Faiz Askari writes: "The scope and reach of blogs has proved attractive for Indian users. Blogs cut across mediums of conversation and with the use of podcasts and video, these can reach even the illiterate and uneducated masses."

 

 

Blogs are set to become mainstream media with more than 80 million people aged 16 to 44 writing one. 

Read the full article here.

Nate Anderson wrtites: "Blogging may help corporations "join the conversation," but when faced with the request to start a corporate blog, plenty of executives want a guarantee that it will help the bottom line. A new report from Forrester provides a framework for companies thinking about making a dive into the blogging pool and suggests that calculating a return on investment (ROI) isn't as hard as some people think—but that it will be different for every company." 

Read the full article here.

Gartner (research) predicts that blogging and community contributions will pick in 2007.

 

Since its beginning, the web has often been used as a tool to meet new people, but in recent years the interaction between web-users has grown dramatically, spawning a new generation of networking sites. Read Marc Cieslak's article.

Mark Sweney writes that social networking websites such as MySpace and Windows Live Spaces are the most popular blog sites in the UK, according to research.

Personal blogs are followed in popularity by those run by mainstream news websites and those dishing up political and celebrity gossip, with the BBC and the Guardian's blog sites the most favoured. Full article here.

New Yorker's Rebecca Mead briefly looks back at an NYer's article called "You've Got Blog" which chronicled the courtship, on blog and off, of Jason Kottke, a Web designer and pioneer blogger, and Meg Hourihan, a co-founder of the company Pyra Labs, which had created Blogger.  Full article here.

 

CNN's Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla look at how you could turn your passion into an online empire.  Full article here.

"Explosive college basketball coach Bobby Knight once summed up his views on journalists, and in doing so may have unintentionally explained why newspapers are struggling to deal with Internet bloggers"...Full article here. 

"How do you measure the blogging ROI? That's not an easy question to answer, according to Steve Rubel, one of the world's most influential bloggers." Full article here 

"Boing Boing would allow its readers to leave comments and engage in a discussion on the wildly popular blog, if it weren't for spam." Full article here. Full article here.

"We are still quite naive as a digital culture, and young people are finding out that what you put up on the Web can still be following you around 10 years later."  Full article here.

Russell Smith from the Globe and Mail writes: "The sexiest word in media these days is blog. Want to make your newspaper article/television report cooler? Mention blogs and bloggers." Full article here.

"The blogosphere is a great place for customer intelligence. Things are happening very fast. Bloggers are considered to be people with strong opinions." Full article here.