Multichannel Merchant reports on the expansion of UK gadget merchant Firebox into the US market. Unremarkable you’d think, accept for these juicy parts:

Bill Linn, a partner with Sandbox Strategies [Firebox’s PR firm], says his firm looked for blogs popular with techies or pop culture enthusiasts, then e-mailed them messages about unique products, deals, and contests offered by Firebox.com. The company started with major blogs such as Boing Boing, Engadget, and Gizmodo; news of Firebox then circulated among smaller blogs that linked to the larger ones.

“Not every one of our clients can get away with that, but when you have product lines like gizmos and toys, you can feed the blogs and generate sales,” Linn says. “We found that blogs don’t respond well if your message is too corporate, so we cut that out and got to what’s important to the reader.”

Yep, that’s 3 of the biggest names in the blogosphere: Engadget (Weblogs Inc), Gizmodo (Gawker Media) and Boing Boing, all happy participants in a scheme that was nothing more than a marketing ploy to make sales.

Before any one tut tut’s me though, I’m not necessarily saying this is wrong, and indeed it’s something that’s been going on for a couple of years now, but many in the blogosphere still hold themselves high upon the dais of perfect morality, when the truth is we all get spinned to, all the time, and some of the time we nibble on the bait.

Tags: Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing Boing

Forbes has the scoop: Yahoo! has purchased MyBlogLog, the firm best known for nifty sidebar visitor includes for blogs, for a sum reported to be “a little over $10 million (US)”. To quote the Forbes article:

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìThis closes the loop between readers and publishers,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù he said. ?¢‚Ǩ?ìEvery publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s the power of implicit networking.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

I guess it’s a case of nothing really out of the ordinary here. Everyone knew MyBlogLog would be acquired, and who tends to acquire blog related Web 2.0 startups…Yahoo! does. It’s early days yet on the news coming out, so we’re yet to see people yelling “bubble” from the roof tops, but expect lots of people doing just that in the coming days. Personally, at the money it’s a good buy for Yahoo!, we aren’t talking massive amounts in acquisition costs, Yahoo! does have a pretty good track record in managing these sorts of buys post purchase, and it fit’s in well with Yahoo’s other Web 2.0 properties, Flickr and De.licio.us in particular.

Tags: MyBlogLog, Yahoo!

This is big news! It’s fair to say that its taken long enough, but at long last Blogger supports private URL’s, beyond the previous abilities to use your own URL for posting but hosting it elsewhere, but to use it with Blogger (or Google as the case may be) as the host. The quote from Blogger via Steve Garfield:

“Blogger added a new feature: Bring your own domain. All you have to do is buy a domain, anywhere, at any price you can find, set up your Blogger account and point your DNS at Google?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s server at ghs.google.com, and viola*! Now your Blogger blog appears at its own domain name, and all you had to do was pay less than ten bucks a year for the domain. You don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t need hosting, because Blogger handles all the traffic, you just bring the domain.”

Good stuff.

Tags: Blogger, Google

Bill Gates has announced Windows Home Server at CES. Sounds like a good idea and it’s something I’d think about buying, however how rapped up in DRM is it going to be? Will I be able to store my ripped music on it without any hassles?

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the fake MySpace page authored under the name of leading Australian High Court Activist Judge Michael Kirby. I wonder what gave it away? Was it the “I’m a Pimp” headline?, or the friends list?. The really hilarious thing is the quote from the the MySpace people.

The case, which MySpace Australia said could be the first confirmed instance of identity fraud on the site, underlines the unreliability of much of the internet’s so-called “citizen journalism”.

OK. Lets take a look at Justice Kirby’s friends and commenters list. Ronald McDonald is a friend. Must be the real Ronald McDonald. Leaving comments include Great Garbo, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Papa Pio XII, King Louis XVI, Friedrich W. Nietzsche and my favourite Joseph Stalin…. and yet the Kirby MySpace page is apparently a world first!

Of course any good conspiracy theory isn’t complete without Right Wing Extremists, the report stating that “the online profile, which is accessible without a password…contains links to an American right-wing extremist group”. Um yeh, in the comments section which virtually anyone can say as they please!

Another great unresearched, alarmist hatchet job from the Australian MSM.

The NY Times reports that Google has acquired a small stake in Chinese download site Xunlei.com. At this stage it seems to be nothing more than a search play, with Xunlei committing to use Google search on their site, which according to their own figures has a user base of 120 million people, an interesting stat given it would account for over 50% of all Chinese Internet Users. Current search marketshare in China according to the report is Baidu at 63%, Google 19% and Yahoo 7.6%, naturally then Google still has a long way to go in replicating its dominance in the rest of the world into the Chinese market.

Micro Persuasion/ TechCrunch report that the long waited Web 2.0 news startup Daylife has launched. First impressions: it’s just a prettier version of Google News. Australians will remember the Peter Russell Clark ads of a couple of years ago where the bearded cook would ask “where’s the cheese?”, so with that image in mind, I ask “where’s the feed”. Let’s see: Web 2.0 style news aggregator (check), tags (check), feed (WTF?!?!). There isn’t anyway to subscribe to the site via feed, at least from what I can see. If there is they’ve buried it in such a way that I am unable to discover it after 5 minutes of looking around the site. The really, really odd thing: Dave Winer hasn’t said boo about the site lacking feeds, where as if it was any other company he would have by now…of course it’s no coincidence that Winer is an investor in Daylife, but I guess we would have expected better from him.

Tags: Daylife, Dave Winer

I know Cam of Gday World fame will read this and think that I’m sucking up to Arrington again, but as long time readers will know, my comment is neither for sale, nor is it anything other than representative of my honest beliefs. Of course, as to the matter of whether they are flawed or not will be a subject for history alone.

But I digress, because Michael Calore at Wired has published a rather reprehensable attack on Michael Arrington under the guise of the “Best Blogfights of 2006”. Mike Arrington vs Everyone as a sub headline is unfair at best. Sure, there’s been some ups and downs, but “everyone”?… please. Whilst I believe the question of editoral integrity is a fair one, I also believe that Arrington is doing a very good job given the possible conflicts his investments do provide…and don’t believe for one minute that I’m excusing him on the topic, it’s a topic that I have covered here at duncanriley.com, and it’s a position in which I’ve been before. Arrington continues to do a great job at TechCrunch, and readership figures for my liking always speak volumes for the truth. Perhaps Calore was on the end of a bad review, or one of his mates? No one is perfect, and neither is Michael Arrington, but I beleive history will show that Arrington was and is the No. 1 muse of Web 2.0, whether you like hime or not.

Congrats to the team at Know More Media on the addition of ten new blogs. These guys continue to grow with some great sites. I’d love to know what sort of figures they are doing now, out of personal interest only. Certainly business is a high paying vertical market to be in.

Correction: My congrats is about 52 weeks late as the press release is nearly a year old. Lucky KMM though for having 1 year old press releases appearing in Google News feeds today. Congrats anyway, be it 1 year late 🙂

Tags: Know More Media

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports on the sale of German language Facebook Clone Studivz for 100 million Euros (sorry, no idea how to type the Euro symbol). The site apparently does have 1 million users who one would presume would primarily reside in Germany, but 100 Euros per user as an acquisition price? WTF? It’s not as though the entry level to these sorts of sites is particularly large, it’s easy enough to pick up a MySpace or Facebook clone script from Scriptlance for roughly $100 US, and with a bit of money and some clever marketing it’s not that hard to pick up a decent size user base….100 euros per user is crazy! Surely being a German language play as well it would also have fairly limited growth potential, unless there is something special in the back end that could see it break into non-German language markets in the future.

I’m still not convinced it’s a full blown bubble yet, but certainly the amount of froth continues to increase. I’ll go back to shaking my head now, and plotting a potential Web 2.0 play for later in the year 🙂

Tags: Studivz