A few days ago I noted that Law.com was creating a Blog Network, re-publishing selected law-related blogger’s posts. Along similar lines, Steve Rubel’s excellent Micro Persuasion blog is now going to be re-published within WebProNews, and Steve has posted an insightful article about the pros and cons of this arrangement:

…WebProNews immediately augments their high-value, professionally written articles with more folksy contributors who live on the edge of the content tail – all at no cost. In return, I benefit from more visibility, in-bound links and traffic. This is a harbinger of the partnerships we’ll see many big media construct in the near future.

Prediction: You’ll see a lot of this blog network/re-publishing/aggregation from big media in the next few months, then this will snowball as bloggers figure out how to do this all by themselves… RSS and the MovableType/MetaWeblog APIs make it easier to than ever to aggregate content, and bloggers will figure out very quickly how to self-assemble their own blog networks. And once they do, you thought cross-linking and blogrolling was an effective way to increase page rank? Watch how fast bloggers game the system again with reposting networks…

The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to Technorati.

Technorati’s chief executive David Sifry says the current number of blogs is now more than 8 times larger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. They are seeing 15,000 new blogs every day…

Check out this article for more interesting stats on the blogosphere.

Law.com launched a new blog aggregating content from other blogs on legal topics. The new Legal Blog Watch is an example of what will surely be a trend for brand name content provider to aggregate blogs on related topics.

Podcast Research is a blog by graduate students from the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo which examines the podcasting phenomena and studies it with an academic eye.

There are various themes the study is interested in such as whether it can be considered a serious medium as blogging has become, and whether commercialization (like it or not) has to happen before it can reach critical mass.

ComputerWeekly has an interesting article today on Google’s use of blogs internally. The article notes that Google started blogs for staffers in early 2003 and has seen these internal blogs put to a variety of uses:

…people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they are thinking about and what they are up to.

“There is a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It is going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years,”said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google.

Read the full article.

Andrew Grumet is amazing. His latest creation is GigaDial, which he describes as follows:

GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters.

It’s kind of like a web-based podcast aggregator. Or an audio bookmark list. Or something…

From Michael Gartenberg:

Last night blogging hit this weeks episode of the West Wing. This is the first time I know of where weblogs played part in the storyline of a TV show. It was interesting how the weblogs were portrayed.

I am sure there are more, but on April 1, 2003 an episode of CBS’ Judging Amy had a character’s blog have an impact on the storyline.

Who woulda thunk Judging Amy was hipper than The West Wing?

Audion 3, an extremely versatile Mac audio player/recorder/encoder from Panic was retired today and is being made available for download free of charge. Make sure to read the true story of audion, the story behind the story. These guys not only can create great software, but I think they missed their true calling as gonzo journalists:

The feeling of being beat to market by days is an interesting one — imagine being punched in the face by a drunk kangaroo then finding five dollars while lying on the floor, a simultaneously crushing but ultimately inspiring experience.

Unofficial builds of Firefox tweaked for better speed for specific processors. Users report Firefox is much snappier when built specifically for a G5 or G4 as compared to the release version built for G3+ class machines.

BurnoutMenu 2.0 looks like an interesting productivity application for managing to dos and tasks, it integrates with iCal and your iPod too.

TaskTime3 seems to be a useful $15 app for project timing and billing…

Sean Michael Kerner writes about RSS enclosures in The RSS Enclosure Exposure for internetnews.com.

The RSS syndication format has spread like wildfire through the Internet, permeating most news sites and virtually all blogs. Now there’s a new aspect of RSS ready to enjoy the same popularity. Called RSS enclosures, they’re the next step in the RSS revolution and hold great potential.

BlogHarbor spokesman John Keegan had some things to say in the article. That guy is clued in.

Update 11/12/2004 – Noted this elsewhere but I thought it bears repeating: BlogHarbor supports not only enclosures in the main RSS newsfeed and in each category newsfeed, but Photo Albums as well have their own RSS feed which contains enclosures. You can use iPodder software to monitor a BlogHarbor Photo Album and automatically receive images as a blog is updated, making it possible to keep your iPhoto library automatically populated with images from your friends and family…

Newsday has an interesting article on bloggers generating revenue from their blogs. Great opening paragraph:

The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.

Another interesting audio application from the folks at Rogue Amoeba: Detour allows you to send audio to different output devices on an application-specific basis. So you can send iTunes to your headphones, and Quicktime Player to external audio for example…

Make Room for Podcasting is a nice summary of the phenomenon of Podcasting.

Also, Jon Gordon has posted a succinct definition of podcasting:

A podcast is a talk or music radio show that’s sent directly to an iPod or other digital music player through your computer. It’s a new take on the growing technology called RSS that pushes text-based Web content to computers. But with podcasting, a listener subscribes to audio feeds.

A new service called BlogFlix has been released, which apparently is able to take your digital images and build a movie-like (think Ken Burns effect) Flash presentation for inserting into your weblog. Here’s a snippet from their press release:

Transvector releases BlogFlix, an online service that creates and delivers videos for blog entries. BlogFlix users can convert their online photo galleries into movies, displaying them along with regular digital video clips within a small frame in a blog. Running in the Flash player found in 95% of browsers worldwide, BlogFlix movies are fully compatible with the most popular blog software hosts.

The BlogFlix authoring tool launches directly from the service’s web site

(http://www.blogflix.net). With its simple interface users can add zoom and pan movements to photographs along with text captions and audio. The tool generates a snippet of HTML text that is pasted into any blog entry to make the movie appear there.