the past year for the leading web-based feed readers. You can see that Google Reader has grown lately, but as of the week ending 1/13/07, it had only 1/13 of the market share of visits of Bloglines.

On his Web log, Pastor Hyatt, the leader of the Evergreen Community in Portland, Ore., has woven in widgets, or mini-applications, that show a selection of book covers from his personal library, present the most recent posts from some of his favorite blogs, and serve up random quotes from the television show "Arrested Development."

"You start small, and it's kind of like an addiction," said Pastor Hyatt (his blog is at bobhyatt.typepad.com). "TypePad has a whole section of widgets, and they're adding more all the time," he continued, referring to a popular blog-hosting service.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog. Widgets are elements, often in the left or right columns of a blog, that enhance its usefulness or aesthetic appeal. (The term "widgets," confusingly, can also refer to compact applications that operate on a computer's desktop.)

"Widgets pull content or services from some other place on the Web, and put it into your personal page," said Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in Manhattan.

I'm venturing into uncharted territory as I launch this blog. A year ago, I didn't even know what a blog was -- until my Communications team began telling me about all the blog traffic on travel and tourism. Now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly -- and hear back from them. Soon we'll add an audio version of the blog. That's how I'm most comfortable: telling stories and listening.

I've checked out Jonathan Schwartz's blog at Sun Microsystems and "Randy's Journal" at Boeing. I've listened to Senator Barack Obama's blog podcasts. I know blogs will be a hot communications tool in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Truth be told, I'm not very good with computers, although I couldn't do business in today's fast-paced economy without my cell phone, and my grandchildren have gotten me hooked on my iPod. I know our guests expect the very latest technology when they check-in to our hotel rooms and we're moving quickly to provide that. I've also hired the most talented and innovative team of leaders in the lodging business, and they're helping me move into this brave new world of communications technology. Ten years ago when my people first started talking about selling room reservations over the internet, I was a skeptic. Today Marriott.com is not only the biggest website in the hotel industry, it's also our fastest growing reservations channel. I'm a convert!

In November, MySpace, for the first time, surpassed even Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo.

The bad news is that MySpace reached this point so fast, just three years after its official launch in November 2003, that it has been forced to address problems of extreme scalability that only a few other organizations have had to tackle.

The result has been periodic overloads on MySpace's Web servers and database, with MySpace users frequently seeing a Web page headlined "Unexpected Error" and other pages that apologize for various functions of the Web site being offline for maintenance. And that's why Drew and other MySpace members who can't send or view messages, update their profiles or perform other routine tasks pepper MySpace forums with complaints.

These days, MySpace seems to be perpetually overloaded, according to Shawn White, director of outside operations for the Keynote Systems performance monitoring service. "It's not uncommon, on any particular day, to see 20% errors logging into the MySpace site, and we've seen it as high as 30% or even 40% from some locations," he says. "Compare that to what you would expect from Yahoo or Salesforce.com, or other sites that are used for commercial purposes, and it would be unacceptable." On an average day, he sees something more like a 1% error rate from other major Web sites.

This marks the first time Technorati has entered into a partnership with a commercial news distribution company, and will help to establish a strong link between two of the most important tools in the communications mix -- announcements via press releases and reactions from bloggers.

All individual press releases distributed through PR Newswire will now include a 'Technorati' button, linking readers to a search result page hosted by Technorati that will display a list of blogs discussing and linking to the news release, and relevant excerpts from those blogs. Once on the search result page, the reader can set up an automatic watch list on Technorati to notify them when any new blog posts are published.

"Press releases have the power to initiate and inform important conversations in the blogosphere, while many bloggers are great accelerators and influencers of public conversation and opinion," said Dave Armon, chief operating officer of PR Newswire. "This partnership joins together two leaders in the communications industry to offer an unparalleled service to both issuers of news and the readers who follow them. Issuers now have a means to track direct blog response to their press release using the most established and innovative blog search facility available, while readers of these news releases will gain broader context for the news by reading how these public influencers are responding to it."

WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.

The search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view). The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.

Development on Findory now will slow to a crawl. There may be new features, but they will be rare. I no longer will spend time exploring funding, biz dev deals, or recruiting.

Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had.

It was exciting, challenging, and fun to try to build a startup. I consider myself very lucky to have had that opportunity.

Seth Garon, of Portland, Oregon, was all too familiar with male pattern baldness, as evidenced by the continuing growth of his bald spot and receding hair line. However, it was Garon's family albums that provided the dimmest forecast of his increasingly thinning future, with his father and grandfather both suffering from hair loss.

But instead of succumbing to his genetically predetermined fate, Garon faced his balding scalp head-on.

On July 5, 2006, Garon underwent hair restoration at the Bosley Medical Seattle Office, and he has written a daily blog about his experiences with the Bosley procedure, hair transplant recovery, and hair regrowth process.

I get that you have opinions you want to share. That's great. You're the Person of the Year. I just don't have any interest in them. First of all, I did a tiny bit of research for my column, so I'm already familiar with your brilliant argument. Second, I've already written my column, so I can't even steal your ideas and get paid for them.

There is no practical reason to send your rants to me. If you want to counter my opinion publicly, write a letter to the editor. If you want me fired, write a letter to the publisher. If you want a note back, write a letter in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. Or you could just write mean things about my column on some blog. Don't worry, I'll see them. I have a "Joel Stein" RSS feed that goes straight into my arteries.

But don't make me feel like you expect a return e-mail. Because this takes my assistant four to five hours every week. I know this because my assistant is me.

That address on the bottom of this column? That is the pathetic, confused death knell of the once-proud newspaper industry, and I want nothing to do with it. Sending an e-mail to that address is about as useful as sending your study group report about Iraq to the president.

Of course, the crucial point here is not what he wants to do, it what his readers want him to do. If they're happy just reading him and not maintaining any sort of dialogue, Stein, and journalists like him, will still have a job in five years. if the audience decides that dialogue is something they want, he's in trouble.

Traditionally, the way that writers get feedback on their books is through sales. If sales start slipping, it means his readership is slipping. Actors have the same process: if people decide they hate Tom Hanks' last performance (or him) they just don't go to his movies (Note: this is not a problem Hanks is having, by the way. He was voted as one of American's most likeable movie stars).

But you know what? It took a column like this to get Jeff Hess and many of the rest of us to read Joel Stein. He got our attention. I enjoyed the article, because while there's plenty of good conversation in blogs, there's also lots of empty and pious bleating about conversations. The conversation has grown at super speed into an article of faith, an orthodoxy. It's good to have someone give it a good kick--even if he's not going to benefit from or respond to our insightful, passionate and provocative responses.

In the meantime, her box will go on, with promises of new material and a brand-new fan version splicing in clips submitted from around the world. Sort of takes user-generated content and interactivity to a whole new level. In any case, present for you below.

If you're tired of hearing the word "blogosphere" (which was kind of fun for a month or two in 2001) then this is the t-shirt for you: Samuel L Jackson in his Pulp Fiction persona, pointing a gun at the world and saying, "Say blogosphere again!"

A few days ago several influential blogs (see below) announced RawSugar, another social bookmarking service, has stopped all R&D efforts, as it is out of funding. Technically, RawSugar is not closing down, but looking for a new home for its technology. While it is sad to see RawSugar go, this was not news to me. As a matter of fact, I have been in close contact with Frank Smadja, RawSugar's VP of R&D, for some time now, working on a migration path for RawSugar's users. As the result, RawSugar users can now easily import their bookmarks into Simpy. If you are a RawSugar user, the import tool is at http://www.simpy.com/3p/rawsugar and it works just like the del.icio.us import.

The import is done in real-time and "in the background". Upon completion, an email is sent to the email address stored in the person's Simpy account. For each bookmark in RawSugar, the following attributes are imported: URL, title, note, tags, visibility (public or private), and add date (n.b. if the bookmark add date from RawSugar is before the creation date of your Simpy account, then the current date is used as your bookmark's add date).

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

Focusing on "lock-in" will fail with these teens - they don't care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.

Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.

Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven't found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.

The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

I should note that i don't think that the answer is "help teens remember passwords." I actually think that this tendency to shed is advantageous in the way that we shed clothes every year because the "old me" is no longer relevant. Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting.

I was tempted to open this blog with a clever quote about technology or about introductions in general, maybe something from Einstein or Wilde or Marconi, but then I thought the best way to introduce myself is simply to say, "Hey there, fellow tech talker."

I'm the new science and technology correspondent at CBS News, and I'd like this blog to be a transparent dialogue of ideas and opinions. I've spent the last 15 years covering science and technology in some form, working for places like The Vancouver Sun, CTV, and CNN. For more you can just click here. But in all my years of being plugged into the digital world I've never maintained a blog, so I hope I can do justice to this one.

LAist thinks that January should become Start A New Blog Month and if you've already got a blog that you've turned your back on, January should also be Write Something New on Your Damn Blog Month.

We have a pair of some excellent seats to the Justin Timberlake concert next Tuesday, January 16. Someone who has a blog or a myspace account who has a new post written and who has the LAist button (see it after the jump) on their side bar will get those tickets.

Justin just brought the sexy back to Anaheim last night, tomorrow he's in San Jose, then 1/12 in Sacramento, 1/14 in Phoenix - ok fine Glendale, AZ, and then Tuesday at Staples Center, followed by next Wednesday in Fresno, and next Friday in Vegas.

At the stroke of midnight on January 11th, 2007, every town in the United States will go on sale on a first come, first served basis (for the duration of the Landrush period). Those who Claim a town (zip code is used to define each town) will have an exclusive right to that town, and all the benefits that follow upon it, including the right to create and maintain their town's only Claim Owner's page.

The cost to claim a town is $100, and each Claim Owner has the right to sell it, use it to make money (generate income through advertising), tell the world about their town, product, service, art, life, thoughts, political opinions and much more. Each Claim Owner also is granted the right to vote on issues that impact our virtual United States, including which charities will benefit from the funds generated here, as 10% of each dollar taken in will be set aside for charitable giving.

The first come, first served Landrush period will only last for the month of January 2007, after which time, our policy of granting Claims only to verifiable residents of the town will go into effect. We believe this policy to be very important for the integrity of the content on the website, and in the best long-term interest of our Claim Owners.

Because subscribers use Photobucket primarily as a means to publish content elsewhere, Welch has a unique window into how traffic is moving around the Web. With a peek into the logs, he weighs in on the "death of myspace debate" rather definitively: Myspace "traffic is going up and to the right. It hasn't flattened at all." But at the same time, he's seeing fractionalization. Specialty networks like the goth site VampireFreaks.com are booming. And as Photobucket moves into the mainstream, its demographics are moving beyond the glitter set. Welch says users are starting to tend toward the 35/40 age range. "A lot of them have kids. Scrapbooking is huge. Two Peas in a Bucket is seeing a lot of traffic."

1) Tell us who you have secret crushes on.
2) We email your crushes asking who they like.
3) If you match we tell you both at same time. If you don't, they'll never know it was you.

Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

"This closes the loop between readers and publishers," he said. "Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implicit networking."

Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.

Two enterprising and ambitious journalists with the Fife Herald - Adam Morris and Paul Breslin - have launched a MySpace page linked to their paper (circ. 13,590), which is based in the town of Cupar. In just a couple of weeks the site has recruited 400 friends and it is being used, says Morris, "as a tool to get younger folk to give us story tip offs." Two examples: a local lad took a £100 car to Italy and back; revelations of raves in "a secret bunker".

As Morris rightly notes: "It's a totally untapped market for local papers, and it opens up new lines of communication."

The Ag is the work of Time's Matthew Yeomans, an early-rising journalist based in Cardiff, Wales. Yeomans scours his bookmarks and RSS feeds every weekday morning and writes a digested version of the best stories from hundreds of the world's great newspapers and blogs, giving you all the news you need to read without reading all the news.

The ad formats have varied from featured spots in the right-hand skyscraper unit to full site takeovers. Series promoted include "Grey's Anatomy" and "Gay, Straight or Taken" on Lifetime, "Wildfire" on ABC Family, "Dirt" on FX, "Beauty and the Geek" on The CW Network, and "Surreal Life: Fame Games" on VH1. Spots on the site--arranged by blog ad network Blogads--range from $800 per week to $9,000 per week for placements in the skyscraper to significantly more for full site takeovers. Blogads declined to disclose the exact figure.

Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, said that brands are willing to advertise with Perez to tap into the blog's enormous readership. Blogads reports 15.6 million ad impressions weekly on the premium ad spot on PerezHilton.com, making it the most highly trafficked space in the entire Blogads network. "The most important factor: everyone at agencies and the clients is reading Perez," he said. "They know their target audience is reading it. And they know they have to be there if they want to hit America's 2 million trend-mavenest women in their twenties and thirties--the women who are the queen bees in their offices for entertainment news."

This opportunity comes with a challenge. This year, aside from the usual self-deluded promises to eat better and exercise more, my New Year's resolution includes a pledge to be more in touch, especially with the elusive 18-34 age group.

I have no illusions that members of this coveted demographic will suddenly take to a guy as old as their fathers. But I want to understand them.

So I'm asking for their help in building a blog. The technical staff at The Post will handle the nuts and bolts. What I'm looking for are ways to encourage participation from people who aren't already regular correspondents. I am especially interested in Internet links that will let people go from my blog to other blogs or to websites that may decide to link back.

Now, I need some other ideas. I'm thinking the usual political suspects - ColoradoPols.com, ToTheRight.org, Colorado Confidential, the Drudge Report, that sort of thing. But I'm looking for some range here, say a link to Dan Savage, whose Savage Love sex column entertains my 20-something colleague Chris Frates.

The blog can only be so blue. But I wouldn't mind hearing from folks who are over-pierced and under 30 about what's on their minds. My hope for the blog is to expose myself - in a strictly intellectual sense, of course - to new ideas.

***

More than anything, though, I need participation and ideas outside the collection of usual suspects battling over Iraq, immigration, gun control and abortion. Those things will, of course, be fair game on the blog. But people certainly have lives outside of ideological flashpoints.

Now, the hard truth: digg is never going to go beyond this group on the digg.com domain name. Now, this isn't a digg to digg, this is just a fact of life and some friendly advice to Jay and Kevin. When you build a huge, passionate community like digg has (and Fark, Slashdot, Engadget, iVillage, and the Well have), you live and die with that group. If digg wants to go big they should start a second digg for women, and one for politics--they shouldn't do it as part of digg.

Lindzon, a longtime investment advisor and fund manager, says he created the short-form show to provide an alternative to unnecessarily complicated stock market analysis. He claims the show - which he alternately describes as "Cramer with breasts" and "buy high, sell high" - currently receives about 10,000 views per episode.

Wallstrip's friends-and-family investment round included venture capitalist Fred Wilson6. As for making money, Lindzon said the show is focused on building an audience for the time being. It currently uses limited post-roll ads via Revver.

With the funding, Wallstrip plans to create five more original shows on the topics of finance and venture capital. Lindzon says, whereas Wallstrip is keeping things upbeat and happy with the all-time-high theme, "not mucking around with companies like Dell," at least one of the other shows will tackle the fact that stocks don't always go up.

After much discussion and heartache we have decided to walk away from the Performancing deal. We listened to our Posties and other Metrics users, dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn't what we were looking for right now.

The decision has been made by Nick at Performancing to make the Metrics platform Open Source and I believe that is a wise decision. Nick is a great guy and I wish him much luck with the other aspects of Performancing.com. Nick did what he could to keep the hosted version of Metrics running, but in the end it just wasn't a fit

Whatever happened, this isn't pretty. After the deal was announced, Performancing moved their non-acquired assets to a new domain name and re-launched that service. They certainly stopped talking to other potential acquirors, given that the deal was officially announced. In merger-land, this is what's known as "being left at the altar" because everyone down the road who you talk to will want to know why the previous deal exploded.

Performancing should have had a more nailed down acquisition agreement, so they aren't entirely blameless.

Several uber-A Listers have multiple posts in the Top 100, if not in the Top 10. Michelle Malkin does have the #6 post ("Danish cartoonists threatened by Muslim extremists"), plus 17 more. Engadget has ten in the Top 100, including a hilarious comment on a Teddy Bear USB drive with a removeable head at #22; Think Progress also has ten, including a clip of Bill Clinton talking about the war on terror from Fox News, at #11; Boing Boing lists eight times, including a critique of the digital rights protection measures on the new Coldplay CD, at #21.

As in life, all things Google resonated in the blogosphere - the Google Blog registered 11 top 100 posts, including a post on the company's acquisition of Writely at #10, and a post about Google in China at #17.

Some regularly-cited top bloggers did not make the top post list, including Gizmodo, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, and Gawker. Daily Kos had just one post on the list (#85, a transcript of Stephen Colbert's White House correspondents dinner speech).

Daniela Cicarelli, a model and ex-wife of soccer great Ronaldo, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.

For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.

Cicarelli and boyfriend Tato Malzoni filed to force YouTube to take the video down and demanded $116,000 in damages for each day the video remains up. Some copies of the video have been taken off the site but users have reposted it.

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.

If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.

The more important kind of widgets are those that let you take data from one Website and embed them into another. Sometimes these are called Web badges or snippets, but they let you remix the Web to your liking by adding, say, a customized search box to your blog, a YouTube video to your MySpace page, or create a whole page of widgets on NetVibes by pulling in your Gmail, favorite RSS feeds, and photos from around the Web. If you use TypePad, there is a whole gallery of widgets you can add to your blog, including your linkroll or a one-click video chatting button.

The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don't matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web.

Some are already calling 2007 the -year of the widget. But ever since Websites started opening up their innards a few years ago and giving away their data through open APIs any programmer could access, the widgetization of the Web was already on its way. Now, nearly anyone can grab a widget and slap it onto their blog, NetVibes or MySpace page.

Widget startups will spring up that not only disseminate information to an atomized Web, but use their widgets to gather information as well in order to recentralize and repackage it.

Each blog posts automatically redirects the searcher to one of a handful of different people search engines that I don't care to link to. People-Search.com is among the most popular. You can spot these and others in dozens of Google Blog Search results for my site and others.

All of these new spam blogs are powered by Google's Blogger platform. However, they are getting indexed by all of the relevant search engines, including as of this writing Technorati. Google needs to put a stop to these immediately. It seems easily remedied if they can mine the blogs for the redirecting code.

1. Buzz Detection
We automatically detect new buzz by crawling 50,000 of the very best web sites, blogs, and news sources. Then our technology crunches the raw data from these sites to identify new buzz that's just starting to spread. We developed the technology to find new things just when they start accelerating in popularity and provoking interesting conversations. Our technology is also supplemented by a network of human taste-makers and tips submitted by BuzzFeed readers. These savvy humans can spot subtle trends our robots might miss.

2. Editorial Commentary
The moment we detect new buzz, it appears in a special terminal interface used by our editors. The terminal is a sophisticated interface that shows trend data from multiple sources. Our editors are experts at using the terminal to publish a quick summary that highlights the newest and most interesting buzz on the front page of BuzzFeed.com. The editorial process transforms a messy jumble of buzz data and submissions into a quick, fun summary of the hottest new buzz.

3. Buzz Tracking
Finally we track the buzz as it spreads through word-of-mouth and blogs. Our trend pages link to the most interesting commentary, videos, news articles, and debate - so you can track a movie, band, person, or idea as it grows in popularity. For each item on BuzzFeed, you can watch the number of links grow as we link to more people fueling the buzz on their own sites and blogs. When something we are tracking gets especially popular, we bring it back to the front page of the site to show how far it has spread since it was first detected.

Even enthusiastic Stickam users say the site often feels lawless. "People are very vulgar and like to 'get their jollies' from harassing people, mainly girls, to take off their clothes," said Chelsey, a 17-year-old user from Saskatchewan in Canada, who signed up after her 13-year-old sister violated the site's age rules and joined the service.

"I'm pretty sure none of their parents know or even think about the things that they are doing on this site," said Chelsey, who said in an e-mail message that she did not feel comfortable using her last name in an interview.

Other companies that offer Web cam chats say that the technology seems to attract abuse. "There are just some people who, if you give them a Web cam, are going to take off their clothes," said Jason Katz, founder of PalTalk, an eight-year-old service that lets users converse over Web cams on various topics. Unlike Stickam, PalTalk asks for a credit card and charges a monthly fee, which it says prevents minors from signing up.

Mr. Kihioka of Stickam said that in some respects, his site was actually safer than other social networks. Live video feeds let users "know who they are talking to," he said. "Unlike MySpace, it is hard to disguise yourself." But he added that his company had the same concerns about child safety as MySpace and was working on an automated system that would monitor live video feeds for indecency.

1. 2006 Petition Against Changes in the Livejournal Interface on mother.livejournal.com, linked by 801 posts
2. Colbert Does the White House Correspondents Dinner on Crooks and Liars, linked by 622 posts
3. Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell Of a Commentary on Rumsfeld from Crooks and Liars, linked by 359 posts
4. State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 from Sifry.com, linked by 339 posts.
5. Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on Bush: Who has left this hole in the ground? We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have. May this country forgive you. from Crooks and Liars, linked by 330 posts.
6. Support Denmark: Why The Forbidden Cartoons Matter from MichelleMalkin.com, linked by 307 posts.
7. SNL: If Al Gore were President from Crooks and Liars, linked by 286 posts.
8. Milking it? from EU Referendum, linked by 284 posts.
9. State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth from Sifry.com, linked by 282 posts.
10. State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth from Sifry.com, linked by 269 posts.

Bloggers rapidly highlighted the faulty graphic last night. At Daily Kos, a diary started by one user included comments from hundreds of users debating whether or not the graphic was constructed deliberately. While some noted the proximity of the program to New Year's Eve might have resulted in sleepy graphic artists at the cable network, others insisted that the 'B' and 'S' keys are far from one another on the keyboard, making a mere typographical error unlikely. Instead, they saw an anti-Obama bias in the news media as the source of the CNN graphic.

***

In an interview with RAW STORY, Senator Obama's Press Secretary Tommy Vietor said he thought there was "no malicious intent" behind the graphic. "Wolf Blitzer is a good person and journalist. Someone made a mistake in a graphic, and that's as far as it goes," he said.

Vietor said the senator and Blitzer had not yet managed to connect on the phone, but that there was a message in his voicemail before 8 AM this morning expressing Blitzer's intent to apologize in person.

Senator Obama's Press Secretary also added "We really appreciate the people in the blogosphere who brought this to our attention, and act as our eyes and ears."

Do comments make it a blog? Do the lack of comments make it not a blog? Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.

We already had mail lists before we had blogs. The whole notion that blogs should evolve to become mail lists seems to waste the blogs. Comments are very much mail-list-like things. A few voices can drown out all others. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you're looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.

1. Boing Boing
2. Engadget
3. Post Secret
4. Daily Kos
5. Huffington Post
6. Gizmodo
7. Instapundit
8. Michelle Malkin
9. Crooks and Liars
10. Dooce

1. Engadget
2. Boing Boing
3. Gizmodo
4. TechCrunch
5. Huffington Post
6. DailyKos
7. Lifehacker
8. PostSecret
9. Ars Technica
10. yanxi.bokewu.com

Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad - 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog. Just one accidental deletion and a couple of hacks added a bit of spice and drama.

But today bloggers are starting to ask if the Official Google Blog is even an actual blog. The reason? It doesn't allow readers to leave comments. The Official Google blog does list links to other sites referencing any given post (a sort of trackback), but that's it. The conversation ends there.