According to Ismail, when people post job listings or items for sale, the data is owned by the Web site where it's posted, rather than by the person who posted it -- and sellers often need to pay to post. Using the schematics provided by the initiative would allow feed syndicators such as PubSub to find such information and offer it to others in aggregated form.

Say you need a date. Right now, a single must pay to subscribe to and search multiple dating sites, Ismail said. If individuals published their datability using the structured formats, "You could say, 'I want all the tall blondes from Sweden.'" Publishing structured data would allow people to find things on blogs in a more interesting and useful way, he added.

Canter and Ismail emphasized that structured blogging could allow companies to build new services that take advantage of the data, which could be stored in shared repositories or distributed via services such as FeedMesh, a service for sharing and distributing notifications of feed updates to which PubSub is a major contributor.

Cleveland Entrepreneur Tony Colan and partner Ed Harrison announced on Thursday they have purchased the domain blogster.com (blogster.com), for $100,000.

The site's programmers rewrote the entire software for blogster.com and took the site live on Thanksgiving Day. The redesigned site features image hosting, a user-friendly interface and pre-designed templates, which provides continuity and easy navigation for blogsters.

"We were attracted to the name immediately," says Tony Colan, VP of Blogster.com. "Blogging is no longer just for teens, techies and political pundits. The growth, we expect, will be explosive, and as a result, we were willing to pay a premium for a domain that will help us build brand awareness in the marketplace."

Blogster.com differentiates itself from the other blogging sites, by eliminating all spam. "We intend to take hard line against spam. We don't want our blogs clogged with all that Internet garbage," Colan said.

The blog aims to be a place farmers can go to find information on agricultural topics, ranging from crop science to economics to veterinary medicine. Like all blogs, it also will let farmers comment on the information it presents.

"It's really nothing but the classic function of the extension service, which is to take research and interpret and apply it in the field," said Scott Irwin, a University of Illinois agriculture professor who helped develop the blog. "It's just using a new tool to do that - a virtual or digital county agent."

Web sites for farmers are abundant and a Google search for agriculture-oriented blogs found several. But very few were dedicated to more than a single aspect of farming or farm policy.

"We saw what was missing was the place that was summarizing, synthesizing, interpreting and suggesting new applications," said Irwin, a frequent contributor to Farm Decision Outreach Central, a University of Illinois Web site that helps farmers manage their operations.

Why so? Every blogger speaks to the world, and every post has the potential to set off a conflagration. So, he says, it makes sense to count the matches. It's true that the A-listers play a crucial role. They fan the flames. But by the time they're onto a nasty rumor, complaint, or embarrassment, according to Umbria, it's no longer just a flicker in the forest. It's a blaze. And by that point, you probably don't need a market intelligence company to tell you about it.

6. Can I get the same insights Umbria provides using a blog search engine?

No. Blog search engines use key word search queries and generate results in real-time, making it very difficult to remove "Splogs" (Spam blogs or fake blogs created to "spoof" or fool search engines and elevate these URLs in search engine rankings) and false positives (e.g., a search on "Apple Computer" that may yield results about someone eating an "apple" while working on their computer). Incidence of Splogs and false positive can skew analysis results by as much as 50%. Umbria has invested in some of the most robust blog spam and false positive detection capabilities available to ensure we produce high quality and highly accurate analysis results unavailable from blog search tools.

The right to blog: People who like to blog -- especially about their employer -- should refrain from doing so at work.

"The computer system is the property of the employer, and the employer has the right to monitor all internet activity," said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute. "That would include blog posts and all e-mail and internet transmissions."

Flynn estimates that hundreds of people have been fired for their blog content in recent years. In the AMA/ePolicy survey, 26 percent of respondents said they had fired workers for misusing the internet. A quarter of employers also said they'd terminated workers for e-mail misuse.

Gervais' podcast also features his "Office" co-writer Stephen Merchant and their former radio producer Karl Pilkington, as the trio take on a succession of offbeat topics from vampires to a regular segment called "Monkey News."

The free half-hour show -- essentially a radio program that can be downloaded to a computer or portable audio player -- now occupies the top spot on the podcast charts of the U.S. and UK iTunes Music Stores run by Apple Computer, whose popular iPod digital music player was the basis for the podcast name.

For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog--written under the pen name Muzi Mei--that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man. This fall the Beijing resident posted a recording of her own lovemaking sounds that would make Paris Hilton blush. More than 50,000 people simultaneously tried to download the 25-minute podcast, crashing the host server. Despite government attempts to censor it, the sex diary is so popular that Li's pen name is intermittently the most searched keyword on China's top search engine. "I express my freedom through sex," says Li, unapologetically. "It's my life, and I can do what I want."

Muzi Mei, real name Li Li, rose to a brief far-reaching notoriety in the last few months of 2003. Writing from south China's Guangzhou city, she kept a blog where she described sexual encounters with various men, including a well-known rock musician.

Now that blogging has officially become the new "cool" way to market a movie, it seems as if we no longer need to see the film once it comes out since the entire thing has already been shown to us over the course of a year and a half on that damn webpage. Between the interviews and the assortment of behind-the-scenes tours, these blogs are waging a tough battle against, what used to be, a sweet spoiler-free world.

Sports blogs are one of the strongest niches in the blogosphere and have received a great deal of publicity and notice from the mainstream media. Sports bloggers deserve some respect and gratification for the work they do, and that's what I hope this will accomplish.

While I love comments-and would never consider turning them off on this blog-I don't quite grasp the notion that the conversation is somehow inhibited without comments. Blogging godfather Dave Winer hasn't offered comments on his blog for a long time, and has publicly dismissed the notion that a blog without comments isn't a blog. In a 15-month-old article in the Online Journalism Review that dealt with blog spam, Winer suggested it's painfully easy to comment on blogs that don't support comments: Commenters should simply run their own blog if they want to comment.

To that end, Winer recently introduced a subtle new feature to his blog. The little green Technorati icon appears above the fold in the right-hand column. Click it; it takes you to the Technorati page showing all items that link to Winer's blog. In other words, it's just like reading the comments left on a comment-enabled blog. Today, Winer notes that the tag has been successful (aside from some "snarky" feedback).

General Motors Corp., credited as one of the first corporate podcasters when it dipped its toe into the waters in February, records talk-radio-style episodes about its vehicles that were downloaded 75,000 times in August. Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary in May with a series recorded inside the park. Verizon Wireless issued one a few days ago to promote a cell phone that will, among other features, let you listen to podcasts.

International Business Machines Corp., which produces podcasts for investors about the future of trends, also set up a podcast-recording system for employee communication. And many media companies, from the BBC to ESPN to The Sun, have jumped on board for simple self-preservation.

"Companies are completely losing control of their messages, and the one way to get into the game is by blogging and podcasting," said Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media. "The companies that are early adopters stand tremendous opportunity to be the winners in the long run."

Young people riding in vehicles smashed cars and store windows in suburban Sydney late Monday, a day after thousands of drunken white youths attacked people they believed were of Arab descent at a beach in the same area in one of Australia's worst outbursts of racial violence.

Sunday's attack - apparently prompted by reports that Lebanese youths had assaulted two lifeguards - sparked retaliation by young men of Arab descent in several Sydney suburbs, fighting with police and smashing 40 cars with sticks and bats, police said. Thirty-one people were injured and 16 were arrested in hours of violence.

Whilst last weeks events at Cronulla have now escalated into Cronulla and surrounding areas being a no-go area for any non anlgo-saxon, our Prime Minister doesn't believe that it's based on race. One couldn't be so out of touch with current events if they tried.

Its unfortunate and quite unsettling to see Australia, home to multiculturalism, degrade to gangs of people chasing man and woman with bottles and iron bars only because they differ in race to themselves. The initial events that sparked these events is of course unfortunate, but for it to come to what it is now is by no means just because of it.

search for specific text within blog titles.

search for text written by a specific author.

search tags from a specific author.

We're down visiting the folks in London again and at about 06.05 we're awoken by a thunder like rumble, the house shaking and the loft entrance flying open. As you can imagine there's much shouting back and forth between the rooms as to whats going on, there's a car alarm going off outside and several of the lights have flicked on in the houses opposite.

1. Blog Commenter Troll - One who floats in and out of many different blogs and leaves anonymous or non-anonymous comments that fit the "troll" trademark code of, well, shame?

2. Blog Owner Troll - The blog owner troll is the top of the food chain in blog trolls. The blog owner troll of course owns a blog, and uses the blog to create "troll-like" blog entries, sparking conversation from other blog trolls, and occasionally luring an ignorant non blog-troll into his/her trap.

(v.) (1) To deliberately post derogatory or inflammatory comments to a community forum, chat room, newsgroup and/or a blog in order to bait other users into responding.

One major difference between the two blogs -- Mason's was very much a personal blog with a look-and-feel that was far from a BBC standard. Unlike Robinson's, which has the complete BBC branding in its presentation and clearly is a formal part of the overall BBC web presence. Indeed, its root URL (blogs.bbc.co.uk) indicates that.

First podcasting, and now blogging. It looks like the BBC is beginning to embrace new media in a big way as a means of engaging with its viewers/listeners/readers in a variety of different ways, traditional and non-traditional.

Will we see a blog portal, an offering to those viewers/listeners/readers to create their own blogs as part of the BBC blog domain? I think it would make total sense in the engagement process.

Just talked to Joshua Schachter, who emailed to say that he sold del.icio.us, the innovative tagging service, to Yahoo.

First things first. He wouldn't say how much Yahoo paid for the service, which now has 300,000 subscribers. But he said he did the deal because he felt it would help the service, which he launched at the end of 2003, grow more quickly than it could have on its own. "We're going to continue to build our vision but with more resources, technology and distribution," he says.

Del.icio.us will continue operating as a stand along service at the same time as Yahoo will integrate more of the tagging technology across its network of offerings.

Blogs really do threaten the mainstream media. Thought experiment: Suppose you call yourself a pro-technology supply-sider. (That's what I happen to be, because I think Moore's Law and Say's Law drive growth and prosperity in the world.) A reader with such an outlook will find a home at RealClear Politics and Tech Central Station because the editors of those überblogs see the world in the same way. You might ask, "Well, doesn't the Wall Street Journal see the world likewise?" Yeah, mostly. But the WSJ needs thousands of employees and tons of ink and paper to produce its product. RealClear Politics gets by with fewer than ten employees.

Are blogs good or bad for business? I recently argued this point with Forbes Managing Editor Dennis Kneale on our television show, Forbes on Fox. Dennis had edited the Forbes Nov. 14 cover story, "Attack of the Blogs," by Daniel Lyons. This story recounted the damage that some nasty bloggers, hiding in the weeds like assassins, had done to businesses and people. Dennis was proud of this story, and properly so. It was well reported and snappily written. But I took issue with it, saying that good companies and honest businesspeople have little to fear from bloggers. When companies and people do the right thing, the majority of bloggers will write good things about them.

Hef is a really good guy. We watched the fight together the other night. I think he's a really special guy - he's the greatest guy ever. He doesn't have his nose up in the air like every other rich guy ... he's down to earth. He eats pizza just like all of us. We go to McDonald's all the time. He's a regular guy.

We're blogospheric.

Yesterday we launched a genuine, authentic, by-the-book New York Times blog. It's Carpetbagger, by David Carr. It's part of a new movie-awards-season web site called Red Carpet, which includes a bunch of things you won't see in the newspaper, like weekly columns by Joyce Wadler and Caryn James. You'll see a refer on today's front page, which I boldly, if ignorantly, declare to be our first-ever page-1 refer to a web-only feature. At the very least, it's our first-ever page 1 refer to a blog.

Within a few days, we'll put up a real estate blog by Damon Darlin and others. More blogs are in the works. Even more are at the idea stage. We've come late to blogging, obviously, though we've put toes in the water on a number of occasions, as when our movie critics sent running commentary from last year's Cannes film festival.

Wait a minute. That seems a little unfair and seems to portray the Times as denigrating blogs.

Read the memo yourself (via L.A Observed) to decide if you think that's the case. But here's the graph that struck me.

"But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr's. It's full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it."

A dental student at Marquette University has been suspended for the rest of the academic year and ordered to repeat a semester after a committee of professors, administrators and students determined that he violated professional conduct codes when he posted negative comments about unnamed students and professors on a blog.

Scott Taylor, the student's attorney, said his client, a 22-year-old in Marquette's School of Dentistry, was brought before the committee for a conduct hearing last week after a classmate complained about his blog, a Web site that contained musings about topics ranging from his education to videogames and drinking.

The focus of the hearing, Taylor said, were half a dozen postings including one describing a professor as "a (expletive) of a teacher" and another that described 20 classmates as having the "intellectual/maturity of a 3-year-old."

Taylor released what he said was a complete transcript of the blog, which is no longer available online. Taylor said the student did not want to be identified, and his name could not be confirmed.

Simon Jones, VP of Business Development said, "Glass based active-matrix displays like your laptop screen are heavy and fragile. They cannot address many applications in mobile devices and retail signage where there is a strong market demand for large, thin and unbreakable screens. Plastic Logic's approach of printing transistors on plastic is the first commercially attractive solution to meet this market need. The flexibility of the display even allows a pressure sensor to be placed under the screen to implement a touchscreen without compromising the optical performance of the display. Plastic Logic's new capability will trigger a wave of product innovation enabled by thin and flexible plastic displays."

Plastic Logic announced this morning that it has produced the world's largest flexible display. Measuring 10 inches diagonally, this screen has a resolution of 600 x 800 pixels with four levels of grayscale, which -- judging from the image here -- ought to be just about enough to match the quality of black-and-white newsprint. As limited as this technology looks at the moment, we're impressed that it's come this far this fast. Maybe next week someone will release a 32-inch color version with 1080p resolution. We'll keep you posted.

November income for J-Walk Blog was $52.35 from Google AdSense, and $82.54 from eMusic. Total = $134.89. In November, I made 428 posts, which works out to $0.31 per post. If we deduct my $75 monthly hosting expense, my per-post income is reduced to $0.14.

So. How much does this site bring in? Last month, November, Google Adsense revenue was close to $700 (not allowed to give you actual figure), Blogads revenue was around $121, DU Network stipend was $150, Chitika was around $212, direct ads were $410 and Vibrantmedia was $140. That makes for a total of $1733.

The search portion of the Best of the Web blog directory is still in beta, and should be "ready for release within the next 30 days. We are still tweaking the post functionality of the search – grabbing current content from the directory…kind of like Technorati does, without all the spam", according to Greg Hartnett from Best of the Web.

According to Hartnett, "we have been interested in blogging for about 18 months, and have been monitoring it closely for the last 12. We came up with the concept of the blog directory in July of this year, and began development shortly thereafter. We were able to draw off the experience of building the BOTW directory, and minor modifications of the underlying code enabled us to deploy an admin interface for it within days. From there, it was a matter of figuring out some of the taxonomy and filling in the blanks."

Celebrity Kaori Manabe appeared in Tokyo on Monday to officially launch a blog promotion committee aimed at increasing the number of people who write blogs on the Internet.

"There may be a lot of people who read blogs, but there aren't too many people who have their own ones," said Manabe, who appeared in a suit and wore glasses. "I want to spread them much more."

The committee was launched with support from major Japanese Internet provider Nifty, with the aim of promoting the correct use of blogs and increasing the number of users. Manabe will serve as head of the committee.

With a packed schedule, why does he spend time blogging? "It lets people in on our editorial process," Williams says. "I take our own folks to task when I think we've failed the evening before. Viewers deserve to know more about our machinations." During President Bush's trip to Latin America last month, Williams wrote that "we dropped the ball" on the president's mixed reception, blaming himself and some of his colleagues.

The blog also gives him a chance to vent. He wrote that setting up an interview with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin took "hours of planning, cajoling. . . . We've conducted interviews with presidents of the United States with less discussion of camera angles, walking distances, duration, lighting and timing."

Williams does a daily introduction for a Webcast version of "Nightly News" and takes home as many as 750 e-mails a night in a blue folder. "These are the customers," he says. In fact, his trip to Mississippi to examine hurricane damage was prompted by e-mail from people in the state who felt ignored with all the media focus on New Orleans. He has also added a periodic segment called "Making a Difference" in response to complaints that television rarely covers good news.

To date, votemerich.com has relied on word-of-mouth advertising to attract attention. Thirty-six bloggers have registered, all vying for a shot at the prize.

The site works like this: contestants tell tales of woe, spin laughable yarns, poke fun at other contestants and even resort to begging to convince others of their dire need for the cash. Adbright.com, an online advertising agency, tracks the number of bloggers who link to advertisers on the site. Every link means a few pennies added to the jackpot. Once the kitty reaches $1,000, contestants will be asked to vote for the top bloggers. After a round or two of voting to narrow down the best of the best, a winner will be chosen.

Here are a couple of small pointers to existing candidates and future candidates. Just like launching a website, launching a candidacy will require some work, in addition to blogging. You'll probably need to get your friends to sign up so you can get an initial core set of constituents. They will be your primary advocates, helping get out the word about your candidacy and giving you feedback on your Vote Me Rich approach. Also, you need to actively seek new advocates, either through registered users of VoteMeRich.com or through other sites that encourage community. I believe it will take someone active in the online community to win this competition.

NBC News announced Thursday that it is launching a "Blogging Baghdad" platform Dec. 5 that will expand its coverage of the situation in Iraq. Available on MSNBC.com, "Blogging Baghdad" will feature additional reporting from the network's team of correspondents led by Richard Engel, video clips and video blogs from members of the network's Baghdad bureau.

Bokee (formerly BlogChina) founder Fang Xingdong said yesterday that registered Bokee users same magnitude next year.had increased about fivefold this year, to about five million, and he expected an increase of the

Bokee has a 10 per cent market share in terms of user numbers and Mr. Fang expects it to break even by the end of next month.

My students have to get used to this. They have to engage with their readers in a way that respects the shared values of the online world.

They have to get used to being harshly criticised and dissected by those who disagree with them, and they have to accept that sometimes the people reading their work will know more about the subject than they do and may have a valuable contribution to make to their thinking.

At a later stage, they'll need to come to terms with Flickr and the other photo-sharing sites, and the way that any event attended by large numbers of people effortlessly generates its own online community, with hundreds of photos linked by common tags.

"As a citizen of the blogosphere, Feedster has always recognized the achievements of independent bloggers and publishers. Our Feed of The Day was created as an opportunity to honor a unique voice or technology from within the din of the web," says Alan Graham, Feedster’s Community Liaison. "We are taking this one step further with our "Feed of The Year" Countdown. During the entire month of December we will recognize some of the best contributors to the blogosphere from our own Feed of The Day list."

For years Alexa has provided traffic rankings for Web sites from aarp.org to zappos.com. Then, about five years ago we created some special rules so that we could provide rankings for homepages on sites like geocities and tripod. These rules allowed people to write reviews of their favorite personal homepages, compare traffic rankings, create related links and more.

But we never created similar rules for the blog hosting sites. Sure, you could get a traffic ranking for a blog if it happened to be hosted with its own domain name -- sites like wonkette.com or kottke.org. But, if you were Attu (attu.blogspot.com) you were out of luck. The best you could get was the ranking for your host, blogspot.com, but not for your own blog.

But now that is changing: Alexa is ranking individual blogs.

Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

Skeptics argue that even obsessive Internet use does not exact the same toll on health or family life as conventionally recognized addictions. But, mental health professionals who support the diagnosis of Internet addiction say, a majority of obsessive users are online to further addictions to gambling or pornography or have become much more dependent on those vices because of their prevalence on the Internet.

But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.

Dr. Cash and other professionals say that people who abuse the Internet are typically struggling with other problems, like depression and anxiety. But, they say, the Internet's omnipresent offer of escape from reality, affordability, accessibility and opportunity for anonymity can also lure otherwise healthy people into an addiction.

Several counselors and other experts said time spent on the computer was not important in diagnosing an addiction to the Internet. The question, they say, is whether Internet use is causing serious problems, including the loss of a job, marital difficulties, depression, isolation and anxiety, and still the user cannot stop.