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Amazon Daily is a blog-short for "web log"-that contains posts by editors from all over the company. Whether you're a die-hard fiction lover, a gadget geek, an avid collector of classic films or just a fan of what we sell, you'll find all sorts of entries that will interest you. Amazon Daily's home page contains all editorial posts (sorted so the most recent entries appear at the top); in the sidebar, they're sorted by topic, so you can browse one concept at a time instead of taking all of it in at once! Each post gives you the opportunity to provide private feedback to the editor as well as leave public comments for other customers to see.

How can I interact with Amazon Daily?
At the bottom of each post you will find an assortment of things you can do once you have read that post. The first is vote whether or not you liked that post, which will give you the option to leave feedback. You can also leave public comments on that post. You will also see an options menu, which has many interesting features. As more interactive features for each post are introduced they will be added into the options menu.

Four in every five blogs on some of the most popular websites contain potentially offensive content, such as pornography or adult language, claims new research.

***

Some of the most popular are shamelessly devoted to sex, such as the award-winning 'Belle de Jour, diary of a London call girl' and 'Girl with a one-track mind, diary of a sex fiend'.

Popular teen sites MySpace and YouTube are battling to remove porn from their sites, a problem that is made difficult because all of the content of these sites is made up of files that users have uploaded.

Computer software firm ScanSafe, which commissioned the Global Threat Report, also found more than one in every 20 blogs (six per cent) contain potentially catastrophic computer viruses, spyware or other harmful programs that can steal private or confidential information.

Helmed by editor Lauren Williams, a Washington, D.C. native who has been spearheading the blog's creative effort, Stereohyped is published by Jossip Initiatives, the New York blog brand behind insider media blog Jossip, award- winning gay lifestyle blog Queerty, and celebrity tabloid blog MollyGood.

"The black community needs a blog of its own like Stereohyped," says editor Lauren Williams. "Whether we're dealing with the Don Imus scandal or potentially welcoming the first black president with Barack Obama, African- American readers are craving a news and entertainment site that's entirely dedicated to them. Nowhere else on the web is there something like Stereohyped."

"Launching a blog for the black community just makes sense," says Stereohyped's 23-year-old publisher David Hauslaib. "We're heading into this with creative people holding degrees in African-American Studies, an appetite for informed analysis, and plenty of experience with gossip," he says. "We're bringing a great editorial mix to Stereohyped. And in the end, serving our black readership will matter most."

Aww, ain't that sweet - Photobucket and MySpace have gotten together and sorted out their problems. Video embeds are working once more on MySpace pages, and I'm sure Photobucket will be much more careful in future when it comes to rolling out sponsored content. In fact, they've put out what amounts to an apology to MySpace - very strange for a company that was hell-bent on dragging them over the coals:

Moving forward, we've established open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace to prevent a sudden block of Photobucket content in future. We want our users to be able to share their content and understand it must be within the framework of MySpace's Terms of Service for it to appear on the site.

Technorati already offers bloggers an array of widgets. They mostly are blog-content related, such as listing top searches, link counts, and tags. Now, the company seems to be considering introducing widgets that display ads.

Or so you'd gather from a survey I just received (as a consumer -- not a journalist) from Technorati.

Coincidentally, I had a long chat last night with Technorati co-founder Peter Hirschberg. He didn't breathe a word about anything widget-related.

The largest cohort of activity (wholly 30%) takes place in the Gaia forums, and here's where the truly staggering numbers come in: Averaging a million posts a day and a billion posts so far, Gaia's message boards (with topics running the gamut from pop culture to politics) is second only to Yahoo in popularity.

Craig Sherman has been thinking what the value-proposition of his site in the era of MySpace or Facebook. "In a world where teens are constantly branding and packaging themselves" on sites like those, he points out, "Gaia is where you get away from it all."

Instead of monthly subscriptions, Gaia Online sells "rare items" - treasures, fantastically cool fashion accessories for player avatars, and so on - two offered a month for $2.50 each. Subscribers buy them via credit card, Pay Pay, cellphone - or cash on the barrel. ("We employ someone full time whose job is getting dollars and quarters" out of envelopes kids send them, Sherman notes.)

YouTube could take an important step toward integrating advertising with its vast library of videos as soon as next week.

Content creators who upload their videos to the site will be offered the option of having short ads shown at the beginning or end, with the resulting revenues split 50-50, according to Howard Lindzon, founder of Wallstrip, a finance-oriented site that distributes videos through YouTube. Key to the new venture will be making sure that those who upload video actually own the rights to it -- which has been a vexing issue in the past for YouTube, now part of Google's Silicon Valley empire.

YouTube didn't respond to several requests for comment.

"It's not surprising at all," said Josh Bernoff, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research. "A revenue-less YouTube wasn't going to last."

Here's the official line from Google/YouTube: "We are actively exploring a variety of ways to help the community to monetize content, and expect to announce something in the coming months that users will embrace," a spokesperson said Wednesday afternoon. "We will not comment on further speculation on programs we haven't yet announced."

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, who from the company's start resisted the idea of integrating anything that felt like a commercial, first mentioned the possibility of inserting ads into videos in January.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, alluded to advertising as one way that YouTube might cuddle up to previously hostile copyright holders. He called YouTube "a wonderful place for people to take copyrighted information, and, with our support, build ad-supported businesses."

To help copyright holders keep off the site content they don't want there, Schmidt said a new tool, Claim Your Content, would soon be available.

Research just out by Hitwise has indicated that although the number of people visiting web 2.0 inspired sites (think YouTube, Flickr etc) we're really a bunch of couch surfing voyeurs who are around to spy on what others are doing, rather than actively participating.

The data collected by Bill Tancer (analyst at Hitwise) showed that just 0.16 percent of visits to YouTube are from those creative people uploading their homegrown videos for the rest of the us to see. Which leaves a whole lot of us hanging around for the spectacle alone.

The research also identified the grand total sum of only "two-tenths of one percent" of visitors to Flickr that were actually uploading photos.

This Just In began April 12, 2007. The blog offers timely insights and practical tips for budget-conscious leisure travelers. Editors from Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine and BudgetTravelOnline.com weigh in every day. Readers are encouraged to post comments.

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we've heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million).

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click "Stumble!" and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person "stumbling." More often than not, it's something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.

People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content. The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are "stumbled" daily.

StumbleUpon has only raised a single $1.5 million round of seed financing.

A trusted source tells me that the online social networking site Facebook plans to open its tightly controlled site to outside widgets, allowing users to embed outside audio, video, and other content onto their profile pages for the first time. Ironically, this move comes just as MySpace tightens up its widget policies, meaning that the two sites could come to resemble each other a lot more than they do now.

Ferrell and McKay are using their alter ego, Gary Sanchez, as a mouth piece for the site. Sanchez says that videos starring Hollywood heavyweights will appear regularly in the featured section of FunnyOrDie, but "the meat and cabbage of the site will be the real peoples."

With their Web server down, contributors to the campus newspaper the Collegiate Times filed blog entries on their parent company's Web site beginning at 9:47 a.m. as they attempted to confirm information about two Monday morning university shootings, which left at least 22 people dead and many more injured. ABC reported 29 dead by Monday afternoon.

According to the student newspaper's blog, 20 students died in Norris Hall, a 72,375-square-foot building that houses the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. The department focuses on materials, material systems, biomechanics, and computational methods, among other subjects.

Students and faculty communicated with each other during the crisis through instant messaging and e-mail. A student captured the sound of several gunshots on campus.

By the afternoon, the university had posted a podcast of statements from its president, Charles Steger. He said police were investigating the first shooting when they received reports of a second shooting. He said the school was shocked and horrified by a tragedy of "monumental proportions." He also said he felt a great personal loss.

"Far and Wide" is a fully interactive blog of the global AP report, handpicked by the asap staff, that customers can embed in their sites. Readers will be able respond to posts about breaking news at the AP and how it's covered. Text, audio, video and photos are elements of this innovative model, which will offer as many as 25 posts a day, with blog entries broken out by topic such as national, entertainment, lifestyles, technology and sports. In addition, mini-interviews with AP staffers in the middle of the news will offer immediate insight into the world's top events. It's breaking news, it's behind-the-scenes and it's interactive. A triple-play for online news junkies.

However, don't laugh. This tiny trick saves me lots of time over the years. Consider this. According to my Google search history I have performed a staggering 31,000 searches over the last two years since they added this feature. Many of these are phrases. Let's argue it's half of them. If I save 0.5 seconds thanks to the dashed-search technique and multiply it times 15,500, I calculate that I have saved 7,500 seconds. That adds up to 125 minutes or two hours! That means I saved at least an hour a year. Plus, that's not counting the tons of other searches on sites the Google history doesn't track.

Your mileage may vary but give it a try.

FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services. We like open floodgates around here, so long as the servers stay dry.

We'll be providing AOL with detailed analytics about how its content is consumed beyond the AOL Web site -- such as within widgets, in feed readers and on blogs -- to help them accurately measure influence wherever their content is consumed.

This is supposed to be under embargo until Midnight EST, but heck, it involves us, so you're hearing it here first.

Things are moving very fast at Technology Evangelist, and an amazing opportunity has been presented to us that we simply couldn't pass up. We're extraordinarily busy, so here is just a quick note for now with the news:

Starting Monday, the Technology Evangelist Podcast will replace Don Imus on CBS radio until a permanent replacement can be found.

Shows will be broadcast live from Minneapolis, and simulcast on affiliates now carrying Imus' show. The MSNBC video simulcast remains dead for now.

Rolling Stone is the "authority figure" for judging music (just check out all their Wikipedia links), which doesn't reflect this generation's obsession with consumer-generated content. Blanchard plans to launch a separate site that will be a social network for music fans, complete with profiles and the ability to have a say in their "Best of" lists. Blanchard called it the "American Idol version of lists." Let's hope Sanjaya doesn't make it on any of those.

Blanchard also plans on digitizing all 1,000 back issues of Rolling Stone, to be available on the website or to purchase as a DVD set. This may be done by Christmas, so you can check Dad off the list.

I think RollingStone.com's makeover is highly overdue, and this is the perfect way to do it: keep the magazine just the way it is but add another online element that embodies youth culture.

When Keith Blanchard, Wenner Media's executive director for online media, including Us Weekly, Rolling Stone, and Men's Journal, asked our journalism class how many people visit Rolling Stone's website, only one person raised his hand.

Blog Top Tags Widget
Display your top tags with the Blog Top Tags widget in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog). Copy the code snippet below, replacing {URL} with your blog URL. Note: when you first install this widget on your blog, it will take us a few minutes to build a custom widget with your blog's top tags, but then after that we'll keep it up to date for you.

Ryan Loken, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. recruitment manager, says he spends one to two hours a week searching through blogs for new talent or additional information about the candidates he has interviewed. "Blogs are a tool in the tool kit," he says. Since he joined the Bentonville, Ark., retail giant three years ago, Mr. Logen estimates that Web journals have helped him fill 125 corporate jobs. Most of the recruits were referred to him by bloggers and blog contributors, and some were the writers themselves.

In addition to blogs that focus on their industry or field of interest, recruiters say they check candidates' blogs about noncareer-related topics for evidence of writing skills and clues to how well rounded they are.

Most blog-related recruits are professionals in technology and media because jobs in these fields often require knowledge of the blogosphere, says Kirsten Dixson, a founding partner at Brandego LLC, a career-management firm in Exeter, N.H., that specializes in personal branding.

In June, Brian Balfour's blog, SocialDegree.com, inspired an unsolicited offer for a product-manager job from an executive at Zoom Information Inc. "I was impressed by the points Brian was making and the way he was making them," says Russell Glass, vice president of products and marketing at the Waltham, Mass., technology company. The blog also offered details about Mr. Balfour's work history and education. "It was a no-brainer to give him a call and see if he'd be interested," Mr. Glass says.

This action by MySpace means that all of the videos and remixes you created will no longer show up on your MySpace profile and comments section. More specifically, if you attempt to add new videos or remixes to your profile, they will be removed.

We are not happy about this and we're pretty sure you're not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you've all been really embracing videos at Photobucket -- to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

In its current form, Twitterverse displays popular words based on time and popularity. We’re pulling data every minute from the public timeline RSS feed as it updates.

The data is parsed by word match, eliminating certain types of words, and a script generates the cloud based on time frame and popularity. We’ll be adjusting the algorithm frequently as we get more data, as well as limiting out certain words (or display names). For now, words are displayed based on being repeated a certain number of times during the specified timeframe.

Even at this basic level, you can start to get a sense of our collective activity and the general zeitgeist of the day. For example, since we cleared our test data and started re-collecting data off the public timeline on Sunday, April 8 at 5:40pm PST, we started to see a shift from people twittering about "easter" early in the day to a growing number of people twittering about "sopranos" as the night progressed. You can imagine checking in daily to see what topics arise.

We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation.

We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it.

We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that: - is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others

We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.

We connect privately before we respond publicly.

When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved--or find an intermediary who can do so--before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.

When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends. If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.

We do not allow anonymous comments.

We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.

We ignore the trolls.

We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don't veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them--"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.

On Good Friday, David Heimann mourned the death of Jesus Christ in the presence of the pope. And for the first time Sunday, he will be able to celebrate the resurrection of Christ in St. Peter's Basilica.

But Rome was not his only destination on this pilgrimage.

Heimann, of Rogers Park, has traversed the back alleys of Beijing where Chinese Catholics largely worship in secret; visited the cathedral of Las Vegas, where gamblers seek forgiveness; and wandered the ruins of sanctuaries that have suffered the trials of time or persecution.

By year's end, the 32-year-old former youth minister plans to visit at least 365 churches in just as many days, spanning 35 countries and five continents. He is chronicling each step of his journey on his blog, www.adsodalitatem.org (the Latin means "toward solidarity"), and linking satellite images of the churches he sees.

In an era when so much attention is paid to issues that divide parishioners, such as abortion, Heimann prefers to focus on the indisputable ties that bind the Catholic Church in an increasingly secular world.

Malaysian online political commentators have formed a group to protect bloggers' interests after two of them were sued by a newspaper with close government ties.

The National Alliance of Bloggers' main goal is to "protect bloggers," and to try to get the government to see their point of view and why they have made certain postings, the new group's president, Ahirudin Attan, wrote on his popular blog "Rocky's Bru."

The alliance was formed late Thursday, Ahirudin wrote.

About 50 of Malaysia's popular online personalities held a meeting and decided to start the organization because a few bloggers were being "demonized again and again" by the government, Ahirudin said.

"When certain quarters in government become hostile towards bloggers, I believe they mean to aim their hostility at a small group of bloggers or online writers whose views and takes of current affairs they fear," Ahirudin wrote.

It was a recent question to third-graders in Shellie Dix's class blog at Glenwood Springs Elementary School.

"I want less homework," Maia wrote. "I think we are really good at writing so we don’t need that for homework. I think we have the hang of math. I think we could read independently. I think we should have more reading at school and less at home.

"Please can we have less homework?"

But there are more posts asking for more homework instead of less.

"Ms. Dix I want more homework!" Grace wrote. "If you give us more homework we'll be so cool. I will be 100% more smart. I will tell you the fifth-graders are going to say ... wow they are smart."

Not only can you nominate your favorite blogs within a slew of distinct categories but you can also vote and comment on others that have already been submitted. In turn, others can also vote and comment on the blogs you've nominated. The exciting thing is votes will be shown on the site in real-time, so you can see who's leading within each category! Winners in each respective category will be recognized at a one-of-a-kind awards ceremony on June 2nd, at Postiecon in Orlando, FL. After the ceremony, the results will be posted on this page.

There are no restrictions to nominations, votes, or comments. You can nominate as many blog sites as you want. In fact, the more the better! You can also comment as often as you'd like. You may also vote for as many blogs as you like, but you can only vote once per blog, per category.

allDAY is the official TODAY blog, your virtual window to Studio 1A and the people who make America's favorite morning show come alive. Whether it's exchanging views with the anchors and contributors or going behind the scenes with the producers, editors, camera people and more, we'll bring you the buzz here at 30 Rock, and we hope you will make this a regular part of your online routine. We want this to be a conversation, so please respond with your comments and questions directly to the blog, and we'll do our best to post what you have to say.