The winners of the 2006 Webby Awards have been announced, and it appears as though the blogosphere doesn’t exist….but of course it does, but bloggers aren’t really up for the $500 USD entry fee, and hence we get the usual corporate sites winning awards, and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post (not really representative of the blogosphere is it?…any one up for making up a George Clooney post? 🙂 ) despite the fact that web eyeballs are looking elsewhere.

Wired and Investor.com take a similar line, which is heartening in knowing I’m not the only one who seems to think this.

So where the bloody hell would you start the first country based version of MySpace, well according to Lee’s Blog:

MySpace Australia.

According to News Corp:

The Australian divisions of multinational companies such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson and Toyota are expected to be approached as they have advertised on the US site, along with key local brands such as Telstra.

I’m soooooo excited. I could have a heart attack like Big Kev!!!

China to have 60 million bloggers by end of 2006 (reuters)

China is the world’s second-largest Internet market after the United States with more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log, sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

The number of Chinese bloggers is expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year, Xinhua said, quoting a report on China’s media industry by the prestigious Tsinghua University.

Zhang Xiaorong, strategy development director of “Bokee”, which was set up in 2002 and claims the biggest share of China’s blogging market, said his company adds about 100,000 blogs a day.

“The expected 60 million bloggers would account for more than half of China’s 110 million netizens,” Xinhua quoted Zhang as saying.

Notice this great software via Aaron’s new blog, Canvas.

It basically allows you to set up your WordPress blog from within WordPress, everything from layout to colours, without needing to touch any code. But it’s not a basic editor, we are talking full customisation here. Really great, easy to use stuff. I haven’t given it a go yet but I will be shortly. If I was Matt Mullenweg, I’d be signing up these folks with Automattic yesterday!

Tags: canvas

I’ve been using Blogdesk for a couple of days now, and for once in my life I can actually feel my blogging productivity increase, mainly because I can quickly copy, cut and edit an image into any blog post, to any of my blogs, along with what I’ve got to say on the story.

I asked Johannes Oppermann, the German based author of Blogdesk, a few quick questions, and this was his response:

I wrote BlogDesk because blogging is about communication and I like the idea to enable people to communicate (one of my other programs is the mail client PostMe). Blogging seems to be easy, but it’s only easy for geeks and the younger tech-generation. I know a lot of people that could never publish a photo with WordPress – but they can do using BlogDesk. When I develop a new program I always think of my 70 year old dad – he has to be able to work with my program.

Why do I give it away for free? I don’t like selling

Again, I’m not being paid for this plug, but I’m loving Blogdesk mainly because of it’s imaging editing abilities. It doesn’t work with all blog clients, but well…technorati tags, image editing, categories…everything I’d ever want…well pretty much close to it. So give it a try! it’s well worth it, and I’m some one who has never felt comfortable with blogging tools like this.

Tags: BlogDesk

All the blogosphere is buzzing about Sphere, the latest kid on the blog search engine block.

Maybe I’ve become sceptical again, but I played with it for a while, its just another blog search engine, and I honestly don’t think it’s quite at the Technorati level yet. Pretty to look at, for sure, but outside of the nice look, I couldn’t find much that was really special.

I’m tempted to start asking people like Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel whether they are actually capable of giving critical press to anything new in Web 2.0.

I mean Tech Crunch and Micro Persuasion are both a good read, but Tech Chrunch in particular appears to be coming the poster boy for hyping every new Web 2.0 tool launch and nearly incapable of giving criticism to any Web 2.0 launch less they start loosing invitations to all the cool Web 2.0 launch parties Michael and the gang get invites to.

Back to my cold and flu tablets now 🙂 A good round up of Sphere can be found over on Greywolfs blog.

Despite the haze of the flu drugs I’ve started taking, and having my 3 year old running around the house with the same flu (isn’t it wonderful how your children love to share) I managed to participate in an interesting podcast this morning at 2web crew where Richard Giles and I interviewed Markus Frind, the chap behind the highly successful free dating site Plenty of Fish, who also makes about $10,000 USD a day from Adsense as well (well to be fair Richard did most of it…..).

Worthy of listening to if your in the blogging business and use Adsense.

He made one particularly interesting point right at the end. If you were starting up a site now, find something that others aren’t doing.

Another point in relation to the so-called Web 2.0 bubble, he said that he didn’t think there was an across the board bubble, only a bubble in VC funding….interesting.

Tags: markus frind

Darrens got a great list of Blog Tools over at Problogger at the moment, including a list of blog editing software. One struck my eye as being worthy of download:

Why did Blogdesk stand out you might ask. I’ll tell you why. The image. Yep, the image directly above this text! It comes with a built in image editor that allow you to crop images and add things like shadows, and the best thing of all: it uploads the image to your server, so you’re never showing images from another site like sooooo many of the blog editing tools out there do.

It’s always been hard for me to use software like this, but with image editing and uploading built in, as well as trackbracks and what not….it’s looking good.

Tags: BlogDesk

Darren over at Problogger does his first vidcast, and what can I say other than cool bananas! I so want to give this a shot soon as well. But if you sit through it he reveals a couple of interesting points.

1. Since he went to full feeds, his traffic and comments have dropped. That’s right Scoble, the community has been diminished by the full feed
2. Using CPM advertising via feedburner he’s actually slightly up on revenue.

And 2 is the pertinent point. I’m not a feedburner user, I’ve always had trust issues about pushing my readers on any blog to a third party, but according to Darren feedburner may have finally cracked the RSS feed advertising tipping point and be able to return reasonable CPM rates for RSS feeds.

It’s enough to finally make me sit up and take notice.

I still see full feeds as taking from the community, in terms of comments and leverage from any site, but in a pure business sense, if Darren can actually make more from a full feed….well all of a sudden they look a whole lot better don’t they!

I sold two sites today. Weblog Empire for $1k USD and Coupon Weblog.com for $250. It took one and a half hours. Scary. Scary in that they could have been worth easily more. Scary in that even relatively non maintained sites can be worth so much. I’ve still got a long list of fun/ trial/ experiment sites I could sell… given these prices, well the ducted gas heating at $6k AUD is looking a distinct possibility 🙂

But the question then arises? what is a blog worth. When I sold the Blog Herald it was a really hard question. Anything above $10k is a hard sale…really. But even smaller blogs? PR6 blog? Is it worth $1k, $2k, $5k???? interesting question.

What I do hope (oddly enough) is that we see more blog sales, because we need to establish a proper market for blogs, and then we can establish a market price.