This is the companion blog to “The Rough Guide to Blogging,” available now (Fall 2006).
WeblogToolsCollection.com is sponsoring a Blogging Essay Competition — for cash! The competition starts today and runs for the next 30 days. You can submit as many essays as you can crank out (of 1000 words or more) and there are prizes for runner-ups too. Oh right, the big prize? A cool $150 bucks.
Go read the rules and get to writing already!
A new “State of the Blogosphere” has been released by Dave Sifry of Technorati. Dave charts stats on how many blogs there are out in the world and feeds us tidbits like that tell us the growth of the blogosphere is slowing — we’re apparently only doubling every 236 days instead of every 150. Apparently, it’s getting hard to double the number of blogs every few months when there are 57 million blogs on the internet nowadays.
Out of those 57 million blogs, about 55% of them are active — with “active” being defined as being updated at least once in the last 3 months. Do your part people, update that blog! We can hit 75% active in the next quarter, I’m sure we can! Do I sound like an over-zealous investor? I’m not, really. I just get excited when people blog.
Check out the full report for some serious statistics and analysis of the blogosphere.
Six Apart has been pushing the envelope for developing new (and better) blogging services and platforms. Their newest creation is entitled “Vox.” The product is aimed toward potential bloggers who want to blog, but don’t want to get bogged down by the technology behind the magic. Keeping the curtain pulled on the wizard as it were.
“Vox, which is free, lets users import audio, video, photos and other content from services like the photo sharing sites Flickr and Photobucket, and the video sharing site YouTube. Vox also provides integration with mobile devices that run on the Palm OS, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile platforms. The service also lets publishers deliver their blogs’ content via syndicated feeds.”
-IT News-
In a way, Six Apart’s new service will be competing with its current easy to use offerings such as TypePad and LiveJournal — not to mention other established services such as Blogger, Window’s Live Spaces, and My Space.
In my opinion, Vox looks beautiful — with a charming interface and website — and is a return to the idea of blogging as something super simple, not just “relatively” simple. Should the dictionary make room for a new entry in 2007? “Vox: blogging made simple.”
“Video blogger and freelance journalist Josh Wolf was on Wednesday given two more days to either turn himself back in to prison or cooperate with a federal grand jury seeking unpublished footage he shot during a protest that turned violent.”
-c|net news-
“The number of blog sites in China reached 34 million last month, a 30-fold increase from four years ago, state media said on Tuesday, despite a series of curbs on media and dissent.
China has more than 17 million people writing blogs and more than 75 million people reading them, Xinhua news agency said.”
-c|net news-
In an article from Information Week, it’s said that free hosting services and blogging software helped to push up the overall number of new web sites on the Internet last month. (Whether this is a good or bad thing, you can decide for yourself.)
“The popularity of blogging services, particularly those of Google and Microsoft, has driven an increase of more than 4 million Web sites since last month, an Internet services company said Tuesday.
The number of Web site increased more than 4 percent to 96.9 million, according to a September survey by Netcraft. The number of sites has soared by 15.5 million since June.
Two trends are responsible for the growth: the popularity of blogging services and the heated competition between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has had ‘huge growth’ in its Windows Live Spaces blogging/networking service, adding 1.3 million hostnames last month, Netcraft said. Google had a gain of 459,000 hostnames, primarily at Blogger. Both services are offered at no charge.
Free hosting services in general have driven site growth. In the first five months of the year, the Internet added an average of 2.75 million new hostnames per month, Netcraft said. Since June, the average has nearly doubled to 5.4 million sites per month.
Recent gains at free hosting services have begun to outpace growth at paid services, Netcraft said. While the two services are not often comparable in terms of the kind of subscribers they attract, the trend is still worth noting.”
A New York Times/CBS poll released today says that while blogs “are growing increasingly popular, relatively few Americans visit them regularly, if at all.”
“Asked how often they visited blogs, the responses from the 78% who said they used the Web, came out this way: frequently 10%, occasionally 9%, rarely 17%, never 40%, and 2% did not answer. That suggests that less than 2 in 10 Americans now visit blogs a lot or occasionally.”
You know what this means right? We have to keep spreading the word about blogging, even if it means literally wearing Blogger T-shirts every day, and taking people by the hand onto a keyboard and setting them up with some blogging software.
Blogger is undergoing a change. The most popular blogging application had long been suffering from a lack of some basic features such as post categories and password protection. The “new” Blogger is still in beta but you can sign up to try it out here if you want an early preview. Some VIP Blogger members already have access to the beta version on their current accounts, who are these lucky folk?
In case you didn’t believe that blogging at work could get you fired (“dooced”), here’s another example of a (French) blogger dismissed for her blog. The book deal is in the works already I’m sure…
Apparently the CIA doesn’t take kindly to bloggers either.
Popular and pioneering vblog Rocketboom has lost their premier on-camera personality, Amanda Congdon. Rocketboom delivers news and views with a sense of humor that has attracted a dedicated cadre of fans. Ms. Congdon said, “I’ve been writing, I’ve been producing, I’ve been hosting Rocketboom for over a year and half. I’m not willing to be moved down to be a face. That’s so old media.” What does Ms Congdon’s departure mean for Rocketboom? Let’s see how the drama unfolds shall we? [additional article]
