Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

17-11-2006

by Damien Mulley

This week, Rattleblog focuses on blogging itself and the new Microsoft Zune music player.

Bloggers are perpetually accused of spending most of their time blogging about blogging. The naysayers liken bloggers to town gossips obsessed with the minutiae of their small community while apparently ignoring important issues in the wider world. Never ones to stop being sheep, this Rattleblog episode is practically a love letter to blogging.

This week Joel Cere highlighted a MORI survey on European blogging trends. Apparently a quarter (24 percent) of Europeans consider blogs to be a trusted source of information; this figure is only 6 percent behind newspaper articles, which are trusted by 30 percent. Another startling fact is that nearly 40 million Europeans have not bought something after reading comments on blogs about the products.

Meanwhile, Nick Douglas, the editor of IT Gossip blog, Valleywag has been fired for apparently being too gossipy. Since it started, Valleywag, a part of the Gawker blog empire, has been dishing the dirt on the tech community of Silicon Valley and further afield. In a bit of delicious irony, all the IT blogs this week are gossiping about Douglas and Valleywag.

Meanwhile, in gossip about a company and not people, Valleywag reveals that the purchase of Blogger.com, one of the biggest blogging platforms on the internet, was done on a whim by one of the Google founders.

Staying with blogging platforms and empires, Jason Calcanis, who sold one of his empires to AOL last year and subsequently took a job with them, has now decided to move on. AOL once again seems to be shaking up their management and Calcanis did not seem to be happy. Calcanis was one of the better known personalities in blogging and he famously slammed Wikipedia for not running ads and making money. The web hippies did not appreciate Calcanis for that.

Getting less gossipy, Microsoft is ramping up the PR and advertising for its new iPod-type music device, but bloggers are not warming to the device itself, or the way Microsoft has approached them to buy advertising space. It seems that if you want to run Zune ads you cannot negatively comment on either Zune or Microsoft. There's nothing more that would wind up a blogger than telling them what they can't blog about.

For those that don't think blogging is worth money, Techcrunch reports that Rupert Murdoch is now saying that MySpace is worth USD6 billion, meaning that he would get 10 times what he paid for it less than two years ago were he to sell it now.

In local news, the Tuppenceworth blog has decided to take a bloggers view on the print media and is running a project called "The Paper Round", which examines papers for actual content rather than advertising and republished press releases. Their investigative reporting is showing there is a lack of investigative reporting.

Staying local, the Irish blogging community once again did well at an awards show. This time the Net Visionary Awards, where loud and lauded blogger Twenty Major won yet another blogging award.

Finally, planning for the Irish Blog Awards 2007 has started with news that there will be a good deal more categories this time round to reflect the strong growth in blogging over the past two years. Don't forget to enter your blog, or start one if you don't have one already. (Disclosure: I run this awards show.)

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.