• Martha Stewart did a show all about blogging.
• A blog that hearts stairs: stairporn.org.
• A designer named Richard Haines draws the stylish looking men he sees in a blog called What I Saw Today. (via Style.com via The Pipeline)
• Wired's Storyboard is an almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature.
• Nerdy Lil Wayne - the rapper now has a blog on ESPN. (via The Cornell Daily Sun)
• Why 23,201 people care that Justine Ezarik just ate a cookie. She has tweeted before about eating a cookie - see here.
• Giga Omni Media raised $4.5 million in new funding.
• The New York Times expanded its business coverage and launched a new blog called Economix.
• Yes We Can Hold Babies is one of many niche Barack Obama blogs. (via Babyosphere)
• Gospelr is billed as a Twitter for Christians. (via TechCrunch)
• Oh noes! Terrorists could use Twitter.
• Internet Retailer has a article about how Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Dragon notebook computer boosted sales with a contest on influential blogs.
• Bloglovin calls itself a blog reading tool Muffin - it lets you know when blogs you are tracking have updated.
• There's a social network for Disney fans called Disfriends.
• 10,000Words.net has a list of 30 amazing photoblogs and some tips for creating one.
• Your coworkers' email may be full of lies.
• This site says our tweets are worth over $400 a month but in reality our tweets are worth nothing.
• Three years from now Facebook will have a buiness plan. Better late than never?
• The Huffington Post takes the lead on the Technorati 100. It's a pretty commanding lead right now too.
• The UK Secret Service is recruiting on Facebook.
• A blog search engine called Iterend is in private beta - via ReadWriteWeb.
• Tina Brown launched a bloggish website called The Daily Beast. The logo of The Beast resembles the logo from The Philadelphia Daily News.
• Drummer Travis Barker blogs (video report) after his plane crash.
• Twitter fights spam with the @Spam Twitter - send spammy twitter accounts to them with a reply or a direct message.
• Bloomba is a Twitter clone that is about things people have done. For example, 13 people have climbed over a wall. (via Inquisitr )
• LOLCats now out in book form.
• Twitter is growing faster than the other social networks.
• What if Wikipedia was a college professor? - funny video from College Humor.
• How to skip the introduction of a YouTube video. More on this here.
• The blogger blamed for leaking nine new Guns N' Roses songs pleads not guilty.
• Is Mahalo an enormous blog? The Inquisitr says that Mahalo is now a "gigantic blog targeting news that drives traffic in any vertical."
• LAist reports that the L.A. Times' new blog called Culture Monster is eerily similar to the name of an indepent blog called C-Monster. See also the "Dear L.A. Times" post here.
• A blog called ChinaSmack translates compelling China blog posts and articles into English. (via The Raw Feed)
• BlogCatalog has a new search feature - via 901am.
• The New York Magazine's Vulture blog says Kanye West plagiarized their website. Kanye can't blame it on a ghost blogger.
• Steve Rubel says the newsfeed is the future of news.
• A top digger has helped launch a new Digg-like site for financial news called Tip'd.
• Andrew Sullivan blogs about why he blogs.
• Oprah is in love with the Kindle. Sadly, Kindle 2.0 has been delayed.
• Nielsen Wire has some stats about "power moms" and social networking.
• ReadWriteWeb reports that the Guardian is now putting the full content of articles in its feeds.
• Bonnie Fuller - the former American Media editorial director - is on Twitter here (via Eat the Press)
• Google Blogsearch recently relaunched with some memetracker features on its homepage but it is already getting spammed. Matt Cutts compares the Googe Blogsearch redesign with Techmeme.
• Technorati's latest State of the Blogosphere said that blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month make $75K+ (mean annual revenue). A lot of bloggers think that sounds too high - see here, here and here. (On an unrelated note this fish is also worth $75,000.) Ars Technica also has a write-up on the State of the Blogosphere. ReadWriteWeb offers a look at how much top-tier bloggers get paid here.
• Layoffs and cuts: Gawker job cuts, B5media pay cuts, AOL Blog Cuts, Heavy.com cuts, Mahalo layoffs. Know More Media closed shop in late July. There are also many layoffs going on in the tech and media industries.
• The Independent has an article titled Will the Internet Survive the Economic Meltdown? The answer to that question has to be yes but not without casualties.

• Google's G-1 Phone ignited a tech blogstorm.
• Technorati recently acquired the BlogCritics network. This makes Technorati a search/content/ad-network hybrid sort of like Yahoo has become - but obviously on a smaller scale than Yahoo.
• Study finds more hiring managers are using social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to evaluate potential hires.
• Twittermoms is a site where Twitter moms can connect with other Twittering moms. (via TechCrunch)
• Bits reports that Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers have started a blog about the iPhone and their $100 million iFund in mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. The blog is at ifundvc.com
• Another Bits post asks how many web services one person can use. A person can update a lot of web services with tools like Ping.fm but they can't really maintain an active presence on too many websites.
• TwitterKeys will let you add some UFT8 icons to your Twitter conversations.
• Editor and Publisher launched two new blogs: Fitz & Jen and The E&P Pub.
• Giga Omni Media acquired The Apple Blog.
• A blogger was arrested for posting 9 unrelease Guns N' Roses songs.
• Boing Boing and Kevin Kelly discuss the idea of the Whole Earth Catalog as a blog from the 1970s.
• Valleywag says that 2/3 of Heavy.com's salesforce has left.
• Gwyneth Paltrow is launch a lifestyle site called Goop. Some details here.
• A blog with a long name thingswithapproximatelyasmanypeopleaswasilla.com attempts to point out that lots of places and things have as many people as Sarah Palin's hometown where she was mayor.
• Boing Boing Gadgets was not impressed with Esquire's E-Ink cover.
• 1.1 million people read the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Palin in the 36 hours following her introduction. Slate says a college sophmore gets credit for pushing Palin as the vp choice.

Staff at Oxford University Press have started monitoring the use of English in web logs to find new words.

Lexicographers responsible for updating the Oxford English Corpus, which provides the basis for its dictionaries, will trawl through some 70 million 'blogs' in their search.

And with 120,000 new ones created every day, they may be in for quite a search.

• blogger
• blog
• stupid
• me
• myself
• my
• oh
• yeah
• ok
• post
• stuff
• lovely
• update
• nice
• shit

If you're tired of hearing the word "blogosphere" (which was kind of fun for a month or two in 2001) then this is the t-shirt for you: Samuel L Jackson in his Pulp Fiction persona, pointing a gun at the world and saying, "Say blogosphere again!"

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.

For sure the b'sphere will continue to remain the largest galaxy in the social media universe in the short term. It's a major center of gravity that pulls people toward it. However, over the last few months a number other social media galaxies have rapidly risen to prominence. Take YouTube, digg and MySpace. These are just three examples, but they are drawing huge audiences. Richard Edelman is gushing over a fourth - StupidVideos.com.

As these constellations grow, some will become larger and more influential than the blogosphere. We're already seeing early signs of this and the power brokers will shift. For example, mobile jones notes that Technorati's coverage of MySpace is sorely lacking. Technorati also does little to help us mine and track YouTube, digg, StupidVideos.com and countless other smaller galaxies of consumer generated media. They focus on blogs.

Says Bush to Sammon: "I think what's healthy is that there's no monopoly on the news. There's competition. There's competition for the attention of, you know, 290 million people, or whatever it is. And the amazing thing about this world we live in is that there's a kind of free-flowing, kind of bulletin board of ideas and thoughts out there in the ether space, sometimes landing on somebody's desk and sometimes not, but always available. It's a very interesting period."

(The ether space is, you know, where the internets live.)

"The old way of gathering the news is slowly but surely losing market share," Bush explains. In case anyone's forgotten, the old way is the once-proud profession called journalism, whose practitioners patiently dug up verifiable facts. The new way of gathering "news," the one Bush is applauding, is this: Making it up. Substituting he-said/she-said for the effort to figure out what's true. Putting bloviators on the federal payroll. Mistaking a food-fight for marketplace of ideas.

The White House has acknowledged the power of the blogs as I have here, here and here -- it's been one Gutenberg moment after another. I am not surprised by this. The blogs have become the tail wagging the dog. Apparently the White House agrees. How lovely to see Presidential acknowledgment -- mad hot, eh?

"There is so much ugliness and viciousness and fundamental untruths that the blogosphere transmits." he lamented. "It also is a vehicle for ugly rumors, for scurrilous personal attacks, an avenue for the creation of urban legends which are deeply corrosive of the political system and of people's faith in it."

The blogosphere is no longer the domain of geeks and political junkies, in its totality it's richness and diversity reflect all of humankind.

I'm often asked to explain what blogging is, what's it all about, why do it, what does it all mean. Given that many would argue that we are alone in the Universe, then I provide this answer. The meaning of the blogosphere is indeed 42.

There is no other answer, and there never will be, because there is no other way to describe all that is life, as there is no other way to describe the blogosphere.

We track about 1.2 Million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour. At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself -- how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.

Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives

Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day

Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers