For a year or two now, I've been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I've also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it's a very simple problem, there's a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I'd see this "PollDaddy" thing pop up.

Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren't the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.

Blogs.com is a new service from blogging company Six Apart that helps you discover the best in blogs. You can quickly and easily find blogs by category and topic or read daily blog roundups of some of the best blog content around the Web. Top 10 Lists from celebrity bloggers and influencers also help you discover new blogs, and everyone is invited to create their own Top 10 lists to share with the community. Blogs.com also produces a free weekly email newsletter so you can get the best in blogs delivered to your inbox. To get the weekly Blogs.com newsletter, use the subscription form on the right.

Open Salon is a social content site we hope to officially launch later this year. We've been hosting a lively private beta test for several months now, with about 1,300 or our closest friends. We're now pleased to open the door for everyone else.

What, precisely, can you do here? After a quick registration, you can start blogging immediately -- and rating and commenting on other posts, messaging other members, and more. You can also invite other members into Open Salon from your own blog page.

The Open Salon home page functions like a real-time magazine cover. We spotlight the best content, but you can also see what other members are reading, rating and commenting on. A new issue goes up every evening at 8 p.m. ET; we update the cover every morning at 11 a.m. ET, and as necessary. In the near future, we'll begin featuring the best Open Salon content on the cover of Salon.com. We'll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open. More to come.

The idea of opening up a site such as Salon to the general public and featuring all these new kinds of content is fantastic. But is compensating contributors solely on a tip-based system the right way to do it? Sure, if everyone who visited the site threw in a couple bucks, it'd probably add up - but realistically, any contributor is likely to get maybe a dollar or two for any given post. Maybe.

So what does Automattic need the money for? After all, from what I know of the business, Automattic has been bubbling around the break-even point for a while now. Matt explains that they are going to roll out newer, hosted services such as BBPress (forums), and will expand their other product offerings, such as Gravatar and the spam-protection service Akismet. The money will be spent to hire more engineers and build out a more robust infrastructure.

That would be a start. Anne Zelenka made an impassioned case for using WordPress to build a social network, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some social features start to creep into WordPress.com as well. They just boosted their storage capacity to three gigabytes, which indicates that they are serious about allowing bloggers to add video and other multimedia content to their blogs.

Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.

When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita):

Google Australia this morning showed a new iteration of Google Maps, launching about a week from now.

First up, if you know how to embed a YouTube video in your blog, you'll be able to embed Google Maps in your website, Google promises.

It'll be as simple as cutting and pasting a bit of HTML code into your website, just like a YouTube video.

The embedded maps have the full functionality of Google Maps -- they provide satellite view, map view or hybrid view, and users can click and drag the maps around.

To embed a Google Map, you pull up the map you want to embed--it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map you've created--and then click "Link to this page" and copy and paste the HTML into your website or blog. The embedded map will be fully interactive--you can drag and click or zoom in on a location, and view it in map, satellite, and hybrid modes,

1) The biggest news is that there will be a rebranding of MyBlogLog. The exact timing and new brand were not revealed. (YahooBlogLog or MyYahooLog? Time will tell.)
2) A complete site redesign is on the way!
3) A new "Widget 2.0" is coming with some hover features.
4) Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs.
5) Some sort of method to turn off your presence for some types of sites will be added.

On Fri. May 4th, we updated Technorati.com to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results. This update changed the earlier references of "N blogs link here" and "X links from Y blogs" with the single Technorati Authority number. On the blog page, we also show the Technorati Rank.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Since at the lower end of the scale many blogs will have the same Technorati Authority, they will share the same Technorati Rank.

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.

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

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.

There are many culprits. First, we have a lot of third party widgets, ads and analytics apps running on the site. They are often the cause for slow load times. FM Publishing, our advertising network, often slows down the site and then other things pile on to crush it.

Today we had three problems. FM is updating their software and caused massive . We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.

Another culprit is MyBlogLog, which we've had to strip off the site a number of times because of slowdowns.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities." You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.

Creating a new Pipe, however, is not for the wary. The mere volume of available options to both expand and narrow down hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of data, combined with the seemingly endless array of (sometimes rather ambiguous) input boxes for each and every module in the pipe, is likely to be daunting for the novice user. Therefore, the service is not likely to be something that the majority of Yahoo!'s everyday users are going to use, but more likely to attract the early-adopting, slightly more technical crowd.

Because of this, Pipes may take off among tech geeks and have enough meme power to remain in the collective consciousness for a while, but may not be able to become a hit trend anytime soon. Content publishers may also become wary of Pipes altering their relationship with the end user by allowing users to manipulate, reformat, and ultimately alter content as they so please. Mishmashing content from all around the web sounds like fun for the user, but some fear that it could decrease brand awareness and reduce webmasters' abilities to track content usage patterns.

We show a little fire icon next to Top Searches, in case you want to write a blurb about something that's super hot.

Here's how we talk about; hope you love it!

Where's the Fire? What's Hot and Why.

Ever wonder why something is sooooo popular? Or want the whole story without having to dig through a zillion blog posts looking for the hot video or juicy pictures? WTF tells what's hot - and why - and where the good stuff is. Vote for your favorite WTFs to help the community bubble up the best ones. Jump in!

Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

That's not to say im any better, but it is true. As a group , most bloggers are only a small step away from the flashing, rotating logos of 1997 or the neon pink backgrounds and blaring teen pop auto play bollocks of your average 17yr old MySpace user -- and I include myself, though i dont use SPA, im as guilty as the next blogger of "bling envy".

Unlike familiar sites such as myspace.com, friendster.com or blog.com, which place intrusive and distracting advertisements on the user's personal blog pages, ShoutPost.com reserves the user's space for the user's content only. Additionally, ShoutPost.com provides a unique syndication system, which enables members to create their blog on ShoutPost.com, and instantly syndicate it on any other website that they have control over. This is the first time that a free-blogging site has offered syndication of this type.

"We wanted to give bloggers a free personal space to share ideas without having to worry about their message being corrupted by the latest DVD release, or the newest network sitcom," said ShoutPost.com creator, Taylor Bayouth. "With the new syndication system, we also offer the first free method for any website owner to easily syndicate their ShoutPost blog anywhere on the web. We think this feature will play a large part in ShoutPost's success."

The wait for Gravatar 2.0 is almost over. The new site will be released in early February with an all new interface and some great new functionality.

When the new site goes live, I'll send a one time email notification to all account holders. If you don't currently have an account, then leave a comment here (with your correct email address) and I will send you the notice as well.

Over the coming weeks I'll be posting screenshots and other tidbits to keep you updated during the final phases of testing and deployment. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you don't miss anything!

Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

"This closes the loop between readers and publishers," he said. "Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implicit networking."

Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.

After much discussion and heartache we have decided to walk away from the Performancing deal. We listened to our Posties and other Metrics users, dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn't what we were looking for right now.

The decision has been made by Nick at Performancing to make the Metrics platform Open Source and I believe that is a wise decision. Nick is a great guy and I wish him much luck with the other aspects of Performancing.com. Nick did what he could to keep the hosted version of Metrics running, but in the end it just wasn't a fit

Whatever happened, this isn't pretty. After the deal was announced, Performancing moved their non-acquired assets to a new domain name and re-launched that service. They certainly stopped talking to other potential acquirors, given that the deal was officially announced. In merger-land, this is what's known as "being left at the altar" because everyone down the road who you talk to will want to know why the previous deal exploded.

Performancing should have had a more nailed down acquisition agreement, so they aren't entirely blameless.

PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers. Through its purchase PayPerPost gains a number of powerful blogger support tools including Performancing Metrics, the leading, free blog analytics service, and Performancing Exchange, an online "classifieds" for bloggers.

CoComment, the blog comment tracking service that emerged from a Swisscom project, has raised $1.5M from Netage Capital Partners, a Japanese venture fund owned by investment company Netage Group. It acquired a 40 percent stake in the Swiss venture.

Netage has holdings in several RSS projects for the Japanese market, according to its website. It is currently launching CoComment in Japan, said Swisscom in a statement. The Swiss telco also said there had been interest from investors and companies in Europe and the US, but that the Japanese investor brought the "broadest" experience and most "success" in the Internet market to the venture.

Despite buzz to the contrary, MyBlogLog.com is not yet the property of serial acquirer Yahoo Inc. This comes straight from Scott Rafer, the former CEO of search engine Feedster and now CEO of the popular blog community tracker.

"We've got a lot of balls in the air at the moment," Rafer said. Rumors that Yahoo was buying MyBlogLog for $10 million have been floating around the blogosphere since the Web 2.0 "summit" earlier this month. MyBlogLog encourages people to build connections and communities around their favorite blogs.

One of Yahoo's PR firms, OutkastPR, emailed us to say that this story is innacurate, and that Yahoo has not acquired MyBlogLog. We dug a little deeper with some insiders and it appears that Yahoo and MyBlogLog are in very early acquisistion discussions, and nothing more. Founder Scott Rafer was completely silent when asked about the rumors today - suggesting he didn’t mind getting all the press attention.

As a provider of syndicated text, pictures and video news, Reuters plans to offer Pluck's BlogBurst blog syndication service to thousands of its media customers worldwide, the London-based company said.

BlogBurst counts U.S. news outlets such as The Washington Post, the Gannett newspaper chain, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman as its customers. In Britain, it also links bloggers to the Guardian newspaper site and Reuters sites.

Blog categories covered include news, politics, sports, health, fitness, technology, travel, food and entertainment.

Pluck plans to take advantage of Reuters' investment to expand its services worldwide, starting in Europe and later in Asia, executives of both companies said.

Then AOL launched two music blogs in Blogsmith: AOL Music News Blog -- which is better than you'd expect from the name -- and Spinner.com, an older domain reborn as a great indie music news blog. Following that they launched The Fanhouse covering NCAA football and the NFL and an elections blog which features Sam Donaldson's Ask Sam column.

That brings us to November and Blogsmith -- like Weblogs a year before it -- is now owned by AOL.

Obviously AOL likes our enterprise blogging platform, but I think the quality of Blogsmith's versatile team factored into AOL's decision -- maybe even in equal parts. I reclaimed the team members who had been on a "Netscape detour" and we've kicked off some major upgrades. We moved to a multi-city version of the platform. That was both the largest and smoothest server move I've ever been a part of. Right now my team is in Florida without me working on an overhaul of the publishing tools.

Is AOL going to release Blogsmith to the public as a Typepad/WordPress/YouTube/Wal-Mart/Starbucks-killer or not? Yes.

Dave McClure, from the audience, asked why Yahoo hasn't acquired Six Apart's blogging tools or Facebook to gain some faster traction in blogging and social networking. Horowitz responded, "We put Yahoo 360 out there and learned a lot from it. 360 may be doing a 180, and change and adapt to address the opportunities." He didn't offer any specifics as to what the 180 degree turn looks like.

Filo added, "We are absolutely interested in blogging, and we hope five years from now to be a major player in that space. We will look at acquisitions."

Today we're launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We'll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community.

I recently interviewed del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, who is now with Yahoo after the popular social bookmarking service was acquired last December. Joshua was recently named as top innovator of the year by MIT Technology Review Magazine. Tagging is one example of an innovation that del.icio.us pioneered (at least in its current form). Joshua told me that "del.icio.us was the first app to showcase tagging" and that now "practically everyone uses tags in the [del.icio.us] system in some form."

But Joshua has bigger plans for del.icio.us - it will essentially turn into a social network, with more focus on people instead of data.

The company seeks to define who is shaping specific conversations in blogs with "algorithms" that analyze relationships, based on four criteria:

overall traffic and number of inbound links

contextual relevance to a customer's specified area of concern, such as key words.

frequency of content publication on such topics

the traffic it sends back to the marketer

This is a very difficult thing to do through automation, because links can often be deceptive. As the hundreds of PhDs at Google have found, it is not easy to deconstruct the masses of "link-farms" between Web sites, purposefully created to boost each other's traffic. We seem to always be one step behind the latest statistics tricks, on traffic numbers too. Rob Crumpler, the company’s chief executive officer, tells us the company has done a lot of work to combat this sort of thing.

WeeWorld is the only online personalized identity provider that enables users to carry their alter-ego with them throughout their online and offline lives. For example, international mobile partnerships such as Motorola and Vodafone enable users to extend their digital identity to cell phone picture messages, caller ID alerts and wallpapers. As the company continues to cultivate strategic partnerships with companies such as Skype, MSN and AOL, WeeWorld is poised to become the standard for online/mobile digital expression and personalization.

In addition to WeeMee portability, WeeWorld.com provides interactive games and personalized ecards to send to friends. Users can create WeeBuddies for their friends, keep their own blog and continually update their own WeeMee to express their current mood or daily attire. WeeWorld also plans to evolve into the broader social networking realm by allowing each WeeMee to create and personalize their own space.

With billions of possible configurations, there is a WeeMee for everyone, as users choose their body shape, skin color, hair style, emotion, clothing, accessories, pets, pastimes, passions, pursuits, sports, backgrounds, moods, emotions and feelings.

Meanwhile, Opinion BuzzTracker - the new blog tracking partnership between FoxNews.com and RealClearPolitics.com - will apparently probe the blogosphere flagging up the most popular politics stories in a given 24 hour period.

The official statement reads: "The tool permits Internet users to easily filter through thousands of political news articles and blog conversations to determine the 'wisdom of the crowds' in a continuously updated format."

According to Opinion BuzzTracker the top three blogs today come from RightWinged.com, Ace of Spades HQ and And Rightly So! - all "points of the political compass" covered there then ...

Want to read the latest gaming news on your Xbox 360 (like Gaming Bits!)? XB Stream is a new application that works with Windows XP/Vista as a RSS/XML news aggregator to show gaming news and play podcasts on your Xbox 360. It takes news feeds (text and images) and converts it to images that are viewable on the Xbox 360's pictures folder or podcasts and places them in your audio folder on the Xbox 360.

In its complaint, the FTC alleged that Xanga, a rival to the popular MySpace.com, allegedly permitted creation of 1.7 million accounts by users who submitted birthdays indicating they were under 13. Collecting personal information from anyone under 13 without parental consent is a violation of the children's protection act, or COPPA, which was passed by Congress in 1998.

According to the FTC, after signing up for the service, children often posted personal information on their blogs.

"Protecting kids' privacy online is a top priority for America's parents, and for the FTC," FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said in a statement. "COPPA requires all commercial Web sites, including operators of social networking sites like Xanga, to give parents notice and obtain their consent before collecting personal information from kids they know are under 13. A million-dollar penalty should make that obligation crystal clear."

"Xanga has long been committed to making its site safer for its members," it said. "When these issues came to our attention, we instituted a stronger, more comprehensive safety and compliance program."

The acquisition gives Six Apart both a feed reader and feed search engine. Rojo will help generate more pageviews, allowing Six Apart to further leverage its newly created advertising network covering LiveJournal Plus accounts and Vox. Six Apart may bundle the Rojo service with its licensed personal blogging service currently powered by TypePad. Six Apart currently licenses TypePad software to companies around the world such as Le Monde in France and Nifty in Japan. Rojo's software could be bundled into these licensing deals or command a higher licensing value for Vox when it is launched and ready for redistribution.

In the case of MySpace, the ability to simply click "add" when you hear a song you like and then you are broadcasting that song on your own page was pure genius. It brought the musicians to MySpace because they saw the viral aspects to music on MySpace. The more musicians came to MySpace, the more value accrued to being a member of the MySpace social network.

The founders of YouTube must have thought a lot about that trick because when they made their video player embeddable on a MySpace page, the MySpace community reacted swiftly, putting YouTube videos on their pages the way they put music on their page. They find something they like and they show it to their friends. Not a link, that's old school, they showcase the media right their on their page.

The biggest change of all is perhaps the least immediately visible, but it affects the entire underlying structure of Blog*Spot. What used to happen was that Blogger would create static HTML files on your Blog*Spot account every time you published, and those files would remain there unchanged until your next update. In the new version, adding a new post simply updates your information in our database. Then, when someone wants to see any of the pages on your blog, those pages are created for them dynamically, on the fly.

When you see the invitation to create a Google Account and join Blogger in beta, you're welcome to postpone it and switch later at a more convenient time. If you do this, your old Blogger login will continue to work as before. However, after a couple of months we will begin requiring you to switch in order to access your Blogger account.

Technorati has been tracking the blogosphere, or world of weblogs, since November 2002, and I'm constantly amazed at the growth over the years. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Whenever I write about these statistics, I'm always asked by people, "Can it continue to grow this quickly?" Frankly, I can't possibly imagine it continuing to grow at this pace - after all, there are only so many human beings in the world! It has to slow down.

Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.

The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.

From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.

About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.

About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.

About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.

Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.

This is about double the volume of about a year ago.

The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

Microsoft officials are working to fix a variety of problems that didn't show up until the service hit production. Among them: performance bottlenecks, HTML rendering issues, Firefox compatibility, and more. No word when Microsoft expects all of the issues to be resolved.

The Internet added 4.4 million new hostnames during July - the single largest gain of new sites in a single month, according to Internet services firm Netcraft. The growth surpassed the previous records set in June of this year, which saw a 3.96 million site gain.

The main reason for the quick growth, Netcraft said, is the battle between Microsoft and Google to attract users to their blog services. Both firms contributed significantly to drive the Internet to a new record number of websites, which now stands at 92,615,362 websites. According to the firm, Microsoft added about 858,000 new sites, while Google gained about 568,000 during the month.

Feedster, Inc., the leader in search and syndication of dynamic content, has announced today that Tyler Goldman will join its Board of Directors and become acting president. Mr. Goldman was previously Senior VP of Corporate & Business Development at Movielink, and founder and CEO of Broadband Sports, Inc. Former president, Chris Redlitz, left to pursue interests in earlier stage companies.

"Feedster is well positioned to expand its leadership in search and syndication." said Mr. Goldman. "With 41 million blogs and feeds being searched dynamically, Feedster provides consumers with the best way to leverage the constant flow of information that is being published on the web. Feedster is well recognized by the technology community as the leading search and syndication engine for dynamic web-published content, including blogs, news and podcasts, and is in the process of expanding this leadership position in newly emerging areas like images and video. As millions of users, publishers and other web-based entities continually generate a vast amount of dynamic content Feedster provides a comprehensive platform to search and syndicate content that is most relevant and timely."

This is an incredibly small blog that's intended to: redirect you to Guy's new feed, show Guy (and others) the reason why they don't want to just let their Feedburner feeds get deleted, and gently inform Feedburner, Bloglines and others of a little problem that needs to be fixed.

For those of you who are are seeing this message in your feed reader and wondering why I'm not sounding like Guy Kawasaki, here's the deal. You are subscribed to an outdated Feedburner feed that Guy allowed to lapse.

Though there is not yet a fixed way for creating revenue from blog services in China, search engines and Internet portals have in succession launched their own blog services. Sina, Sohu, BlogCN, Bokee.com, ChinaBlog.net and others are already crowding the market.

Photobucket dominates the category, with a 44% market share. It surpassed Yahoo! Photos in January, and its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006. Flickr, my friends should be happy to note, has also been growing rapidly, increasing 44% in the past four months, and up from a rank of #9 in this category one year ago (week ending 6/18/05). Slide has also taken off this spring, with its visits increasing more than ten fold in the past four months.

Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide's traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket's traffic, and 50% of Imageshack's traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites, as I've reported before. It's amazing to consider that the 1.39% of the downstream traffic from MySpace that goes to Photobucket could be largely responsible for Photobucket's category dominance.

Down for Maintenance
Blogger is temporarily unavailable due to an unexpected problem.
We will be back up as soon as possible.

The URL they put this on is http://www.blogger.com/sorry.html. You should be sorry! :-)

An eBay Blog (Web log) gives you an online publishing tool to share your opinions with the rest of the eBay Community. Blogs can be used for a variety of purposes: to enhance an eBay store, share personal experiences or talk about collectibles you like to win on eBay. What you write on your eBay Blog is up to you because it's all about you.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster has arrived and we have all been taken to planet Zeus 94 to kneel before Zod. All this is a little much for us to handle at the moment so come back later please. And leave a quarter in the collection tray on your way out.

There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called "neighborhood" is prominently displayed on each page (see screen shots below). If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up.

Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want -- integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages.

comScore World Metrix's proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million. Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.

Please note that your MSN Space's URL will change on June 5, 2006. As part of investments in the improvement of MSN Spaces, it we will be migrating all of the URLs from http://spaces.msn.com/NAME to http://NAME.spaces.msn.com. (For instance, instead of http://spaces.msn.com/thespacecraft/ you will now see http://thespacecraft.spaces.msn.com.)

This is the second url change users will have to endure, and it won't be the final. During the 10.5 update earlier this year, the team removed the "/members/" part from blog urls and with the eventual migration of Spaces to the Windows Live platform, the domain will surely move to spaces.live.com. No doubt there will be important technical reasons which necessitate these changes occuring when they do, however logic would suggest that it would be less confusing for the end users if at least two of the changes occured at the same time. I'm expecting to see some irate Spaces users commenting at the post linked below.

Okay enough fluff. That's the sales spiel that most of us hear and believe. But as loyal reader Kiltak discovered, it's not always that way. Kiltak is the proud owner of the excellently named Geeks Are Sexy blog. It's well written by guys who know what they're talking about and--most important--often link back to my blogs.

Predictably, they've become steadily more popular. More and more readers until one day, Kiltak tried logging onto his blog, only to discover that Blogspot seemed to have deleted his blog. No warning.

As expected, Kiltak sent a few salty emails and voice calls to the Blogspot folks, basically asking "What the @#$%?!?"

Sadly, it took them some time to figure out what he was talking about, but when they did the explanation went like this: The traffic going to Geeks Are Sexy as well as its content had risen to a level where Blogger decided it might be a possible source of 'spam' blogging. When that happens, it sticks the blog into a quarantine of sorts until they figure out what's what. Meanwhile the blogger no longer sees the site name in his blog management interface.

Moving to our own domain was at least briefly considered. If Blogger had been unable to get the site back, there would've been no question that we would've abandoned this and moved to a different platform.

But moving now wouldn't be a simple business. The blog is back, and shouldn't be eaten by Blogger's spam killer in the future (so they say). This means that there'd be some pretty intense content migration to do (including images uploaded to the Blogger servers). Plus we'd lose our page-ranking, peoples' bookmarks would die, and all sorts of other uncoolness.

A lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to her. It's an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books or music, and thousands of products from hundreds of other trusted merchants. You can pick whatever content you want to put in your lens to bring context to your topic. Then, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, your lens gets his started and sends him off in the right direction. It's a place to start, not finish.

We're just out of beta, and we're betting no one is going to retire on their lens earnings. But already some of you have earned as much as $30 (dinner for two!). Others have earned about $1. And still others have pooled their money to send thousands of dollars to places like Room to Read, which helps build schools for children in developing countries.

The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. A true expert on a topic could generate many, many times that number by creating a blog, along with some static content, and putting up simple Google adsense ads. So top content producers are not going to be heading to Squidoo for the money, ever (Squidoo’s model is set up in such a way that they could never make as much money from a lens as they could on their own). And besides, the blog format just works better for experts - fresh content generates lots of links, which equals traffic and search engine juice.

The only unanswered question is whether or not experts will go to Squidoo even without the financial incentive. Maybe, but Squidoo's tools are not particularly advanced - self publishing is easy these days.

Squidoo may generate some content creation growth, but I don't see it generating serious page view growth under their current model.

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post. For this analysis, Technorati excluded generic or default categories, like "General" or "Diary", which some services put into each post if the author doesn't specify a particular tag or category. We only counted posts that used a non-default tag or category.

The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international

English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.

Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.

Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months

Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.

The Korean language is underrepresented in this analysis

Language breakdown does not necessarily imply a particular country or regional breakdown.

Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.

The rel-tag microformat has been adopted by a number of the large tool makers, making it easy for people to tag their posts. About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them.

Moodviews reveals patterns that follow on weekly, monthly and even yearly cycles. For example, the label "drunk" becomes increasingly popular each weekend. The label "stressed" appears less during summer months and more towards the end of each year, perhaps because of end-of-year work deadlines or the stress of visiting in-laws.

On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".

The latest addition to Moodviews, a program called Moodsignals, tries to explain match these blogospheric mood swings to current events. It identifies emotional peaks by comparing recent label usage with records of previous use. When it finds a spike, the program picks out less commonly used words from relevant blog posts in an effort to identify the cause of the emotional change.

Moodviews reveals patterns that follow on weekly, monthly and even yearly cycles. For example, the label "drunk" becomes increasingly popular each weekend. The label "stressed" appears less during summer months and more towards the end of each year, perhaps because of end-of-year work deadlines or the stress of visiting in-laws.

On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".

Loved, that's what many bloggers felt around Valentine's Day 2006, while there were increased levels of flirty-ness and loneliness

A broad spectrum of moods is observed around New Year's Day 2006, with unprecedented levels of nostalgia, drunkenness, contemplation, and hopefulness

Unseen levels of happiness around Christmas 2005.

Thankful, hungry, and full around Thanksgiving 2005

Scaredness around Halloween 2005

Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005

Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005

Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005

In what may just be an Easter fluke, it seems that the entire Wordpress.com Blog Network is down for the day, and has been dead for at least an hour. The outage comes after complaints from some blog owners (including SEJ’s Greg Sterling) that posts placed over the past day were lost.

Hello folks. We're doing a little unplanned emergency maintainance to some systems that were causing problems over the past few weeks. Your blog will be unavailable for a few more minutes while we get everything situated. Relax and enjoy this Easter Sunday morning, and know that everybunny at WordPress.com is working their butts off to get your blog back online. — Matt and the team

://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.

Today we're happy to unveil something new: the Blogs of Note blog (meta!). Now you can see all the blogs we've ever blog of noted, going all the way back to 2001. This also means that if you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the Blogs of Note Atom feed to get the latest delivered to you every day.

We hope you have fun with this combination slice of blogging history/firehose of hot fresh blogs. As a bonus tip, if you run across a blog that you'd like to check out but that's not there any more, try running it through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to see if they have a copy.