Coming on the heels of a report that Japan’s blogosphere is growing, China’s blogopshere is really exploding mounting a 24 Percent growth increase over the last 12 months, and its showing no sign of slowing down.

CHINA had 19.87 million internet bloggers at the beginning of November – a 24 per cent increase over the past 12 months.

Blogs devoted to medicine and education are particularly popular, the Xinhua news agency said Wednesday, quoting a study by search engine Baidu.

While more than 15 per cent of Chinese bloggers updated their blogs at least once a week, only 4.6 per cent did it daily, Baidu found

The report came some six weeks after state press reported that China intended to require its millions of internet bloggers to emerge from the shadows and register under their real names – a move that raised privacy concerns.

Source: Australian IT Insider

Originally posted on December 7, 2006 @ 7:33 am

Companies don’t pay attention to bloggers. It’s really that simple.

According to an insightful new survey, PR pros in the U.S. and U.K. agree when it comes to recognizing the importance of blogs, but comparatively few from each country participate in the blogosphere by monitoring, writing or reading blogs—showcasing a huge disconnect in the communications industries in both regions.

• Almost 89% of U.S. respondents and nearly 83% of U.K. respondents believe blogs are an important form of digital communication.
• More than half of all respondents admitted that no one is blogging on their or their clients’ behalf (U.S. — 64%, U.K. — 64%).
• Most respondents (U.S. — 78%, U.K. — 78%) believe that the public relations department should handle fallout from bad news breaking in the blogosphere.
• 80% of respondents (U.S. — 87%, U.K. — 82%) confess they or their clients don’t have an official blogging policy in place.
• 63% have not adapted their communications strategy to include proactive outreach to blogs, message boards, and other forms of digital medium.
• Nearly half of the respondents (49%) are not monitoring blogs and online conversations.

Source: Bulldog Reporter

Originally posted on December 5, 2006 @ 4:21 pm

Wikia, a San Mateo company that allows groups to share information about their interests with wiki technology, has raised a second round of funding — all of it coming from Amazon.com.

It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,000 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia’s collaborative encyclopedia process.

Source: VentureBeat

Wiki’s offer a great opportunity to build unique communities. I’m sure this is a great opportunity for people to build communities. Wikis offer a great platform for New Media Producers to take part in building news based and community based information organization.

Originally posted on December 6, 2006 @ 5:54 pm

Disclaimer: I was enlisted to help broker the sale of The Blog Herald, and am a former owner of the site.

It was just ten months ago that we acquired The Blog Herald from Duncan Riley, the original founder. And now we’ve closed a deal to sell The Blog Herald to an undisclosed buyer.

It’s with a whole bag of mixed feelings that I find myself writing this post. Many of you have noticed over the last few months that we’ve been working on refocusing our company. Our core business has always been the consulting work that we’ve been doing since 1994 in one form or another. We also found ourselves not enjoying the blog network business as much as we used to do.. and with a hot market right now for existing blogs – it looked like a good time to divest ourselves of some of our sites.

But it was never our intention to sell The Blog Herald…

[Read more…]

Originally posted on December 3, 2006 @ 8:02 pm

Matt Cutts of Google touches on the state of blog spam

Is blogspam gone from Google Blog Search, Technorati, and Blogger? Of course not. But is is better than a few months ago? Yup, I’d say so, and I expect folks to continue to work on reducing blogosphere pollution.

For more indepth coverage on the state of blog spam you can check out a report by KB Cafe and Know More Media’s Marshall Sponder on Web Metrics Guru

Originally posted on December 3, 2006 @ 1:39 pm