Technorati launches Technorati Mobile.

(Via The Blog Herald).

Following up on RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices and Danny Ayers’s post on blogging hosts — here’s our attempt at ranking blog hosting websites. These statistics are based on Technorati’s index. Software used (MT, WordPress etc.) are not part of the statistic.

Technorati API allows 500 queries per day. We picked query words randomly from an english dictionary. We then collected the top 100 results (most live blogs) between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST over a period of the last 18 days. We eliminated duplicate blog home pages to create a list of 173192 unique blogs.

Note: Technorati ranks results by freshness — our statistics are hence for the “Live Blogosphere”.

We do not claim our statistics to be representative. These are the biases –

1. Technorati index.
2. US Blogs, given our query time-frame.
3. Blogger — spam blogs are very live.
4. Self hosted blogs. Our numbers only use URLs to classify blogs. For instance, a blogger weblog hosted at a personal website is not classified with blogger. Blogger blog’s are identified by “blogspot.com” being part of the URL.

Even with these biases, our numbers should give a good estimate of blogging host popularity.

Based on our collection here’s how blog hosts compare.

Technorati API also provides inlink information of blogs. We normalized inlink for these blog hosts to find the the number of inlinks/blog for each of these hosts. Total inbound links in our collection is 1.8 Million. The mean inlink/blog is 10.64

The impact rating – inlinks/blog

The Rest .. includes many blogs which are self-hosted. Self-hosted blogs, as is evident are the most popular.

Thanks to Jim Mayfield for suggesting the use of technorati.

Brian Livingston has an interesting stat on RSS aggregators. This is based on a representative sample taken from hits to feedburner.
Here’s the top 10 —

1. Bloglines — 19.49%
2. NetNewsWire — 10.07%
3. iTunes — 9.53%
4. Firefox Live Bookmarks — 7.25%
5. iPodder — 7.17%
6. My Yahoo — 6.68%
7. FeedDemon — 4.23%
8. NewsGator Online — 3.83%
9. Reader not identified — 3.07%
10. Pluck — 2.07%

Via Andy Lark.

Following up on Slashdot’s recent post on Asia Next Frontier in Blogging.
For the curious, and language literate — here’s a partial (and probably noisy) listing of some Japanese/Asian blogs:
cocolog-nifty, fc2, blockblog,
blogzine, lolilop,
mo-blog, exblog,
ocn, dion,
blogical, yahoo,
Ameba, livedoor.

Staying with Asia … here’s one from China and one from India.

Via Glocom. Here’s an interesting piece about growth (and more) of Japanese blogs.

According to new surveys, 93.7 percent of Japanese Internet users were not aware of blogs as of February 2004, but by November of the same year, 60 percent had heard of blogs. Now the number of bloggers in Japan is estimated at 1 million. While most bloggers write their personal journals for fun and not for pay, blog-hosting firm Ameba Blog rewards its most popular blog sites with cash prizes. Known by the nickname “Kazuma,” a 32-year-old blogger who published the true story of his controlling wife earned 1.34 million yen ($12,800) in awards in four months.

This tool is an experiment with Location metadata and Google maps. It is in no way endorsed or supported by Google or any other organisation – this is just an experiment by us folks here at Blogwise, so complain to us if it breaks

BlogWise currently maintains locality information of blogs anyway and is quite popular. So BlogMaps is a nice logical extension. Unfortunately its still in Beta – and lists a very small number of blogs. However its a feature to watch out for as it evolves, considering the popularity of local blog aggregators (subway system based) like NYC, London Bloggers and many more.

Via WhatsNextBlog. If you thought Mark Jen’s firing at Google was the end. Well, here’s more.

An Iranian blogger, Arash Sigarchi, has been jailed for 14 years. His offense? Criticizing Iran’s arrest of other bloggers.

He was jailed on charges against the state, including espionage and insulting Iran’s leaders, after the 28-year-old criticised the Iranian government and its treatment of web log writers on his own blog.

Bloggers across the web were asked to add a Free Mojtaba and Arash banner to their blogs and contact Iranian government representatives.

More at silicon.com.

Automatic policy adherence – be it for an organization, blogging host or country will have to be addressed soon. This is not to say that policies in effect are right or wrong and have to be followed. But means of verification need to be in place to atleast warn the blogger on possible implications.

Via SearchViews.
Vimeo has a similar interface to Flickr and works on collaborative content management.
Its currently in Beta and does not support account signups. But it does look cool.

We had an interesting discussion on Walmart, UPC Bar Codes, RFID today in our research group. The point was about how this powerhouse has affected adoption of some technologies in non-Web commerce.

I came across some interesting statistics which points to Walmart and their growing dominance on the Web. From the Internet Stock Blog.

The top 10 with visitors in December ’04, December ’03 (in millions) and year-over-year growth were:

eBay, 50.9, 49.9, 2%
Amazon, 42.5, 37.4, 14%
Wal-Mart Stores, 23.8, 16.7, 42%
Yahoo Shopping, 22.6, 21.5, 5%
Shopping.com, 19.1, 17.1, 11%
Target, 17.5, 13.9, 26%
Dell, 17.5, 12.7, 38%
Best Buy, 17.3, 12.9, 34%
Overstock.com, 14.7, 8.6, 71%
Expedia, 12.7, 11.4, 11%

EBay with 2% growth is no match to Walmart’s 42%. Walmart says – “Watchout!” to the rest of the Web.

For Google fans, a year in review for AdSense, tips, tricks, features and more.

More at http://www.google.com/adwordsreview04

From Marketwatch – On Google

Late Tuesday, Google said fourth-quarter profit rose to $204 million …
Google also said quarterly sales shot up to $1.032 billion from $512 million a year earlier. Excluding the payments Google makes to other companies to acquire Internet traffic, the company generated sales of $654 million, more than the $590 million analysts expected. Google is benefiting as companies spend more of their advertising dollars online and as the prices paid for keyword search results rise.

From CNN – On Yahoo

Five years of stagnant online advertising ended in 2004, according to jubilant executives at Yahoo Inc., helping the Web giant nearly triple its fourth-quarter profit and boosting its financial outlook for this year. The Sunnyvale, California-based company … earned $373 million, or 25 cents per share, for the three months ended December 31.

From MarketWatch – General Trends of online advertising

TNS Media Intelligence forecast a 5.1 percent rise to $150.5 billion in 2005 on top of last year’s estimated 10.6 percent bump. The first half should see the strongest rate, with rise of 6.9 percent; that will tail off to 3.5 percent in the second six months of the year. Media categories that stand to benefit the most include online, expected to gain 11.2 percent …

Online Ads and Search Engines are hot! Search engines make most of their income from paid advertisements. They get paid based on number of advertisement clicks by users. As per my understanding some companies commit a preset amount of money(over a duration of time) to paid advertisements and some don’t. So a search engine’s income largely depends on how many clicks it can get to advertisements on its search pages and on other pages on the Web which explicitly display content specific ads.
One obvious way for search engines to exploit the latter to increase their revenues would be to skew results so as to rank pages which display their advertisements highly. This way the number of visitors to these pages increase resulting in a proportional increase in advertisement clicks.
This raises some interesting questions. Can search engines come up with optimization algorithms so as to maximize their overall income with the following constraints:

1. Income from individual companies do not exceed committed boundaries.
2. Search ranking skew towards pages displaying paid advertisements are not so as to effect search users significantly.

I don’t believe Google or Yahoo dies or would ever consider doing this, but they are not the only search company and their success will build a market in which other companys will offer similar services. There remains a risk that an unscrupulous company might be tempted to skew its search to increase profits.

Via Richard Waters from Financial Times – In Search of More: The ‘friendly’ engines that will manage the data of daily life. Richard discusses possible search engine directions in quite a length.

May 2008. Google launches G-Life … November 2008. Yahoo!’s new MobileBuddy .. January 2010. 10 years after America Online bought Time Warner, Google acquires Walt Disney.

Most of the content is hypothetical, but is fairly obvious and trivially predictable. Interesting to note was the point on the need of meta-data to augment current search technologies – something which is being talked about and used(Technorati) quite regularly now.

The internet has also introduced an important new layer of context. Led by Google, web search engines interpret the meaning of information based on the meta-data attached to web pages, as well as analysing the links between web pages to assess its relevance.

Meta-data promises to bring other forms of visual content within reach of the search engines. Some digital cameras already encode information on a picture, such as the time it was taken. Global positioning sensors built into camera phones could add location information. Using the voice capabilities of a camera phone, the user could also append commentary when taking a snapshot, then use keywords to search for the picture later, says Adam Sohn, marketing director of Microsoft’s MSN unit.

Ultimately, all the random, unstructured information contained on web pages and other data-repositories could be subjected to a form of structuring that made it more intelligible to machines. This is the idea behind the Semantic Web, a vision of the future internet promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.

Recently there has been quite a lot of buzz about media dissolution and reassembly driven by the Web/RSS/Blogging. It probably reached the zenith when Slashdot reported today on the Media in 2014. I found some interesting related comments on the earlier RedHerring’s 2005: The year the media will turn inside out blog and Mitch Ratcliffe’s Media Transformation is inevitable blog.
Some snippets from RedHerring make an interesting read.

Everything is up for grabs. Audiences. Marketing channels. The very shape of advertising, marketing, and promotional spending. BzzAgent, a system that distributes product to individual bloggers for reviews, demonstrates what happens when companies’ primary promotional goal is to win evangelists to their products rather than to attract new customers.
The next year will see the kinds of evolutionary moments in media like those that last took place in warm puddles of ooze to produce man, ape, and slime mold. Media’s dissolution and reassembly will be the biggest story of 2005.

These comments and others raise some interesting questions. In the past new forms of media, be it television or radio, have co-existed well with the age old newspapers. Will the web’s next evolution, change all this? Think of it — it’s been a while since I visited my favorite(not any more) news publisher.