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."