Tag: blogging

Are these the 30 most popular blogs in the world today?

top_30_blog_list.gifAccording to one research firm, other blog popularity-ranking services are flawed because they only use one or two measurements to calculate the most popular blogs.

They, on the other hand, use a schmorgasboard of statistics including inbound links from the likes of Yahoo and Google, Alexa (does anyone normal actually use their toolbar?), plus US unique monthly visitor data.

Spotting a fundamental flaw in this already?

Or, in other words, how many of those blogs are not US-based?

Andy Merrett Internet

Opinion: Elton, how much digital music will you sell before you try to "shut down the whole Internet"?

andy-merrett.jpgAndy Merrett writes…

Despite his rants and raves, I’ve got a fair amount of time for Elton John, but his latest idea is just plain crazy.

According to an interview in The Sun, he’d “shut down the entire Internet for five years” in order to “see what sort of art is produced over that span”. He’s concerned that too many people are sitting at home using the Internet to blog rather than getting stuck in to good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.

That, apparently, has led to the death of long-term artistic vision.

Yours, perhaps, Elton, but c’mon – are you serious?

Andy Merrett Columns & Opinion

Blogging is ten, maybe twelve, or twenty-four years old

blogging_platforms.gifThe Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article over the weekend suggesting that blogging is now ten years old.

According to the article, the first blogger is “regarded by many to be Jorn Barger”, who “began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary, on Dec. 23, 1997.”

What appears to be closer to the truth is that Jorn Barger was the first person (or one of the first people) to coin the phrase ‘blog’, because other sites reckon that blogging has been around for much longer than a decade.

Andy Merrett Internet, Websites

Spin-my-Blog now available to UK and US LiveJournal users

livejournal_spin_my_blog.gifSpin-my-Blog, which launched in February, has now done a deal with Six Apart to make the service available to all 12 million LiveJournal users.

Simply by making a phone call and speaking their blog entry, users of the popular blogging platform can blog while on the move, or anywhere they don’t have access to a computer. It’s also more convenient than texting blog entries, unless you’re into micro-blogging of course.

Andy Merrett Internet