It looks like the world is going blog crazy as the number of blogs online doubles every five and a half months, with a brand new blog being created every second.
That’s the claim made by blog trackers Technorati, whose online service indexes and searches blog postings across the globe.
The company is currently tracking more than 27 million separate blogs around the world – around 60 times more than what was online three years ago.
According to Technorati, around 2.7 million of those blogs are updated at least weekly, with something like 1.2 million total posts appearing every single day. New blogs are appearing at a rate of over 75,000 every day with an average of fifty thousand blog posts being recorded every hour.
The figures were released by Technorati founder David Sifry in his “State of the Blogosphere” post on Monday.
“At (this) rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject,” Sifry noted, adding that the sheer amount of information presented a new challenge to readers trying to find the most interesting and authoritative data available.
Although the vast majority of blogs take the form of personal diaries, navel gazing monologues and raging outlets for hormonal teenage angst, some bloggers have taken on a growing role in accelerating news cycles, challenging mainstream media reports, questioning political figures and subversive activities like undermining advertising campaigns.
It’s not all good news though, with Sifry revealing that “about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud.”
We’ve certainly suffered from spammers scooping up our content and reproducing it on their own, unrelated blogs in an attempt to drive traffic elsewhere, and these fake blogs are making Google blog searches a frustrating affair.
Sifry announced that Technorati along with tech companies including all the major search engines will be working together in another “Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit” this spring to form strategies to combat this growing problem.
Now holding the record for the fastest-selling debut album in the UK, the success of young British indie-rockers Arctic Monkeys shows how the Web has changed both the way in which bands promote and market themselves and how people find new music.
For less than the cost of a handful of flyers, bands can set up their own Websites, offer free downloadable tunes, sell merchandise, maintain free email mailing lists and invite a dialogue with their fans.
With a growing fanbase clambering for more, it wasn’t long before record companies were begging to sign up the band, and last week’s album release on Domino Records saw the Artic Monkeys record-breaking leap up the charts.
How do ‘Normal’ phones work?
Using VoIP over the Internet is a hit and miss thing. We know the Internet is fantastic at coping with problems – if there are network errors, the data is re-routed around the black-spots, and when the error goes or traffic gets congested, it just re-routes the data somewhere else. It’s best to think of the Internet as a loose collection of around 30,000+ networks that happen to interconnect at various places.
VoIP in an ideal world
Security implications and therefore costs are a significant issue. The increase in network traffic that VoIP can bring can have other cost implications, such as ensuring firewalls are “chunky” enough to support the VoIP traffic.
Love music? Love iPods? You might 
Couple of content quickies – 
BBC World have been busy bunnies of late, signing distribution deals all over the globe.
The video streams include the adverts that would be shown if BBC World were being shown on the TV in the region. As yet, BBC World aren’t charging their advertisers any extra to splash them on mobile screens – they’re seeing it as added value for them
In the 3/Hutchinson Australia deal, the subscribers are being asked to pay Au$4/month for unlimited access, Au$2/day or Au$0.50/two minutes.
Four months after releasing their first iTunes-enabled mobile phone, the disappointing Motorola ROKR E1, Motorola have had another stab at creating the perfect music phone.
The biggest complaint was the laughably feeble memory on the ROKR that could only hold a maximum of 100 iTunes songs – regardless of memory capacity – and a treacle-slow song transfer rate.
In a flurry of arty waffle, Steve Lalla, vice president and general manager for mass-market products at Motorola, explained that the, “L7 is really in what we call our ‘self-expression portfolio,’ where design and style is the key premise behind the product”.
It won’t be long before kids think that “going to the chemists for some prints” is some kid of euphemism for scoring drugs, but with the onslaught of cheap digital cameras and high quality printers, the writing’s on the wall for the print developing business.
Images can be read from a built in CD-R drive for printing, with high quality scanning afforded courtesy of a 3200 x 6400 dpi MatrixCCD scanner scanner.
Users can monitor what’s going on through a high definition (256 ppi) 2.5 inch colour LCD preview monitor, with a USB port for backing up data on to external storage devices (such as CD-R/Zip drives).
Looking for new sources of revenue beyond their Internet telephony service, Skype have announced a deal with Warner Music Group to flog ring tones and artist images.
“We are excited that more than 70m Skype users around the world will now have the ability to enjoy content from Warner Music artists,” said Alex Zubillaga, executive vice-president in charge of digital strategy and business development at Warner Music (that’s some job title – we wonder if he meets people saying, “Hi, I’m Alex Zubillaga, EVPICODSABD at Warners?”)
Ringtone sales have proved a surprise hit for mobile operators and content providers, coining in an astonishing $4bn in worldwide sales in 2004 – around 10 per cent of the $32.2bn worldwide music market.
For the first time in its long history, Eastman Kodak is generating more annual sales from digital imaging than from film-based photography.
But it’s not all good news though, with the company reporting that total losses could top an eye watering $1 billion, as a result of the hugely expensive restructuring demands required by a potentially risky shift to digital.
The company is still half way through the arduous task of restructuring the business for the digital world, and has already laid off some 25,000 workers.
Fortunately for Kodak, Christmas proved a highly profitable period with sales of its EasyShare Printer Docks surging 95%, and sales of kiosks to drugstores and other outlets up 23%.
Google have released version 4 of their popular toolbar for Web browsers, with groovy new features to lure more visitors to their sites.
The Bookmarks functionality has also been enhanced to allow users to create and label bookmarks that can be accessed from any computer – something noticeable missing from arch-rival Internet Explorer.
By ramping up the feature set Google is hoping to grab a larger share of Web users (and thus more advertisers) and steal a march on Yahoo and Microsoft who both offer their own toolbars.