Interesting new report from ebiquity on spam blogs. Nothing most people didn’t already know, but digging deeper you find this:

“MySpace is now the biggest contributor to the blogosphere. The other key driver LiveJournal and blogs managed by SixApart (as seen at their update stream) contribute only 50-60% of what MySpace does. The growth of MySpace blogs has in fact dwarfed the growth of splogs! Further if MySpace is discounted in our analysis close to 84% of all pings are spings!”

In Octobers State of the Blogosphere report, David Sifry reported that Technorati was tracking 57 million blogs. I can’t find a more up to date figure on the Technorati site (they seem to have buried it somewhere), but even if we say Technorati is tracking 60-70 million blogs now, how does this compute:

Every MySpace blog comes complete in Technorati with “name – MySpace Blog”, so every post from a MySpace blog has MySpace in the name of the blog…and all Technorati found was 5.353 million references, and yet the ebiquity report indicates that MySpace blogs + posts make up nearly half of the blogosphere and is growing at the fastest rate. Last figures I heard for MySpace usage was 170 million + members. That’s a lot of blogs. Technorati still isn’t tracking even 5% of them.

So next time the State of the Blogosphere report comes out from Technorati, make sure you report the figures correctly: there isn’t 60-70 million blogs out there (or what ever the figure Dave Sifry reports), the figure is ONLY what Technorati tracks, and they’ve still got a long way to go on that front as well.

Tags: Technorati, MySpace

Originally posted on February 4, 2007 @ 8:53 pm

Michael Weider of Watchfire uses an interesting analogy to explain all the things that could go wrong with web 2.0.

A car that has less options has fewer things that can break. Power steering, power locks, power seats, seat warmers, and the myriad of other car features provide a better experience, but they also have more items that require maintenance.

The same can directly be applied to websites. While web 2.0 technologies open a whole new world of features and functionality for us, allowing us to have “a richer, more fulfilling web experience,” they also expose us to more security and privacy converns and vulnerabilities.

SC Magazine highlights the most common of these vulnerabilities that you need to be aware of.

Originally posted on February 1, 2007 @ 2:09 am

Just imagine a weekend without The Superbowl. I will be taking off this weekend. I realize in the world of sports this is a huge weekend. But I badly need time away from this computer screen and to reboot. I’m heading into Pennsylvania Amish Country and relaxing. I might do a little bit of notebook journaling.

While many American’s will be gathering around watching in excitement as for the first time two quarterbacks with the word ‘Man’ in their name square off in a warm tropical place surrounded by ravenous fans to determine which team is well, which team wakes up and performs better this week. I want to be relaxing. I believe this is the first Superbowl in 20+ years that I will miss.

And doing it intentionally. Who knows I still might square off and watch the darn game. But I have no intention of it at the moment. So enjoy the commercials folks. I know I will be able to catch them on some website, probably YouTube.

Originally posted on February 2, 2007 @ 7:01 pm

Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis have teamed up to do a Startup Conference.

More Info on Techcrunch:

I am very excited to announce a new conference, called the TechCrunch20. This is a joint venture between us (TechCrunch) and Jason Calacanis, who broke the news about this earlier today. The format is simple: Twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period. And they don’t pay a cent to do this.

My personal take is this should be an awesome get together. Hopefully I won’t have to mortgage any of your property to go.

Originally posted on January 31, 2007 @ 2:32 pm

No matter what your personal view is on Microsoft (evil/not evil) you got to hand it to Mr. Big Shot himself. Bill Gates usually knows what he’s talking about. Like so many tech gurus he might be a bit premature in his predictions, but still, they have an impact and are usually more or less valid in the end.

And now TV as we know it has only five years left to live. Thank you, internet!

“I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we’ve had,” he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.

[Read more…]

Originally posted on January 30, 2007 @ 12:54 am