One of our beloved readers and an AOL staffer has let us know that Blogsmith is gearing up for an early launch in 2007. It’s competitors should obviously be a bit shaken. They include MovableType and WordPress.

Blogsmith was originally developed to power early blog network pioneer, Weblogs Inc founded by Jason Calacanis.

Blogsmith was developed by Brian Alvey.

Sponsor: Learn How MidPhase Made Publishing Easy Again

Originally posted on December 30, 2006 @ 3:41 am

If you have done any ad sales online you’ve probably heard of AdMonster. They are the leading online ad sales membership group and the only one I know of. They’ve just launched their new job site, AdMonster Jobs. This could be useful to you up and coming blog networks, and other folks who are in need of advertising for an ad sales operator or someone to run your advertising technology.

Originally posted on December 30, 2006 @ 5:18 am

Veotag has developed a technology to index videos, meaning, distinct sections of the video are defined as “chapters”with distinct url’s. The company is applying this tool to teaching institutions and to marketers.

So what is veotag:

veotag is an exciting new service that lets you display clickable text, called “veotags,” within an audio or video file.

Your audience can see the veotags whenever they play your file on the web. Clicking on a veotag lets your audience jump right to that part of the file.

Originally posted on December 30, 2006 @ 5:02 am

According to Nielsen-Buzzmetrics a handful of popular bloggers continue to be the driving force in the blogosphere.

A small cluster of power bloggers — focused on politics, blogging and humor — were responsible for the top 100 blog posts for 2006, according to word-of-mouth measurement firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics. The top blog — based on the number of inbound links from other blogs between January 1 and November 30, 2006 — was mother.livejournal.com’s petition against changes in the livejournal interface. The single post was linked to in 801 posts by 786 other blogs.

“A minority of highly influential blogs continues to influence the broader conversation on the web,” said Jonathan Carson, CEO, Nielsen BuzzMetrics. “However, unique circumstances and events, such as the LiveJournal protest against proposed interface changes, can resonate with passionate stakeholders and catapult lesser-known blogs to the top.”

Originally posted on December 29, 2006 @ 3:19 am

From the Google Blog, in response to raised eyebrows regarding the 2006 Google Zeitgeist:

The Zeitgeist is “the spirit of time.” This is why when we come up with the lists of top searches on Google.com for 2006, we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as “ebay”, “dictionary”, “yellow pages,” “games,” “maps” — and of course, a number of X-rated keywords. These are constants, and although unquestionably popular, we don’t think they actually define the Zeitgeist.

Basically, Zeitgeist is Google’s take on what’s hot, but not necessarily most searched for. To make sure everyone gets it, Google have updated the Zeitgeist page with new wording.

Originally posted on December 29, 2006 @ 7:00 am