Philadelphia is not going down as a great city to blog. The city is requesting $300 from bloggers. The city calls it a "business privilege license." The City Paper has more details on the blogging fee here. NBC points out that the fee could make some people decide not to blog and that could be bad news for the city and Philadelphia businesses. Take a look:
MediaPost reports that a Sysomos.com analysis of over 100 million blog posts found that the largest blogging demographic is still young people. 20.2% of bloggers are 20 years old or younger. Here is the breakdown:
20 years or younger (20.2%)
21-35 yrs (53.3)
36-50 yrs (19.4)
51 yrs or older (7.1)
The most bloggers are located in the U.S., followed the U.K., Japan and Brazil.
U.S. (29.2%)
U.K. (6.75%)
Japan (4.9%)
Brazil (4.2%)
Canada (3.9%)
Germany (3.3%)
Italy (3.2%)
Spain (3.1%)
France (2.9%)
Russia (2.3%)
Australia (2.22%)
India (2.14%)
Sweden (2.05%)
Malaysia (1.7%)
Netherlands (1.69%)
In the U.S., California and New York are the states with the most bloggers.
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress has added a phone your blog feature.
We've got the cure. Now, instead of drunk dialing random friends, lovers, and acquaintances one at a time, what if you could dial your blog and talk to the whole world at once? It'd be like something out of Star Trek.
The future is now, folks. You can now go to your My Blogs tab, enable Post by Voice, and get a special number and code to call your blog. After you're done, the audio file from your phone call will be posted to your blog for all to listen to and enjoy. (And added to your RSS feed for podcast support.)
This will be useful if you have a lot of readers that will listen to audio. Mashable says the technology is powered by a company named Twilio.
The Paris Review, a quarterly publication founded in 1953, has launched a blog. The introductory post by editor Lorin Stein can be found here.
Since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has devoted itself to publishing “the good writers and good poets,” regardless of creed or school or name-recognition. In that time the Review has earned a reputation as the chief discoverer of what is newest and best in contemporary writing.
But a quarterly only comes out…well, you know. We have been looking for a way to keep in touch with our readers between issues, and to call attention to our favorite writers and artists in something close to real time. If the Review embodies a sensibility, this Daily will try, in a casual and haphazard and at times possibly frivolous way, to put that sensibility into words.
The Paris Review is calling its blog The Paris Review Daily. The homepage of the Daily can be found here.
Paid Content reports that Yahoo has registered the me.me domain name. Yahoo is presumably going to use the domain for its Twitter competitor called Yahoo Meme.
Yahoo, however, calls the purchase "an essential component of our online branding strategy." The buy may suggest that Yahoo is readying a wider roll-out of the service, which has not been advertised widely.
On Meme, users write up short entries and add photos or videos to their pages, which are called "memes;" users can "follow" other memes and track entries from those pages via one central dashboard.
One downside with Yahoo Meme is it appears you have to create a Yahoo account to register. Not everyone wants their accounts all wrapped together. It is much easier to create a Twitter account right now because it is only tied to an email address.
YouTube to List Sources That Generate Lots of Video Views
YouTube announced today that it will begin listing the sources of views that help make YouTube videos become popular. This might be an opportunity for blogs to get some traffic if they help help build the most views for a particular video.
What this means is that you can get recognition for sourcing videos that your readers love and helping those clips become popular on YouTube. It's another way all that hard work you put into building your readership can pay off and generate even more traffic for your blog or site. You might even get your site in front of a whole new audience via people who encounter it for the first time on YouTube.
YouTube says they are experimenting with the functionality on a range of popular videos and plan to make it a permanent feature. The Muppets "Stand By Me" video was given as an example.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has an interesting post here about the rise of fast food content.
But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn't a copyright issue - the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it's far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it - if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.
But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.
So what really scares me? It's the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It's the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.
Michael Arrington is absolutely right that this is on the rise. There are new companies emerging that are hiring lots and lots of writers very cheaply to produce tons and tons of content. It probably isn't a coincidence that these companies have emerged during a recession when many people are looking for a way to increase their income.
The search engines will certainly point people toward some of this content. Not all of the content these companies create will be bad but some of it is bound to be. This shouldn't mean the end of original hand crafted content but these mass content producers will certainly increase the competition that content creators face. There are ways around it. Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook can point readers to the higher quality posts and articles. If bloggers will link to each other more like they did in the early days of blogging that it will help too. This should, in theory, help weight the better written content above the subpar content.
We have microblogging, so why not microvideoblogging. That's the idea behind Robo.to, a website that lets you publish micro videos - or visual status updates - that are no longer than 4 seconds in length. The videos can be distributed on Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.
Bits reports that the idea is also meant to serve as a digital calling card for users.
The idea behind the platform is simple: In addition to the microvideos, which can be uploaded from a webcam or a mobile phone camera and pushed out via Facebook and Twitter with a few short lines of text, Robo.to is meant to be a digital calling card online or a hub that houses information about an individual's identity on the Web. That's what helps separate the service from other microvideo services like 12seconds.
Bits says Robo.to already has 100,000 plus users, thanks in part to Justin Timberlake regularly posting the tiny videos on his Twitter account, @jtimberlake.
TheBump.com, a blog for first-time parents from TheKnot.com, is running a Mommy blog contest. The Bump Mommy Blog Awards program invites mommy and daddy bloggers and their fans to nominate their favorite sites. The contest has 15 different categories. The nomination period ends on Tuesday, October 9.
"Real parent bloggers are one of the most useful resources for pregnancy and parenting information," says Carley Roney, editor in chief of TheBump.com. "The Bump Mommy Blog Awards is the perfect medium to bring recognition to all these mommy and daddy bloggers for their hard work."
On Tuesday, October 13, TheBump.com will showcase up to 10 finalists for each of the 15 blog categories. Visitors can then review the top entries and vote for their favorite blogs until Monday, October 19. On October 20, the winners of each blog category will be announced and will automatically be entered in the running for the title of Best Overall Blog. The grand prize winner will receive a stimulus package of $1,000 from The Bump. Each of the 15 blog category winners will receive a gift card for $100 from a specialty baby retailer.
Music Blogging Network Called MOG Gets More Funding
Venture Beat reports that a music blog network or social network named MOG has raised $5 million. Venture Beat says the site has 8 million uniques and has signed up large advertisers including Nike, Procter & Gamble and LG. The targeted niche content and demographics must be appealing to advertisers.
MOG has an advertising network called MOG Music Network (MMN). The faq here explains how bloggers can sign-up and how they get paid.
More people are using the Tumblr tool to make short blogs. According to Mashable, Tumblr generated an impressive 255 million pageviews in July. The source of the data is Quantcast. Mashable says Tumblr expects to serve 330 million page impressions in August. Tumblr also says they have had 50 million visitors in the past 30 days.
The Inquisitr reports that SB Nation, a sports blog network founded by Markos Moulitsas in 2003 recently raised $8 million in venture capital funding. Markos Moulitsas is also the founder of the DailyKos political blog.
There are 200 blogs in the SB Nation network covering several sports including baseball, soccer, basketball football and hockey. The site has 3.5 million unique visitors according to data from Quantcast - see here. It is good to hear some blog networks are still getting funding even as the recession lingers.
Google Operating System reports that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will let users search tweets and updates from other microblogging sites.
Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.
On the plus side, a microblog search engine can return the latest information about an event or topic. On the negative side, there is the potential for the microblog services to become filled with spam and repetitive entries. The more popular they get the more likely that is. Filters can help with these problems and Google's microblogging search engine will likely implement multiple filters.
Bloggers Abandon Blogs For Several Different Reasons
The New York Times has a story about abandoned blogs. The article cites a 2008 Technorati study that found that about 95% of people who start blogs end up abandoning them.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Blog abandonment is not a new issue. There have always been people who have started blogs and then stopped blogging. Some quit because the issue or event that motivated them to blog faded away. Some quit blogging because of time constraints with work, family or health. Others quit when they found out blogging wasn't the quick path to riches they thought it was - this reason is probably less of an issue today. Some people have also left their blogs without updates for months because they found it easier to use Twitter or another microblogging service.
The Times says some bloggers quit blogging even though they managed to create a popular blog. They found the lack of privacy disconcerting.
"Before you could be anonymous, and now you can't," said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.
Ms. Sun's posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from "The Simpsons" — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the "best online diary" award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions - wrong ones - about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.
As you might suspect, the Times story also says that many bloggers quit because it is difficult to attract blog readers.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.'"
Building a readership can be a struggle and not being able to build one is the reason many bloggers evenutally quit. At the same time there are bloggers content to continue writing even for very small audiences. Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, told the Times a joke about blog readership. He said, "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one."
Wired's Gadget Lab reports that Amazon.com has added a form where bloggers can sign up for Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing for Blogs beta program. The blog just needs an active RSS feed and Amazon can convert into Kindle content.
Any blogger can sign up for the company's 'Kindle Publishing for Blogs' beta program and set up an account to participate. Bloggers just have to made their feed available to Amazon’s website and the company will translate it into a Kindle friendly format.
Amazon hasn't made clear how much bloggers can charge for their blogs but it will split revenue from the subscriptions with the individual publishers. Currently most blogs on the Kindle charge $2 for subscription. Amazon has said individual publishers will get 30 percent of the revenue, with 70 percent going to the company.
It's probably not going to make a lot of money for bloggers and Amazon taking 70% seems a little steep. However, there are Kindle readers that do a lot of traveling that might pay to subscribe to their favorite blogs so they can read them on the plane or train.
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg 
The Paris Review, a quarterly publication founded in 1953, has launched a blog. The introductory post by editor Lorin Stein can be found 
Venture Beat 
The Inquisitr 
Google Operating System 
Wired's Gadget Lab 