He's a little burned out, he says, a little depressed. He's wondering if this is a natural cycle with blogging -- something that saps so much of your being. He's threatening to launch something completely different. Maybe a blog on the history of travel.

"When you are doing it, it really is quite addictive," he said the other day. "When I'm not doing it, I don't want to go back. I feel like Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows. Once he walked out of his hole in the ground and discovered the world, he didn't go back for months."

With the let-up came a frightening realization for one who worked in the moment. While he never received the amount of hits of an Atrios, Daily Kos or Instapundit, his name carried weight in blog and political circles.

"Now I am coming across more and more people who have never heard of me. The Internet moves 10 or 20 times the speed of regular time. Unless you're really on top of things, the world forgets about you really fast. It's hyper-true in the blogosphere."

A week later, he was here in my living room. He sat on my couch and explained that he didn't yet know what he was going to write, didn't have in mind any angle. He did have a phrase weaving in and out of his mind: "The Angry Left." Apparently I am the Angry Left personified.

Nevertheless, he sat on the couch with a notebook and we conversed. He watched me work on the blog, he asked me a million questions, some quite provocative: for a while there, I got the feeling he thought my writing on My Left Wing and all my passionate, vitriolic rhetoric was so much pissing in the wind. What did I hope to accomplish? Why was I so... "mean?" That was the word he used, too, which didn't bode well for my eventual representation in the article, I mused.

Finkel asked what time I woke up. 5am, I replied. That threw him a tad, but he was game: we agreed that the next day he would wait outside my house until I turned on the porchlight, to signal he could come in and be with me for an "ordinary day." That plan kind of fell by the wayside, though -- there is nothing ordinary about having a Washington Post reporter watching your every move and taking note of your every random exclamation and mutter...

Yesterday, we announced that Newsweek, one of the country's leading weekly news magazines had launched a privately-branded RSS aggregator through NewsGator Private Label Hosted Solution. The site has been in public beta for several days, and we're seeing a large contingent of their readers using the service on a daily basis. We host private label readers for a number of publishers, media companies, and content providers, and each one has a slightly different twist in terms of the interface they provide to site visitors. Newsweek is no exception. They have a very simple and clean look and feel, and it takes only one a few clicks to add feeds to the personalized reader. There's no sign-up process, an account is created the first time you access the application and if your computer allows cookies, you don't have to sign-in each time you return.

"I am thrilled that IceRocket is uniting with Think Partnership, enabling us to connect the huge and growing blogging community to the business opportunities and network provided by Think Partnership, especially Litmus Media's Valid Click network and PrimaryAds' affiliate marketing network," said Blake Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes further stated that "we have spent significant time evaluating many opportunities within the interactive marketing and advertising space, and have concluded that Think Partnership was clearly positioned as one of the premier companies in our market as well as being a leading edge technology based company with the resources to execute on this exciting opportunity."

"I am looking forward to the completion of this deal and working with Think Partnership. Both of our companies are focused on providing the highest integrity services to our users and building core enabling technology that can eliminate click fraud and "splogging" on our networks in real time." said Mark Cuban, of IceRocket.

Today's the great big launch of Geekologie . It's tough to try and break into the market with a new technology/gadget blog, but it's a huge subject and there's always room for more coverage. Plus, we hired an actual geek to manage our geek blog. He lives at his computer, doesn't shower, and has probably never even touched a girl. Actually none of that is true, but I'm sure he's really happy that's what we're telling people.

Meanwhile, Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com and Myspaceeditor.org, two Web sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images. MySpace doesn't build many customization options into users' profiles.

Ramos, who makes money by hosting ads from Google's AdSense and ValueClick's FastClick networks, says he's received six-figure offers from Internet companies interested in buying his sites. "Hundreds of people are doing this," he says. Other programmers offer to overhaul MySpace profiles for a fee, charging several hundred dollars for the service.

Entrepreneurs say some of the most successful MySpace spinoff businesses are now being auctioned for thousands of dollars. "People make a ton of money" selling the sites, says Michael Melen, who operates several MySpace-related services. Melen's offerings include Myspacesponsor.com, which shares ad revenues with MySpace users who put banner ads in their profiles, and Unblockmyspace.com, which allows users to surf the site anonymously.

"This is a first of its kind blogging experiment," said Mr. Kukral. "I want to see if I can use a quickly made blog and some inexpensive blog promotion techniques to get a person like Mark Cuban to notice me, and actually call me."

The point of this blogging experiment is to further prove the power of of instant publishing/blogging as an effective method of promoting your business online.

"If I can use a simple blog and a press release to get the attention of a successful businessman and mogul like Mark Cuban, then actually get him to call me, I can further prove that blogging is indeed a powerful way to get attention and accomplish specific goals, cheaply and quickly."

Kukral hopes that Mr. Cuban will be drawn to his offer from the creation of a press release through PrWeb.com.

"This blogging experiment only works if Mark finds my offer to call me on his own, either by reading this press release, or from some other bloggers writing about it and him becoming aware of it through them."

"It is like pollution," said Mark Frauenfelder, the founder and co-editor of Boing Boing, who also writes a personal blog at MadProfessor.net. "It reminds me of visible smog, because it obscures what you want to be looking at. You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out."

But Robert Scoble, whose "Scobleizer--Microsoft Geek Blogger" is hosted on the WordPress.com service, said he is happy with the filtering there.

The Scobleizer blog gets around 10,000 visits a day, and about 400 comments are left on the blog daily. Of those, 100 are spam, Scoble said. Most of these are flagged correctly. However, there are also false positives, valid reader comments identified as unwanted postings, he said.

"We've built technology to solve the problem, we invest in updating it, and our 160-plus bloggers manage the few spams that get through," Weblogs CEO Jason Calacanis said. "The only spam that can really get through our defenses are the ones that are hand-rolled by a person, and we catch most of those."

You're making it into this major problem. If you have the right software and you put in simple rules it's not a major issue. The problem is the software makers, combined with blog owners, have not done a horrible good with their software. If you put in simple controls the problem goes away. Folks just don't install the tools to block comment spam.

I declined because I thought that the value of a blog is precisely in its spontaneity and in the play of opinions between the blogger and the listeners. The blogger must do this several times a day in order for the blog to remain "fresh."

If this column has any value to the listeners, it is found, I believe, in deliberately gathering the best opposing points of view together ? from NPR and from the listeners ? and then to provide an opinion as to whether the listener or NPR was correct. In my experience, the best and most useful answers to the questions and comments I receive are found by taking the time to distill a measured and thoughtful response out of the swirl of argument and contention.

The value of "Mixed Signals" is found in the opposite direction ? in the flash and flair of smart deadline writing, clever opinions and in the wit and repartee of newsroom culture. It is essential that the listeners play an important role in giving feedback and comment to the blog.

On March 31, 2006 the market share of visits to MySpace Video increased by 1,242%, sending it far ahead of YouTube and the other video search services. As I've written before, MySpace is the leading source of traffic for YouTube, accounting for 23% of its upstream visits for the week ending April 1, 2006. It makes sense that MySpace would launch its own video service and MySpace Videos began showing up in Hitwise data in January, shortly after YouTube began to take off in December. Now that MySpace is owned by News Corp, it has the perfect distribution mechanism for Fox content, and could be testing out its video capability with viral videos, which have been so successful for YouTube.

The printouts on my desk describe the 28-year-old journalist, a hostage and victim for 82 terrifying days, as something between Patty Hearst and Baghdad Jane, between a traitor and ''Princess Jill." TBone posted a potshot, calling Carroll ''a liar" and the kidnapping ''a total scam." PA Pundits said that ''I still just can't get past her being (for the most part) unharmed." And Debbie Schlussel called her a ''spoiled brat America-hater."

The blogosphere was not the only source of pollution. Indeed, the oil-spill prize goes to Don Imus's producer, Bernard McGuirk, who described this young reporter as ''the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. . . . She may be carrying Habib's baby." But in the short, volatile, and powerful life of the Web log, the Jill Carroll debacle may be a turning point.

Web logs have been around barely a half-dozen years. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that a quarter of Internet users now read blogs and 9 percent write one. Most of the 28 million blogs are online diaries such as those on MySpace. But there is also the feisty political corner of this zone.

The political bloggers first flexed their muscle in 2002 when they trumped the MSM -- blogspeak for Mainstream Media -- by forcing Trent Lott out of the Senate speakership after he toasted the good old segregated days of Strom Thurmond. In 2004, they proved the power of the Internet as a great equalizer when they confronted the house of CBS and Dan Rather over Bush's military records.

Two years later, we have -- ready, fire, aim -- the Jill Carroll affair. These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up. An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?

In people's haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of "shoot first and ask questions later" has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us - including myself - have been guilty in the past of hitting that "Publish" button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

In newspapers and magazines, for example, section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture. "Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, 'The heck with that,' " observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.

Moves to accommodate the technology are tricky. How far can a news organization go without undercutting its editorial judgment concerning the presentation, tone and content of news?

So far, the news media are gingerly stepping into the field of "search engine optimization." It is a booming business, estimated at $1.25 billion in revenue worldwide last year, and projected to more than double this year.

Welcome to the new home for all of the BBC's weblogs. Although we have had blogs for a number of years, most notably our Scottish community site; Island Blogging and the excellent Ouch, this is the first attempt at bringing you a complete list, some news of new launches by journalists, DJs, and radio shows, as well as links and tips to help you find your way around.

That said we appreciate we still have a lot to do which is why we're grateful for your feedback. We're already collating comments on all of our existing blogs, scouring bloglines, technorati, google blog search and the like. So we'll spot if you are talking about Nick Robinson, Paul Mason or Peter van Dyk on your own blogs. But you can also email us about what we're getting wrong (or hopefully right).

Teenagers are so obsessed with the site that last year it saw more traffic than Yahoo's email service, Tesco's website and Amazon. Only eBay, Google and Hotmail are viewed more often in Britain.

The site allows its 6 million members to send each other messages. Members have their own mini-sites with pictures of themselves and details of their tastes. They can browse other members' sites and start conversations with thousands of people they have never met.

'I check my messages every single day,' explained 16-year-old James Hardman from Leeds. 'All my mates do it. We want to find some nice lasses and just text and email each other. We're meeting a couple of them in the school holidays.'

James is one of the rare members brave enough to put his phone number on the site, but says he has only been bothered by 'weirdos' once or twice. He is more coy about the 'adult section' of his site, where members can put up naked pictures of themselves and choose who gets to see them. 'My pictures are quite rude but I haven't let anyone see them yet. I'd be very careful about that.'

The popularity of the site has raised concerns: some parents are worried about inappropriate banter on the site, and the possibility that some 'young people' are adults posing as teenagers.

As Ghyslain Raza recalled, whenever he walked by his high school's common areas, other students would jump on tables and chant, "Star Wars Kid! Star Wars Kid!"

There would be a commotion as they shouted and poked at him, trying to get a reaction. "It was simply unbearable," he said.

An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town, Mr. Raza had become a worldwide object of ridicule when schoolmates put on the Internet a video of him clumsily pretending to be a Star Wars character.

Three years later, Mr. Raza and his parents this week reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates they had sued for $351,000 in damages.

This time around the Washington Post plans to hire two bloggers for its Web site.

The paper's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, has informed RAW STORY that Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, is looking for a liberal blogger, along with a conservative one, to replace Ben Domenech who resigned after only three days of blogging, when his earlier writings were discovered by mostly liberal bloggers to be racially insensitive and - in multiple cases - plagiarized.

The paper doesn't plan on making any formal announcement, but the news should be welcome to many critics on the left who felt that it was unfair to hire just a conservative blogger in the first place.

Many felt that the hiring of Domenech had something to do with a column written by Howell last December (The Two Washington Posts) which was critical of one of the more popular bloggers at washingtonpost.com.

There several pizza-centered blogs, but NYSlice is the only one focusing wholly on ready-to-eat pizza. Blogs on sites such as Pizzamaniac.com and Pizzatherapy.com, while equally passionate about pies, focus on making pizza at home.

Adam Kuban publishes NYSlice, and his bloggers comment strictly on pizza in and around New York City. Great coal-fired pies are the standard for all pies judged by the group.

"There are a lot of foods that inspire passion, and pizza seems to be one of them," Kuban said, explaining why he started the site. The Oregon native got hooked on pizza when his dad experimented with home recipes, and the move to Manhattan a few years ago landed him in pizza heaven. "I've got the bug for it for sure. I'm a passionate consumer when it comes to pizza."

On Notice

Things go on this list first. You can specify how long something is on notice. If there are no more infractions in this time period, they'll automatically come off the list. Otherwise you can move them to your Dead to Me List.

Dead to Me List

Put things on your dead to me list when you'd like them on there permanently. They'll only come off your list if you manually remove them.

"I was a bit fed up with the way the big media in France and Europe talk about the relationships with America.

"In France, we only talk about the relationship when there's a problem with Iraq, or a problem with commercial issues. And this is not the truth. This is not the real life.

"So I thought that maybe we could see what happens if I talk to the American people. It's not so crazy."

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn't as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there's lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

The word comes from reputable US mag, Playstation Magazine, which says Sony is planning an advanced PS3 "lifestyle server" that'll let friends tap into your multimedia diary even when your machine?s switched off.

A big feature of this will be your video blogs, which you'll record on an Eyetoy camera, mix with shots from your camera-equipped PSP, and load up to the Playstation Network Platform.

Sound geeky enough yet? That's not the half of it. As a dangerously obsessed gamer, you'll also want to leave mates snippets of your gaming life through in-game highlights and access to your rankings, along with messages organising your next team battle.

Official confirmation of these extras is expected to come in Sony's speech in Sony's pre-E3 conference speech on May 8th, along with a better idea of the console's price.

An AP spokesman did tell Raw Story that AP does not credit blogs, but he was mistaken. AP does credit blogs when we are aware that they have broken a story first. The spokesman then called Raw Story back to correct his misstatement. Raw Story seems to have taken that correction as an admission of plagiarism, which it emphatically is not.

YouTube, the video sharing service, raised $8 million, bringing the total amount it has raised so far to $11.5 million. The backer is Sequoia Capital, the VC that originally financed the startup in November.

So, even as the company is just beginning to try to shed its copyright problems and transition to becoming an entertainment partner for big media companies, it's bringing in dough. It's had some recent luck signing up established folks, including E! and Comcast's G4 cable network.

There are no political blogs on the list-they hadn't been invented yet. Actually, I got the impression that many bloggers got a bit shirty when political blogs started up, and started getting popular?politics (and especially right-wing politics) wasn't what the blog-powered future was supposed to be about. Blogs were supposed to be personal, thoughtful, witty, sincere, not brash and combative.

The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period.

The traffic analysis shows the Internet is still a space where new brands such as MySpace can suddenly break into the upper ranks, where older brands such as Citysearch can revive themselves after languishing for years, and where established outfits such as Google often wind up as beneficiaries because they buy or copy services pioneered by upstarts.

Google Inc., for instance, bought Blogger.com in 2003; the number of people posting or reading material at that site jumped to 15.6 million last month from 2.5 million a year ago.

"The growth in blogging reminds us the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation," said Gary Arlen, a research analyst and president of Arlen Communications Inc. "This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard."

The Washington Post's article on the growth of traffic to community websites sent me to the bookshelf to dust off my copy of net gain by Hagel and Armstrong. It was published in 1997, a year after we started Forum One. net gain helped inspire many online community tools and services including ours, the "Forum One Index," a search engine for web forums. The Index didn't survive the bursting bubble, but Forum One did.

Now it is blogs and RSS instead of forums and "push" but the rationale is much the same -- the power of people. We're very excited to see the market catch up with the ideas and applaud the success of the new generation of community sites.

This number includes blog readers who applied through JobsBlog and were later hired ... Their JobsBlog application is not necessarily the reason they were hired. (The successful attempt could have been, again, a Monster.com posting, a friend who is an employee, a cold call from a recruiter, etc.) It also only includes people who applied through the blog, so if you read and loved the blog and got hired - but didn't apply through us, you wouldn't be included in this total.

What I do know is this ... Each of these 137 did, at some point in their candidate lifecycle, apply through the blog, and therefore, we can assume they also read our posts and utilized our tips!

Powell has been working as a nanny and secretarial temp while penning her blog, in which she tries to cook recipes from American cookery grande dame Julia Child in a cramped New York apartment over the course of a year.

"Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge," she writes.

"And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job and her cats' wellbeing, she has signed on for a deranged assignment: 365 days, 536 recipes, one girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen."

The book of the blog has sold over 100,000 copies, and a film is planned shortly.

Today, the New York Times launched its site redesign, announced by a prominent editor's note on the homepage. There's a few lessons for bloggers to learn from the redesign, as well as some evidence that the Times itself has been learning from bloggers.

The most prominent change is the new wide page layout, which makes great use of the expanded screen real estate that serious web geeks have available on their displays. A lot has been written about these wider pages recently, but many of the first sites to make smart use of this kind of design have been Movable Type-powered blogs like Gawker Media's Sploid, Paul Scrivens' Whitespace, Kevin Cornell's Bearskinrug, Jason Santa Maria's blog and Khoi Vin's Subtraction. The additional space on the page lets the Times use large and valuable ad units online without compromising the amount of editorial information displayed.

://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.

Now every website owner can see who's talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the "traffic" of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.

Unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results. And the longer we're able to gather data the more accurate the system will become. We hope this will provide publishers with a useful tool in tracking their sites and how their content is referenced by other websites.