Blogging | Blogging news

Second Life (secondlife.com), the multiplayer online world that launched its beta version in 2003.

Today Second Life has more than 5 million registered accounts, as reported on the Linden Life blog, which runs on: ?

WordPress (wordpress.org), the popular open source It first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.

Today it hosts more than 893,000 blogs, many of which feature ads from: ?

AdSense (google.com/adsense), born with Google's 2003 acquisition of Applied Semantics.

The "Ads by Google" contextual advertising was, at last, a reliable commercial model for independent website owners.

Revenue is based on advertisers' bids for specific keywords, such as the current top bid of $US1.04 ($A1.26) for the search term: ?

iPod, which became much more than a cool gadget with the 2003 launch of the iTunes Music Store and the Windows version of the iTunes software.

More than any other (legal) internet site, iTunes drove demand for downloads of digital audio and video.

It is also a source of podcasts, which are now distributed through many channels, including: ?

MySpace (myspace.com), the social networking site founded in July 2003, now one of the world's most popular websites.

In 2005, News Corp paid $US580 million for the site at a time when many called the internet strategy of Rupert Murdoch's (below) a: ?

Miserable failur...

But let's take them for what they are.

Blogs are not news.

They are not journalism.

They do, however, represent an ongoing dialogue in response to news and journalism.

And it's good to have a dialogue.

BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog noted that the number of blogs is decreasing.

The question of just how big the blogosphere is has caused some debate recently, and the BusinessWeek blog notes that the "State of the Live Web" figures of 15.5 million blogs reflects live blogs, opposed to the often reported figure of over 70 million - which includes all blogs.

It's not surprising to learn that the majority of blogs are inactive.

Not everybody needs their own soapbox, and a lot of people that have one, probably shouldn't.

The Cnet blog says the bubble has burst, and the millions of people who were at first excited by the phenomenon have grown bored with it.

There are those who take exception to the notion that the blogosphere has reached saturation - those who would have us believe that it is, and should be, limitless.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of blogs in the blogosphere contain nothing worthwhile.

A comment in the ValleyWag blog aptly points out that there is only a finite number of people who can write something interesting.

A strange sort of evolution has happened.

The blog, wh...

The company's plan is that partners will get used to the advantages the software provides and want it for their own internal use.

"We want to make sure partners are familiar with [Lotus Connections] and actually understand the power of it by experiencing the power of it," Kounadis said.

Today's announcement is more evidence that IBM is intent on dominating the enterprise social-networking space.

In March, IBM Labs researchers demonstrated tools, upgrades and raw, experimental pieces of software spanning business intelligence, application integration, information sharing and other areas for social-networking use.

But Big Blue is not alone.

The path technology can take from consumer use to the enterprise is well-traveled.

Even a few Web 2.0 technologies have already migrated into business use.

In February, Google introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, a suite of hosted applications targeted at the same enterprise market traditionally dominated by Microsoft Office.

Many of the products in the package, such as Gmail and Google Calendar were originally introduced as intended for consumers.

Cisco Systems (Quote) is taking advantage of the trend, too.

In February, the company bought privately held social-networking vendo...