"CES's choice of Engadget as its Official Blog Partner further cements the publication's place as the leading voice in consumer electronics coverage. Our award-winning site will cover the 2009 CES with the fast-paced, up-to-the-minute reporting that has made Engadget the market leader and final word in the world of technology journalism," said Joshua Topolsky, Editor-in-chief, Engadget. "CEA is one of the global consumer electronics industry's most powerful trade groups, and CES is the industry's most important and anticipated event, hands down."

"The online technology community is of continuing importance to us and this partnership shows the crucial role that blog sites like Engadget play in bringing CES' hot product news to a worldwide audience, before, during and after the show," said Karen Chupka, senior vice president of events and conferences for CEA, the producer of the International CES. "We estimate that some 20,000 new products are launched at CES each year and the Engadget editorial team is able to bring all the hot product news, across dozens of different categories, to life for both consumers and technology professionals."

Engadget will provide live coverage of the 2009 International CES on both its domestic and international sites, and will have extensive presence at the show, including interviews, product news and reviews, updates on CES events and commentary by a team of Engadget editors from across the globe. Engadget's expansion into the international market will provide an opportunity for consumers and advertisers around the world to follow up-to-the minute news from the show.

Puh-leeze. Not surprisingly, Denton is unapologetic (although Lam says he's sorry about disrupting the poor Motorola guy so many times during his presentation). Most of the events in the video are completely harmless, with TVs winking out as people are staring at them in the big hall - so what? I find it hard to get too excited about the whole thing, and much like Nick I find it refreshing that someone is standing apart from the slack-jawed and drooling coverage that CES gets in other places.

"The Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event," the C.E.S. said in a statement. "The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of C.E.S. media credentials and caused harm to C.E.S. exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future C.E.S. events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker are being reviewed."

Office Snapshots shows you the inside of the offices you care about. This will generally be from Web/Tech companies, and perhaps larger companies that people will be familiar with.

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.

An MSN spokesman said the company will gradually add Windows Live features, rather than relaunch the site. "MSN Spaces will focus on building Windows Live innovations into a ready=for-market product, rather than shipping as a beta in the Ideas site," the spokesman said. "MSN Spaces will seamlessly transition to Windows Live Spaces as we add new Live features to the service later this summer."

Microsoft first declared its intention to add new functionalities, along with new advertising opportunities, to its Web-based software offerings last November. At the time, Eric Hadley, MSN's senior director of advertising and marketing, told OnlineMediaDaily that the booming ad market created opportunities for ad-funded software.

Meanwhile, MSN Spaces users now can earn money from their blogs by becoming Amazon.com associates, and also by running ads distributed by Kanoodle.com.

In the case of Amazon.com, users would choose which books to feature on their blog's book list section. They would get paid anytime one of their blog visitors clicks on one of the featured books and purchases it from Amazon.com, according to another posting on Thursday on the official MSN Spaces blog. This program is available to bloggers in the United States, U.K., Canada, Germany, France and Japan.

For the Kanoodle.com program, MSN Spaces users need to sign up to have the ads displayed on their blogs. The ads will be contextually related to the blog's content, and MSN Spaces users will get paid every time a visitor clicks on an ad, Kanoodle.com announced Monday. This program is available to MSN Spaces users in the United States and Canada and only if their blogs are in English, according to the MSN Spaces team official blog.

In love with your brand new Xbox 360! Of course you are. Well now you can show that love by adding your Xbox Recent Games Played and your Xbox Gamercard to your MSN Space. There are even five new themes all about Xbox.

The latest scuttlebutt is that MSN Spaces is partnering with Getzville, N.Y.-based Kanoodle Inc., a provider of Web advertising. This way, MSN Spaces bloggers can choose ads to display, and share in revenues based on the number of clicks generated, according to the sources.

Firstly, it allows a user to publish different information to different groups of people. Personal information can be available only to their Messenger contact list, for example, while business related information could be available publicly.

Secondly, it allows people who subscribe to your information to be automatically informed of any updates you make, be it via your Spaces profile or your Messenger and Mail Beta contact list. It is worth noting that users can view who has subscribed to their Live Contacts information.

So what does the site do then? Whenever a blogger updates his or her post, a portrait of that blogger will be shown top (there’s a delay as RSS shouldn’t be polled too often). Older posts, and their accompanying faces, move down the page over time. 40 faces will be shown at any time, but the number of bloggers participating is not limited.

While using these three sites, we paid careful attention to how each blog-creating service handled four basic tasks: publishing text entries, or "posting" as it is called in blog land; adding photos; publishing links to other Web pages on our blogs; and providing privacy (if desired) online. We also took note of the overall style and formatting options provided on each site.

Our verdict: Microsoft's MSN Spaces did the best job of performing these tasks in a way that was organized and self-explanatory. Yahoo 360 was almost as easy, but it tries to tie in the use of too many other Yahoo services. Blogger.com has a long way to go until it becomes as easy to use as the others.