MyBlogLog on the meaning of life: "What we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One, people are not wearing enough hats. Two, Matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields, which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source, which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist automatically, as orthodox Christianity teaches, but has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved due to mankind's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia."
Robert Scoble pisses off the blogosphere with this post. Scoble's perturbed that some bloggers are not linking out to other blogs from their blogs. The blogosphere is a really
big place now and it is becoming more difficult to get attention. Munir Umraini at The Blogging Journalist says he tries to "make it a point to try to link to every blog I use for reference." Duncan Riley suggests that some blogs are not linking out as much as they did in the good old days of the blogosphere. The response from Valleywag's Paul Boutin includes five lessons learned from the Scobleizer linking issue.
Google Blog Search passes Technorati in search traffic according to a Hitwise report. Google's Blog Search got a boost when Google "added a link to its new blog search function in October on the Google News front page."
Stephen Baker at Blogspotting explains why blogs are great for school closings:
Bambi Francisco blogs that Friendster is partnering with Google for contextual ads.
GigaOM reports that video sharing website Metacafe is getting a new CEO.
Jason Calacanis finds a monkey in the place of George W. Bush's photograph on the Wikipedia listing for the U.S. President. He also explains why AOL Weblogs Inc.'s retiring of small blogs is not that big of a deal.
BusinessWeek calls podcasts the next big ad medium with advertisers spending over $400 million on them by 2011. Mark Evans questions the excitement over podvertising: "I know lots of people who read blogs but very few people who listen to podcasts so it strikes me that blog-vertising has much greater growth potential." Some niche podcasts with lots of listeners, like the Harry Potter podcasts, have made money but there is also a lot of podfading -- podcaster burnout.
Digital Inspiration has a post about reducing RSS stress. Tips include creating a folder for your favorite blogs and using search keywords on your unread items.
Darren Rowse at Problogger has a post about the importance of sourcing. Providing a link to the source within the post or by using a via or thx is important. It's part of what blogging is all about.
The Yahoo Publisher Network blog has a detailed post about how to leverage linkbait.
All 41 of Gaping Void's random notes on blogging are worth reading. Gaping Void's First Rule of Blogging is the most crucial: "Blogs don't write themselves."
Forbes' Web Celeb 25 was mostly about celeb men. Cre8pc writes, "The majority of the names of the list are men. I counted three women out of twenty-five men."
Read/Write Web explains how to trend watch using Technorati or BlogPulse.
Search Engine Land has an interesting interview with Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera. Rivera told SEL how many sources Techmeme monitors: "It's in the low thousands. But on any given day, new sources are added and dropped so the total monitored over time is much larger."
News.com has a story (thx TechSpot) about "mystery clips" from Gawker media that were pulled off YouTube. Gawker's Nick Denton says the "mystery" clips were "embedded on Gawker sites, with Gawker news items." Rader Online also has an article about the "mystery" videos.
Technorati has gone live
with WTF and they have used the name WTF which
means Where's the Fire and not this.
Originally, there was some confusion about what Technorati was launching.
Technorati CEO David Sifry enjoys
watching the WTFs roll in.
Flickr's made some changes that upset the old school Flickr users. The changes include
requiring a Yahoo id and placing limits on contacts. Mathew Ingram has some
fun with fs in the title of his post.
Forrester has an article that helps marketers attempt to calculate the ROI on corporate blogging. Some question whether calculating the ROI of blogging is actually possible.
The diagnosticians at the Clare-Panton Family blog have listed the symptoms of blog disease. (thx Blog Herald)
Duncan Riley takes apart an MSM story about a fraudulent MySpace page.
Take That Mean Blogs. Steve Rubel unsubscribes from mean blogs: "That's why for 2007 I have unsubscribed from dozens of mean-spirited blogs this year. I wish I could name them, but, um that would be mean!" He says Lifehacker is one of the good blogs. The WSJ thinks so too.
Get Blogger on your own domain. Details here, here and here.
Blocked from Wikipedia: Qatar was blocked from accessing the UCG reference tool. Apparently, it was an accident.
Wired says these were the best blog fights of 2006.
Blogging Times reports that the Baghdad Blogger at Riverbend has returned.
More video finding tools: NewTeeVee reports on new video sections from Megite and Tailrank.
The Gifter wishing well is collecting 1,000,000 wishes from the Internet in exchange for $1,000,000 in charitable donations. The wishes can be read on the Million Dollar Blog Post.
Senator's Top MySpace Spots. Here is some comic relief from The Onion. A Senator's top MySpace slots are all giant corporations.
Stingy Zune: Cliczune reports that many songs can not be shared on the Zune. "There is a lot of testing going on at Zunerama and ZuneThoughts about songs that can or cannot be shared when purchased or acquired through the ZunePass. Both sites are coming with numbers of around 40% of songs that "can't" be shared from Zune to Zune."
