With its third issue, Blueprint: Design Your Life, the newest lifestyle magazine from the creators of Martha Stewart Living, is introducing Bluelines, a daily blog today. In our need-to-know-it-now age, this blog is an immediate and essential extension of the new, bimonthly periodical, Blueprint. Bluelines features fun finds, favorite sources, inspiring ideas, and clever shortcuts for women ages 25-39 who are interested in creating and refining their own personal style. The Blueprint blog is part of the launch of the blueprintmag.com website, which links to marthastewart.com.

"Bluelines adds another exciting dimension to Blueprint. Readers are constantly looking for new ideas and the Blueprint editors are thrilled to share their latest and greatest discoveries with them on a daily basis -- from our favorite online handyman who will tell you how to fix anything to the new oversized tote the entire fashion department is ordering. Now our readers can enjoy an instant fix online along with the sumptuous, in-depth experience they get when reading the magazine," said Blueprint Editor-in-Chief Sarah Humphreys.

Instead, budding musicians will be asked to sign up on a record label Web site such as www.columbiademos.co.uk or www.rcademos.co.uk to blog their music, photos and videos.

"Blogging is clearly one of the major trends in music, media and entertainment," said Sony BMG's U.K. and Ireland Music Entertainment Chairman and Chief Executive Ged Doherty.

"A hundred thousand new blogs go online each day at the moment, and the blogosphere is doubling every 230 days, so it makes complete sense for the major labels to use the process in a creative way to encourage, discover and communicate with new artists," he said.

The move echoes strategies used by start-ups such as Amsterdam-based Sellaband and San Francisco-based social-networking site Bebo to attract talent and get artists known quickly to a fast-growing audience.

From Monday the next Arctic Monkeys must upload a video or MP3 audio package to a new SonyBMG website where it will be assessed by label bosses and any musician or fan who chooses to log on at columbiademos.co.uk or rcademos.co.uk.

The change is necessary because Mr Doherty does not believe that recorded music, overall, will recover. "Digital sales are not going to make up the decline in physical CD revenue," he says. "By 2010 income from CDs will be down 50 per cent. The old world is gone for ever.

"We need to enter into a new relationship with our artists, where they see us as partners rather than the enemy." The demo blogs are designed to create an open, transparent access point for musicians.

Blogging is one of the major trends in music, media and entertainment, and we think it's about time that a major record label uses the new medium to find and communicate with new artists

We want to offer all those artists out there a new, efficient way of presenting yourself to our label's A&R managers, and using blogs for this purpose will be drastically easier for all involved parties.

Because we are open for submissions and conversations with interested artists, and the market-place, in general.

What happens if you guys like me / my band?

If we like your band we will first bounce your blog links around internally and collect feedback, and see how high the collective level of interest is. We may contact you, or visit one of your shows, or request more information, at any time.

If things get more serious we may offer you a development deal or some other form of collaboration – this all depends on the individual A&R manager that will engage with you but you will be engaged in normal A&R process.

Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month - statistics that haven't been released until now. That's a huge jump.

First, myself and non-college friends appear to be getting more unsolicited invites from others - including those not in school - to connect on Facebook. Facebook is going mainstream.

But there’s an undercurrent of development happening, suggesting Facebook may be seeing serious momentum in other ways. It's old news that Facebook opened its application programming interface last year, which lets software developers outside Facebook build other applications on top of Facebook's platform and data. The open project is called the Facebook Platform. But Facebook’s growth over the past several months, and improvement to its API policy, deserve attention.

Imagine Facebook user profiles and networks everywhere. In a suite of office software. In an online classroom. In a family's entertainment system. In whatever application developers choose to connect with.

So the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million. Twitter allows users to post a small update via SMS, instant messaging client and the web. Anyone who chooses to follow you will get that update on the Twitter home page, or their mobile phone of they choose to. Unlike most mobile phone web services, you can update via SMS from anywhere in the world and from virtually any handset.

Although Twitter was designed to let users announce what they're doing at the time of posting, we have already seen other uses coming up. The train system in San Fransisco (BART) uses Twitter to announce changes in schedules; conference participants use it to post notes of the sessions at the conference and there are updates from news companies like BBC via Twitter.

There is a secret sauce here -- once somebody has stored their photo somewhere they will guard it zealously. Their online social life, so built around images, depends on it. That is what excites CEO Welch. "We're fad-proof," he declares. "If one social networking site goes away and another comes up the user just moves, but their content stays with Photobucket." He tries hard not to compete with the sites where his users congregate, which he calls "the social edge." "We focus very much on not being a community," Welch explains. "We let the communities build around us."

A recent story on News.com tried to poke holes in the Photobucket, so to speak, by saying that "critics" claimed the business would be at risk if MySpace ever withdrew permission to host links there. But that's about as likely as MySpace simply ejecting members by the millions. If it prohibited their precious links it would face a user revolt.

But in fact the flexibility Photobucket gives users to shift their links to other sites does enable them to flee MySpace, something many teenagers have recently been doing as they migrated to Facebook, where security and control provisions are greater.

The real risk to Photobucket would be if the next hot social network were able to become popular while prohibiting linking from the outset. But given how users have learned to behave, that might be difficult to achieve.

How much growth has Twitter lost because of all the time it's unavailable? I have never engaged in sustained use of a web app that is down this much - I can imagine large numbers of other people just walk away and never come back. Everybody says Evan Williams has struck gold in this wildly succesful new service - but I'm sure he knows there's a real risk of that never proving true do to constant service problems. Good luck to the Twitter folks - I sure wish the site was up!

So the bloggers weren't even talking about current conditions in Baghdad. That left it to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post -- and author of the heralded 2006 book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" -- who appeared on MSNBC's "Countdown" tonight to debunk this idea of a newly-safe Baghdad. "I talk to Iraqis all the time," he said.

He revealed that there had been steady insurgent artillery shots falling in the supposedly safe "Green Zone" all week, at least two Americans had died there in recent days, and U.S. Embassy staff had been instructed, in a switch, to wear their protective vests outside at all times. He also disclosed that the embassy's pool, scene of much partying in the recent past, has now been declared off-limits to extended stays.

To back up his point that pulling out of Iraq would be a disaster, President Bush had said today, "They have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we've got here," in a speech to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

Then he quoted two of them: "Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed."

Only hours later did the White House reveal that the bloggers were brothers, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, and these supposedly little-known average Joes had met Bush in the Oval Office in 2004. They are dentists and write an English-language blog from Baghdad called IraqTheModel.com, also available via Pajamas Media.

James Paone, a partner at Lomurro, Davison, Eastman and Munoz in Freehold, N.J., said that the firm's insurer - The Chubb Corp. - said several weeks ago that it would not add the blog to the existing policy. "We were in the process of beginning to set up a blog, having internal discussions about what areas of law would be the subjects," he said. "We wanted to cover the first base, which is [Chubb's] coverage. Our insurance carrier said [a blog] is not a risk they were interested in insuring. The entire discussion stopped."

Paone said his firm contacted Chubb to ask about insurance coverage in case someone tried to sue it over content in the blog. Now, the law firm is in the process of setting up a meeting with Chubb "so we can understand what their rationale is for saying they weren't interested in covering that kind of risk," Paone said.

Yahoo Inc. will offer international news from reporters working with U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy Co., including a blog written by Iraqi staffers, the companies said on Wednesday.

The project will be called "Trusted Voices," and feature coverage from McClatchy foreign correspondents based in the Middle East, China and Latin America, among other regions.

Yahoo plans to launch the coverage on its news site early in the second quarter of 2007. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

The new blog will be led by Mergers&Acquisitions reporter Dennis Berman and former Bloomberg reporter Dana Cimilluca. It will also incorporate reporting from Wall Street journal correspondents in New York, London and Hong Kong, as well as WSJ.com editors and Dow Jones Newswires private equity reporters.

The site is free for both journal subscribers and non-subscribers. In a press release, the paper billed the blog as "the centerpiece to an expanded arena of deals coverage by the Journal, with additional community tools, graphics and video to launch in coming months."

"Deal news itself is quickly commoditized on the Web," said Berman in a statement. "Where the Journal provides value is our insight, experience and intellect. Our collective observations on a given situation are what make all the difference -- and we hope to deliver a bit of humor and entertainment, too."

1. Athletics Nation
2. Baseball Musings
3. MetsBlog
4. Bleed Cubbie Blue
5. Viva El Birdos
6. USS Mariner
7. Lookout Landing
8. Minor League Ball
9. MLB Trade Rumors
10. Baseball Analysts

There are three criteria that Sports Media Challenge use to rank blogs for the top 10 - Influence, Fan Engagement and Quality. These criteria combine quantitative aspects, including the number of incoming links that connect to the blog, number of fan comments as well as qualitative measurement by Sports Media Challenge analysts.

Sandra Gidley, the Liberal Democrat MP, hasn't posted since January 2006. In one of her last entries, she wrote, "I made a new year's resolution to resume the blog, but to be honest the beginning of the year was depressing" (Gidley was one of those who called for Charles Kennedy to go). Tory MP Theresa May hasn't posted since December, stating the obvious with the comment: "OK, so my previous promise to make my blogs more frequent may have fallen by the wayside."

Sandra Gidley, the Liberal Democrat MP, hasn't posted since January 2006. In one of her last entries, she wrote, "I made a new year's resolution to resume the blog, but to be honest the beginning of the year was depressing" (Gidley was one of those who called for Charles Kennedy to go). Tory MP Theresa May hasn't posted since December, stating the obvious with the comment: "OK, so my previous promise to make my blogs more frequent may have fallen by the wayside."

Celebrity blogs are faring little better. "Oh my goodness, I am so sorry it has taken me so long to write!!" posts the actor Gillian Anderson in one of the last entries on her website in August last year, which shows she can't have been that sorry. Barbra Streisand's sideline in political commentary can't be dependent on keeping up the pressure - her last entry was four months ago. Some blogs, such as Mariah Carey's, in which she famously left rambling, incoherent messages before going into therapy, seem to have disappeared altogether.

"You have to be opinionated and passionate about what you write, or your enthusiasm will wane," says Drew Benvie, social media adviser for Lewis PR and a blogging expert. Benvie thinks now is the time to dig out your old password and get back to blogging. "Companies are starting to see them as a way of promoting their products. Write about films and you might get tickets to screenings; write about gadgets and you might be sent gadgets to test."

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I'm not. I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I've been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that's not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs... blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you've probably heard of.

I'm physically ill after reading what happened to Kathy Sierra. Maryam and several others here at PodTech asked me about it and are concerned since the same sites that are attacking Kathy also mentioned me and Maryam. Maryam is really freaked out about it. So am I.

It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don't care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man.

But the service of San Francisco-based Obvious Corp. might go down as one of the era's silliest fads, along with unreadable MySpace designs and blog widgets that display pictures of recent visitors.

These deep thoughts leap into the world as blog posts — as well as text and instant messages to blather-stream subscribers. But it probably won't take many posts about midnight fridge raids and toenails ripping through socks for readers to conclude their Twitter pals are turning into twits.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and George pitch NBC "a show about nothing"? At one point Costanza asks a network executive, "What did you do today?"

"I got up and came to work," the exec replies.

"There's a show!" George exclaims. "That's a show."

That's also a Twitter.

"The people are leading the charge into podcasting, and we don't take it for granted that all they want is American Idol," says Ron Bloom, CEO and co-founder of PodShow.com, a podcast network that offers links to 60,000 podcasts in 135 categories.

Podcasts with wide audiences are not so new; the president, the pope and even the Queen of England all have them. But an increasing slice of the podcast menu is more specialized and education-oriented.

One podcast tracking site lists nearly 1,300 podcasts in its education category out of a total of about 30,000 tracked; another lists more than 1,900 out of about 32,000. On iTunes, ground zero for the podcast universe, a dozen education-related podcasts regularly rank in the daily top 100 podcasts based on subscriptions.

"Almost any category you pick in podcasting is exploding," says Dave Hitt, a talk-show podcaster (Quick Hitts) who also helps run the Podcast Peer Awards, in which podcasters vote on the best in 16 categories. "Podcasting didn't exist 2½ years ago, so the number (of podcasts) has gone from zero to estimates of more than 50,000" in a short time.

Another storied print magazine is coming to an end in print, and the focus is shifting to online and events: InfoWorld, the weekly magazine owned by IDG, is closing down, and the announcement will come Monday morning, paidContent.org has confirmed. It was first reported in MediaSurvey premium newsletter here. InfoWorld has been a pioneer online and has been the earliest to embrace new techniques and forms of journalism and advertising, including blogging, podcasts, RSS (and ads in it), screencasting and others, so this move probably makes sense.

The worst thing: the staff internally didn't know about this until this story came out, and got picked up by SF Chronicle and Valleywag among others. From what my sources told me, there won't be too many layoffs as most of the team had been working on multiplatform already: print, online and events. And don't discount the events side, as that was a major source of revenue for the brand.

The topics are limitless and may range from counterfeit cigars to a new spirit on the market, to a memorable round of golf at a storied track.

The blogs are free for all to view, and subscribers to Cigar Insider can also submit posts and enjoy a direct dialogue with the editors.

"The blogs give the editors of Cigar Aficionado a unique opportunity to write on a variety of topics, not always about cigars and at times on a whim," said Marvin R. Shanken, editor and publisher of Cigar Aficionado. "They have been hugely popular with our sister site, WineSpectator.com and we are confident the same will be true for Cigar Aficionado."

More than one in every eight children has been bullied by email or text message, psychologists have claimed.

The phenomenon - dubbed 'cyber-bullying' - is becoming more common, with girls most likely to be targeted.

A five-year survey of almost 15,227 children aged 11 to 13 found a steady increase in the number receiving nasty or threatening emails and texts.

Twenty-one per cent of girls were victims of cyber-bullying last year, while ten per cent of boys were victimised.

Fifteen per cent of pupils reported suffering harassment via text or the Internet.

The survey was carried out by psychologists Nathalie Noret of York St John University College and Ian Rivers, of Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh.

Students at a suburban Catholic school are being ordered to take down their photos, snappy comments, or anything else they may have posted on MySpace.com.

Friday is the deadline for students at St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School to follow orders or risk suspension. School Principal Sister Margaret Van Velzen sent letters home to parents this week saying, in part, that if families allow children to continue their MySpace.com sites, they will not be allowed to return to school. The school plans to use its computer-savvy staff members to monitor the site for student activity.The principal declined comment, but St. Hugo office manager Judy Martinek said the principal just wants to keep the students safe.

"We've stated our position and we hope all students are in the process of taking down their sites by tomorrow," said Martinek.

Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin said most websites were aimed at being provocative and were run by frustrated journalists and political pundits, the Star daily reported.

"Do not quote them because you are disgracing yourself as you are the authority. Do not give credit to such anarchist websites," Zainuddin was quoted as saying.

Malaysia's media is kept under tight control, while blogs have seen an increase in popularity as Malaysians take to cyberspace to discuss politics and social issues.

Blogs run by Malaysians in recent months have alleged corruption by government figures in writings that later sparked mainstream news reports.

"The information posted on the blog website may be something provocative, politically motivated, inaccurate and is mostly rumour floated for the interests of certain parties," Zainuddin was quoted as saying by the state Bernama news agency.

News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends, according to people close to the negotiations.

The two companies enlisted help from some of Google's biggest Internet rivals. The News Corp.-NBC Universal partnership has deals with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and News Corp.'s MySpace to place videos in front of their collective audience of hundreds of millions.

Despite Hollywood's dismal track record in creating successful joint ventures, these players see little choice but to band together to compete against Google and Apple Inc., which are becoming powerful distributors of entertainment.

News Corp. and NBC Universal want to control how their shows are watched online and to hold onto advertising dollars migrating to the Web. Google is expected to gobble up nearly a third of all online advertising revenue this year, according to research firm EMarketer Inc.

At launch, full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef, plus hits from the studios' vast television libraries, will be available free, on an ad-supported basis, within a rich consumer experience featuring personalized video playlists, mashups, online communities and video search. Plus, the extensive programming lineup will include fan favorite films like Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, Devil Wears Prada, The Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy with bonus materials and movie trailers. Post-launch, plans will be considered for acquiring additional content as well as producing and licensing original programming for the new site's audience.

View your snipped URLs

Edit your snipped URLs, including their nickname etc

Search through your snipped URLs

View popularity statistics on your own snipped URLs

links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of "trusted bloggers")

links from other sources (mail, chats)

using tags to categorize a post

PageRank

the number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers)

clicks in search results

The popularity of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of that blog document. A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called "news readers" or "feed readers") exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also, subscriptions can be validated against "subscriptions spam" (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them "more popular") by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers.

To rank the search results, Google combines a quality score obtained by mixing those signals with a relevance score (IR score) that depends on the query. "The IR score may be determined based on the number of occurrences of the search terms in the document. The IR score may be determined based on where the search terms occur within the document (e.g., title, content, etc.) or characteristics of the search terms (e.g., font, size, color, etc.). A search term may be weighted differently from another search term when multiple search terms are present. The proximity of the search terms when multiple search terms are present may influence the IR score." (the quote was slightly altered for clarity)

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the "founding father of personal blogging"?

Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier proto-blogs? The answer is most likely "yes" to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title "first blogger" is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).

Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of Scripting News, which launched on April 1, 1997.

He boasts on his site that Scripting News "bootstrapped the blogging revolution" and that it is the "longest currently running Web log on the Internet." A decade ago, however, Winer wasn't actually using the term "Web log," nor does he claim to have invented the term. Winer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CNET News.com until after this article appeared. He replied in a post claiming "the first blogs were inspired" by Scripting News.

I hope you that you've noticed the changes taking place on my web site mrmagazine.com. With the addition of the blog and the regular updates of all the new launches you will be able to keep up with the latest happenings in the magazine world we love and enjoy. When in comes to new magazine launches, you will see every single title with its cover picture and frequency. The magazines will be posted only, and only if we have the actual physical copy of the first issue. If we miss your new magazine, please feel free to send it to us and we will make sure it will be added to the list. Remember, change is the only constant in our business.

The researchers said large advertisers were to blame for a significant share of the spam problem.

"Ultimately, it is advertisers' money that is funding the search-spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the Web with low-quality content and reducing Web users' productivity," they write in the paper, which will be presented in May at the International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta.

Mr. Wang, group manager and senior researcher for cybersecurity and systems management at Microsoft, said, "The good guys are part of the problem."

The researchers' specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft's Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.

The video-sharing Web site announced Monday that it will hold the first YouTube Video Awards to recognize the best-user created videos of 2006. The awards will be handed out in seven categories: most creative, most inspirational, best series, best comedy, musician of the year, best commentary and "most adorable video ever."

The nominees, picked by YouTube, are compiled in a gallery at www.youtube.com/YTAwards. YouTube community members can vote on their favorites beginning Monday and concluding on Friday. The winners, as chosen by the community, will be announced March 25. Each will be prominently featured on YouTube and receive a trophy, the design of which will be revealed later.

Among the nominees are noted "vloggers" Paul Robinett ("Renetto") and Peter Oakley ("Geriatric1927"). The comedy of Barats and Bereta, and Smosh, is also nominated, as are series such as Lonelygirl15's and "Ask a Ninja." The power pop band OK Go is perhaps the most professional of the nominees; it's nominated for the famous treadmill-choreographed music video, "Here It Goes Again."

I have the pleasure of confirming the rumors: Heather Harde, currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, will start her new job as the CEO of the TechCrunch Network (and my boss) by the end of the month. This isn't the way I hoped to announce this news, but Om Malik broke the story after an internal Fox email got out.

It was tough to talk Heather into leaving Fox, where she’s been for the last ten years. In that time she's had a combination of operating and corporate development roles. Most recently, she was part of the founding executive team of Fox Interactive Media. At FIM she ran the mergers and acquisitions team, which was responsible for eight acquisitions, totaling $1.3 billion, and two equity investment deals. Prior to Fox, Heather was at business school at Harvard.

At a "global summit" of its most-valued software developers, Microsoft repeatedly declared that it would "win" in search and other parts of its Windows Live internet strategy.

"The words are empty," Scoble responded. "Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that's 'in it to win', then I don't get it."

He continued: "Microsoft isn't going away. Don't get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the inter-net? Come on.

"Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative."

Scoble's comments reflect wider concerns - shared by some Microsoft insiders - that the poorly understood Windows Live initiative is failing to make the impact expected when it was unveiled 18 months ago.

Anna Wintour is as picky with words as she is with her wardrobe. According to one Vogue-er, "They are expanding the Vogue Web site and getting more involved with the Internet. But Anna hates the word 'blog' so much, she refuses to call anything on her site a blog and has charged her staff with coming up with a new word that isn't as garish-sounding. She wants it ASAP - in time for launch." However, a source close to Wintour said, "Anna just doesn't want people to refer to stories as blogs, because they're not. It's an improper use of the word." A rep said, "Anna has nothing against blogs."

90% of my blogging is now on Twitter...

If you want to hear my thoughts going forward I suggest joining my twitter group: http://twitter.com/JasonCalacanis

you'll get like 2-15 alerts on your phone/AIM a day with my links, thoughts, discussions, etc.

I'm thinking of doing a week of Twitter-only blogging.... so, join now!

500 people are already on the group... crazy!

Let's say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?

Probably too many for most people to even try, if the numbers run by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, are accurate. On his blog (lsvp.wordpress.com), Mr. Liew determined that even the type of site that can get the largest advertiser payments per user would have to be immensely popular before it made that kind of money.

The analysis is "sobering," wrote Tim O'Reilly, the chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books. "This may be why more entrepreneurs are going for low-investment sites that don’t need an exit but provide 'lifestyle businesses' for their owners," he wrote on Radar, his company's blog (radar.oreilly.com).

That is, rather than seek venture financing and hire a staff, it may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site — say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts — and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on.

Personal Bee's founder will come in as VP of business development at Technorati; we're not sure whether the value of the target was in engineering, where Technorati's been weak. Any significance beyond that? One person familiar with Personal Bee says Technorati -- which has in the past offered brand-tracking to marketers, ego-surfing to bloggers and search to ordinary users -- plans now to build themed news pages in the style of Techmeme.

Nearly 80 percent of home buyers start their search on the Internet - soon they'll have more to look at.

On its Web site, the Peninsula on Indian River Bay development in Delaware has begun using high-quality, television news-style presentation to sell homes. On the site, viewers take interactive tours of the property, led by two on-line hosts, through different site "channels."

According to Roland Varesko, president of Ecendent Interactive, the production company that put together Peninsula's site, nobody is doing this on as grand a scale as the Peninsula. "It's like having your own TV show," he says.

But the trend is sure to spread. Even now, the economics are such that a development of 50 to 100 homes could afford a Web site like Peninsula's, according to Varesko. And big real estate brokers, such as Century 21, Coldwell Banker (both part of Realogy) and Re/Max, are quickly ramping up.

"I believe streaming videos on Web sites is the wave of the future," says Charlie Young, vice president for marketing for broker Coldwell Banker.

I have been called a patriot, and treated like a criminal. I have been called a Soldier and treated as the enemy. I have been told to get a hair cut and not to eat the civilians. My humor misses most people. Sometimes it is too rough, too dark, and too close to home. But that is what happens when you have seen too much and spoken too little. It finds a way to the surface. A way to be heard.

I have stood by long enough.

I have been mistreated, and I have seen others mistreated. I had the system that is supposed to help me, hurt me. I have seen it hurt others. I have seen this place break a Soldier down. I have seen the hope slowly leeched from a Soldier. Vibrant and full of pride, ready to be healed and return to the fight, broken down, spirit trampled, and hope taken from them. I have seen it. And I have been that Soldier.

The Rugs Done Right Blog focuses on area rugs, highlighting new styles and trends, care and cleaning tips, purchasing advice and decorating ideas. Blog posts are written by Jamie Carney, an area rug proprietor and the BuyRugsDirect.com site owner. The move to RugsDoneRight.com offers Carney the opportunity to provide additional services to her Buy Rugs Direct customers, and the blog is the first of these new features.

Blog topics vary, but the central theme is always area rugs. Posts are short and succinct, quickly making a point or offering advice before directing readers to a link with more information. Recent posts have discussed: what to look for when choosing an area rug for your home; the proper care and cleaning of rugs; the pros and cons of different materials; and how to install and protect area rugs throughout your home.

Flickr collections visually differentiate themselves from Flickr sets by using the mosaic-style icon you see in the screenshot above. Unfortunately it looks like collections are Flickr Pro-only, though any plain old Flickr account holder knows you don't get enough sets with you free account to have much of a need for collections anyway.

We were not surprised, then, when many Slashdot users either derided or hammered our idea collection effort after a news item about it was posted on the site's homepage on Sunday morning. Some suggested we'd be better off drinking lots of Jamaican beer. Another commenter wrote: "This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard out of [The Economist]. They actually will compensate you, with a rocking 6-mo web-subscription to economist.com (street value: roughly $50)... Perhaps the Economist should actually talk to their economists, and ask them what 'Incentive Compatibility' means. If I were the Economist, I'd be terribly embarrassed about this."

As often with such debates on Slashdot, however, they raise an important point, which is then only superficially discussed before moving on to other more fundamental things (the debate quickly digressed to talking about democracy, Hitler, the Soviet Union and, of course, Ayn Rand). Yet the underlying issue is indeed a crucial one – and one we probably need to resolve somehow if we want to make this project a success: How can we cleverly combine – to mutual benefit - ultimately for-profit efforts such as Project Red Stripe and "commons-based peer production", in the words of Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School.

And if our terms and conditions really keep you from submitting your great idea, you can always do what Jeff Jarvis, the creator of the popular blog BuzzMachine, has suggested - and some have already done: post them on you own blog. But don't forget to send us a link.

Things have changed on the off-line front. I have to go now. It has been a lot of fun. I might be back sometime in the future, but I need to stop for awhile anyway.

TaTa For Now.

Usually, the VHB provides links, charts, stats and commentary (like about the number of properties on the Vancouver market and their average prices, historical patterns, comparisons between Vancouver and other cities) that have the implicit questions -- is this a bubble and will it crash?

His last post on Friday left no indication that a halt was in the works, so those who visited his blog on Monday morning expressed surprise. "This is very sudden and I am sad to hear that the mysterious VHB will no longer be making the prescient posts I have become used to reading over the past 12+ months," said a commenter named Mohican.

"Please!!! Don't go! She'll come round!! Just involve her more...She can do some graphs and you guys can research, together," said a commenter named Mighty Mouse.

"Well good luck with that. If you can, keep the site alive. It will be interesting to go back and check the comments in the future. We are going to look like either prescient geniuses or ignorant boobs. I don't think there is much in between," said a commenter named Freako.

Thanks to all who have posted such nice things over the past few weeks. Life is going very well, thank you. I do miss blogging in a way, but on the whole it is better to get on with the coolness that is life. Enjoy the crash! (Whenever it comes . . .) VHB out.

Topix.net, the news search site majority owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, has bought its .com domain after paying a Canadian company $1 million in January (late last year Topix received $15 million funding), and is planning to move the site onto Topix.com, reports WSJ. The story, which makes a bigger point about search engine influence on other sites, says it is worried about the effect on its Google rankings after this. About 50 percent of visits to Topix come through a search engine, and about 90 percent out of that is through Google...Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10 percent, that would essentially be a 10 percent loss in ad revenue, CEO Rick Skrenta said in the story. Topix will run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search results.

"YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site," said Viacom in a statement.

"Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

Last month, Viacom, which also owns cable networks VH1 and Comedy Central, told YouTube to remove 100,000 "unauthorised" clips.

Viacom said its demand came after YouTube and Google failed to install tools to "filter" the unauthorised video clips following negotiations.

"There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process," it said.

Here in Richmond, at Virginia Commonwealth University, professors Jon Ackley and Michael Pitts decided to explore the business of NASCAR by creating a class titled "From Dirt Tracks to Madison Avenue." The class, a five-week honors module, has been offered three times during the fall semester and will be offered again in the fall of 2007.

The class featured a variety of speakers from all different aspects of NASCAR, including Katherine Wintsch from The Martin Agency, the advertising firm that handles the NASCAR account, and Nate Ryan, motor sports columnist for USA Today.

"Our goal is to give the students an overview of the business side of NASCAR," Ackley said. "We talk very little about actual racing although we don't bypass that discussion when questions are raised. In the end, when students indicate that they might still not be fans but appreciate the magnitude of the sport, we believe we have accomplished our goal."

Now the two professors have broken out of the classroom and onto the Internet with a new blog. The blog, "The View From Here: The Business of NASCAR," was launched on Feb. 15. Like the class, it explores the money end of NASCAR.

But the most significant changes are are under the hood. Instead of presenting a default set of content to new users to start them off, My Yahoo is now analyzing known data about the user (zip code from IP address and the areas of Yahoo that the user visits often) to create a customized version right at signup. So, for example, if the user tends to go to the Yahoo Movies property occasionally, a Yahoo Movies module will be auto added when they create a new My Yahoo account.

Until e-ink gets cheap and ordinary people can gaze into their very own super high contrast electronic copy of the NY Times, we'll have to settle for sneak peeks at concept devices like this, E Ink's blueChute e-ink tablet. Even though the exact functionality of the device has yet to be decided -- currently it's functioning as a glorified demo platform -- the blueChute's Bluetooth support and microSD slot would suggest that it could be used to display maps streamed from a mobile phone, or have it display widget-like information from a nearby tethered computer.

The survey is conducted quarterly, and the previous quarter marked the first time that Facebook was tops among both women and men.

Two blogs were in the female top 10 list for the first time: Pink Is the New Blog and What Would Tyler Durden Do? (WWTDD). Both blogs have an entertainment/gossip focus, which Mr. Weil says "is consistent with Gen Y females' current adoration with content surrounding celebrities and their 'uh oh' moments."

MySpace was second on the top 10 list for females, but it remained sixth for males, with the percentage of 17-to-25-year-old males listing it as their favorite moving up slightly from 13% in the previous quarterly listing to 14%.

1. Occupation Project/Halls of Congress DC (Blog list)
2. Chris Simon Cheapshot (Blog list)
3. Simon Two-Hands Hollweg Mar 8, 2007 (Blog list)
4. Canon EOS-1D Mark III Snapping Off Frames Like a House Afire (Blog list)
5. My Chemical Romance UK Single - I Don't Love You (Blog list)
6. South Park Says the N Word! (Blog list)
7. '93 Giuliani ad with Donna Hanover and kids (Blog list)
8. The Third Coming (Blog list)
9. Democrat Hypocrisy on Iraq (Blog list)
10. Monzy performs at Stanford Univ. (Blog list)

However, on a day-to-day basis for those of us here in the International Zone in the middle of Baghdad, this has meant that our nights are filled with explosions and gunfire and lots and lots of helicopters flying overhead. It really seems, at times, as if they're flying in circles around our trailers, just to see how many of us they can wake up! (However, as one of my friends pointed out, at least you know that you've got someone keeping you safe this way.)

I'm usually in the office until 9 or 10 p.m., so I miss the lightshows that my friends have been telling me about--all those explosions have a visual aspect, apparently. But in terms of the noise of it all, it's kind of like sleeping through the 4th of July or New Year's Eve for weeks on end! (Or trying to sleep through it...)

"She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It's intense. For right now."

I wasn't sure what the "technosexual generation" is either. Lucky, he goes on to explain. "Technosexuals" is apparently a new marketing buzz word for young people who use text messaging and blogging in order to meet and arrange hookups.

Yeah, yeah, I know. All the cool kids are doing it these days. But ew. Something about that description kind of makes me want to stop blogging forever and communicate with others only through Morse code. I feel, I dunno. Dirty.

It's now been more than two years since the first story was submitted and dugg on Digg. Since then you guys have helped Digg move from a personal project amongst a group of friends to a huge online community. Now, your contributions in submitting, digging, and commenting on content have propelled Digg to a point I never dreamed of - as of today Digg has one million registered users.

I'd like to let this post serve as a thank you from me to you - the Digg community faithful. You've not only made it possible for the Digg team to continue the Digg concept in new and exciting ways, but you've also driven us, with a sense of pride and excitement that genuinely makes going to work a lot of fun.

A recent government report forecast that robots would routinely carry out surgery by 2018.

The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.

Other bodies are also thinking about the robotic future. Last year a UK government study predicted that in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings.

The European Robotics Research Network is also drawing up a set of guidelines on the use of robots.

This ethical roadmap has been assembled by researchers who believe that robotics will soon come under the same scrutiny as disciplines such as nuclear physics and Bioengineering.

A draft of the proposals said: "In the 21st Century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with - robots.

"It will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems."

As TechCrunch traffic continues to grow, a problem is popping up more and more often - the traffic we send to a site when we write about it on its launch day can (and often does) take it down. It's not that TechCrunch traffic is that massive, but it's enough that if there's a bug somewhere in application that wasn’t noticed with small traffic testing, it can be exploited and quickly take the site down. The last week, we’ve averaged one site down per day.

Examples: We wrote about Spotplex and it went down fast, as did Amie Street and Kegulator tonight (Kegulator is more of a toy, so it doesn't really count).

Another problem is that the traffic doesn't last. See this Alexa chart for Spotplex as an example. There's a spike, and then most of the people never come back. Hopefully a few stick around, register and tell their friends, but building an application to scale to handle a TechCrunch post is a long term solution to a short term problem.

The court order was issued yesterday and most internet users logging onto the site in Turkey are met with a holding page with a Turkish message, which translates as: "Access to this site has been denied by court order ! ..."

Greek and Turkish YouTube users have been trading video insults over the past few months, attracting much coverage in the Turkish press. Greek videos reportedly accused the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of homosexuality; a Turkish user responded by calling Greece the birthplace of homosexuality.

It is illegal to criticise either Ataturk or Turkishness in Turkey and the prosecutor's office in Istanbul acted despite YouTube's agreement to take down the offending videos.

The video is ugly. It insults the founder of the Republic. Like it or not, Atatürk is a sacred figure for most of Turkish citizens. And an insulting video would trigger such a popular reaction. However, would it be necessary to legally stop the access to Youtube? In Brazil, a legal step was taken recently. But compared to this one, it is a minor intervention. In terms of net regulation, Turkey is now in league with China, Iran and some other countries in the same line....

Are you fed up with having to remember dozens of usernames and password? Does the idea of creating yet another account on yet another site leave you cold?

OpenID is a new standard that hopes to alleviate some of the pain, and we've just made it available to everyone who has a WordPress.com blog. This means you can sign in to a growing number of sites using your existing WordPress.com account.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

Utah Street Networks was founded in 2003 and has seven employees based in San Francisco, Calif. The Utah Street Networks technology and certain members of team will join CMSG led by Dan Scheinman, Senior Vice President and General Manager. The deal does not include the Tribe.net site, which will remain completely independent of Cisco.

Eons, the 50-plus media company for loving life on the flipside of 50, today announced $22 million in Series B financing led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from new investors Intel Capital and Humana Inc., as well as existing investors General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital. The financing will fuel Eons' accelerating growth as it continues to inspire boomers to see, learn, and be more on the way to the reachable goal of living to 100.

"We're very excited that Charles River Ventures is taking a lead in this round, especially given their proven track record of investing in companies poised to establish a leadership position in emerging markets," said Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO, Eons. "Boomers are ready to play hard on the Web, and Eons is not only changing the way they connect with each other, but also how corporate America reaches this desirable demographic. Our active community, proprietary tools - such as Eons' search engine cRANKy - and expert advice are shaping a new era of activity on the Web for this audience.”

Taylor added, "We are equally pleased with Intel Capital's investment as well as the participation from our founding venture backers, General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital, whose continued support is a strong endorsement of our market and our strategy."

The issue of whether any paid content online is "better than what you can get for free" has been debated since the dawn of the Web. What arguably makes some of the top blogs better than other blogs is that, by dint of their success, they have become scoop magnets, e.g TechCrunch, Engadget. That doesn't necessarily make their reporting or analysis better, but you can always get the information there first. Of course, if they were behind a pay wall, that advantage might disappear.

That's why the Seth Godin consultant model might be more viable. Darren Rowse at Problogger, for example, offers advice to bloggers equivalent to what you might get from a paid consultant.

The argument against a paid content model for blogging begins of course with ideology - there are many blog purest who would refuse to call a paid blog a blog. Blogging, traditionally, has been about openness and inter-connectivity, which a paid subscriber wall certainly does not foster.

Most self-employed bloggers take in between $2,000 and $10,000 a month from ad sales, says Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds.com, a Web advertising concern based in Carrboro, N.C. The few that have huge audiences make significantly more, he adds. During election time, for example, a political blogger can bring in $20,000 to $30,000 a month, says Ken Layne, West Coast bureau chief for Wonkette.com, a political gossip blog owned by Gawker Media.

Self-employed bloggers set their own schedules. Writers of breaking-news blogs say 40- to 60-hour workweeks are the norm. To scoop his competitors, Mario Lavandeira, author of the celebrity-gossip blog PerezHilton.com, says he averages 19-hour workdays that start at 5:15 a.m.

CAREER PATH: Most bloggers start out using free Web sites such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com. They say it takes at least six months to build readership and clout in the blogosphere. Mr. Lavandeira advises picking an area you'll enjoy discussing for a long time because "you have to be passionate about what you're writing." A background in journalism or communications helps but usually isn't required. "I don't want to hear where candidates went to college or where else they worked," says Ryan Block, managing editor of Engadget.com, who hires most of the site's employees. "I review writing samples."

What a week! We added 7,723 new social networks in the past four days. Wow! Here's a few of them. We've also gotten great ideas, feedback, and suggestions from the folks creating them. It's been fantastic, so thank you!

We worked through the night to make your networks on Ning faster than a speeding bullet. The issues folks saw with our database bug earlier in the week are resolved and, while something new can always show up, our servers are happy as clams under the current high load. God, I hope I didn't just jinx it by saying that :-)

In all seriousness, we've been up, stable, and fast for the past 18 hours and responding to issues within minutes. In total, we took Ning down for 3 hours over the past 4 days. We had intermittent slowdowns for an additional 6 hours. The benefit of monitoring absolutely everything is that we can tell you that we've had 97% uptime since our launch. Not too bad for the first week of a brand spanking new product.

What did the Egyptian government accuse him of?
According to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Kareem stands charged with the following alleged crimes: (1) Spreading data and malicious rumors that disrupt public security; (2) Defaming the President of Egypt; (3) Incitement to overthrow the regime upon hatred and contempt; (4) Incitement to hate "Islam" and breach of the public peace standards; (5) Highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt and spreading them to the public.

In late March, the company will launch The Onion News Network, a service that will stream original clips every week produced by a team of 15 new hires, including an entire production team. (That pushes the Onion empire to roughly 145 staffers.)

"Prepare for a news shit storm," says Mills.

Footage is based on the premise that the paper has been running a 24-hour news service for the past 75 years, only no one knew about it. Clips will cover the past seven decades, as well as current events. "We're not taking things we've done on the site or in print and applying video to them. This is its own enterprise," says Mills.

The Onion's dive into video production is one of many as traditional rags try to figure out how to survive in the digital world. Larger publishing empires have been scrambling for years to turn a profit on their web enterprises and are now taking a cue from YouTube by producing online videos they hope will boost ad revenue.

Despite laying off 100 employees last year, including high-ranking execs, publisher Time said this month that it would launch an in-house studio to help its 130 magazines develop online videos. Washingtonpost.com hopes that syndicating its multimedia content to other sites will increase ad revenue by broadening viewership.

Reuters hopes to draw from the 70,000 subscribers of its messaging service as a starting point for its foray into the fast-growing sector of community websites.

"You will see us, later in the year, launch a version of MySpace for the financial services community," said the chief executive, Tom Glocer. "It won't have the latest hot videos and the 'why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys' blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models."

The website will also be exclusive to Reuters subscribers. "People don't want to have 100 friend requests from teenage girls in Florida if they are trading the credit derivatives market, but they probably are interested in being able to share research," said Mr Glocer.

Three YouTube channels - one for news and two for entertainment - will showcase short clips of BBC content.

The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube's monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website.

BBC News: The news channel, which will be launched later this year, will show about 30 news clips per day. It will be advertising funded like a similar deal with Yahoo USA. BBC News is also offered to non-UK subscribers of Real Networks.

Because of the advertising, these clips can be seen outside the UK only. Any UK users clicking on a link to one of the news clips on YouTube will get a message that they have no access to this clip.

Dean and I are so excited that our official myspace page is set up. We have so many things to share with you. First of all, our baby boy is due at the end of March! I can't believe I have a whole month left considering I feel like I'm ready to pop. At this point in the game i'm getting very exhausted and a little uncomfortable. Not to mention my little man is an active one.I think he spends most of his day either kung fu fighting in my belly or having a mean game of of twister with his umbilical cord. But, we cannot wait to meet him! And, we have another baby being born in March...Our new B&B (bed and Breakfast). We took it over a little while ago and renovations are in full swing. It was an older colonial B&B in Temecula that we are turning modern and chic for our generation...and its of course run by us. Yes, you read correctly... Tori Spelling will actually make your bed and serve you muffins if you stay there.

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That's when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help "submitters" get Digg stories noticed by paying "users" to digg them. There's a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn't get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that. (Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit.)

If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg "have failed," and that Digg "can tell when there are paid users." Adelson added, "When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don't remove their account so they don't realize they've been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn't work."

Ten hours after hiring U/S, I had 40 diggs. The vast majority of them had also dugg the Photoshop tutorial or the $35 offer. This was the moment when I reached a tipping point, and I began to get a lot of organic diggs and comments. The crowd on Digg is drawn to what's popular, and many of them second-guessed themselves when they checked out my blog and saw how crappy it was. Quomen commented, "None of those photographs really appeal to me. Am I defective? or just a loner."

Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There's a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more "reputable" in the Digg system. If you're trying to move up the Digg ranks, it's in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it's gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.

When I woke up in the morning, my story had been awarded the "became popular" tag and had 121 diggs. U/S had done what it promised: The company had helped me buy my way into Digg popularity, and my site traffic had gone way up -- overnight, I'd been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror.

Ultimately, however, my story did get buried. If you search for it on Digg, you won't find it unless you check the box that says "also search for buried stories." This didn't happen because the Digg operators have brilliant algorithms, however -- it happened because many people in the Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid. Despite the fact that it was rapidly becoming popular, many commenters questioned my story's legitimacy. Digg's system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted.

Is there a quirky landmark in your town? An unsung hero or an eccentric? Do you frequent a little-known locale that has a claim to fame — or deserves one? We want to know about them. MSNBC.com will be featuring notable locations across the U.S., submitted by you. Send us photos and videos of the best-kept secrets in your area.