Author Archive

Myspace is more of a social networking platform than a blog platform; while it does include options to make blog posts, the blog isn’t really front and center when someone browses your profile; it’s more of a line item, one more thing about you that’s shared with friends or with the public at large.
Nevertheless, given the sheer number of people who’ve signed up into Myspace (141 million, according to the “My Network” statistics on signing up), there’re potentially millions of [...]

LiveJournal is a hosted blog solution from SixApart, the same company that also provides TypePad, Movable Type, and a new offering called Vox. SixApart???s web site indicates the focus ??? TypePad and Movable Type being offered for professional and business blogging, Vox for personal blogs ??? and LiveJournal for a community of bloggers.
Not surprisingly, the key highlight of LiveJournal is the ability to form and manage a community of blogs; people who choose to blog on a common set of [...]

Xanga is one of the older blog platforms around; started in 1998 as a site for sharing book and music reviews, it morphed into a blogging service in 2000. Xanga is one of the most popular blog platforms, with a total number of users estimated at 27 – 40 million. Most of these users are believed to be teenagers or schoolgoers.
Xanga hosts weblogs as well as photo / video blogs; each user gets a “Xanga Site”. Unlike Blogger and Wordpress.com [...]

 
Blogger is one of the oldest blog platforms around, whereas Wordpress is among the newer ones. Nevertheless, Wordpress has been gaining users and popularity; part of it may be due to the free / open source nature of the offering, but the range of features coupled with the ease of use is probably a key driver.
This review is based on testing the free hosted service at Wordpress.com, not the software download at Wordpress.org that’s used for self-hosted sites. Technically, there [...]

For many people, it’s a no-brainer; if you want to blog, you need to go to Blogger. Founded by Pyra in 1999, Blogger was one of the earliest blog platforms; a combination of ease of use, no-fees with an ad-supported business model, and word of mouth made it an automatic choice. Google bought it over in 2002, and has continued to make it accessible freely, with options to integrate Adsense in your blog.
Blogger has undergone several updates over the years; [...]

For all the hype that follows YouTube, Flickr and other new Web 2.0 offerings, the biggest Web 2.0 success story has really been weblogs and blogging. A report on Technorati talks about the explosive growth; the number of blogs today is over a 100 times what it’s been 3 years ago, with the size doubling every 200 days or so. Yet, the Technorati count of 55 million excludes spam blogs, and others that don’t exactly meet their criteria as being [...]

At the ITU telecom world event in HongKong, Microsoft kicked off its connected services sandbox; a way for developers to work with service providers to develop and test new kinds of offerings, fusing Web 2.0 with classical communications services.
Given that mobile phones outnumber PC’s, and many people expect that it would be the preferred way to access the web for most casual users, it does make sense to focus on such applications.
However, in the light of a recent announcement of [...]

Two months ago, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion. Now that seems like a huge figure, for a startup; and with potential for litigation over copyright, many wondered whether it made sense for Google.
To quote fellow blogger Delta
Google also probably guessed that they were about to take on board a huge legal fight that would probably cost them billions more than the $1.65 billion that the company, YouTube cost them.

Here’s the reality. The acquisition was an all-stock deal; Google [...]

Another approach to evaluating the oft held opinion that Web 2.0 represents a bubble; let’s take a look at what’s outside.
Azeem Azhar looks at historical trends in business and industry, to trace what’s been happening. From the early days of the industrial revolution, business organization has been evolving; early partnerships giving way to joint stock companies, culminating in the vertically integrated industrial organizations like the automotive industry, or the horizontal conglomerates with fingers in all pies.
Part of this was driven [...]