In 2005, when Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington started TechCrunch, his popular blog on Internet startups, he saw it mainly as a chance to indulge his obsession with young technology companies. But it turned out that Arrington had latched onto something big. TechCrunch became the go-to site for the scoop on new Web companies. And, as [...]

CONSUMERS who get their news from the internet are likely to trust a blog for reliability as much as a mainstream media site, the competition watchdog said today. Graeme Samuel, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman, said a recent report by search engine Technorati showed the number of non-mainstream blogs in the 100 most popular [...]

Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not. That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue. Purists may [...]

When Arianna Huffington announced plans two-and-a-half years ago to publish a blog, she was greeted with derision by many of the vocation’s purists. The archetypal blogger, after all, was supposed to be a solitary outsider who worked from home – preferably in pyjamas – railing against the arrogance and excesses of the so-called mainstream media. Ms [...]

The Economist Group is using the power of the blogosphere to build ‘buzz’ for its political stories before they are published. Having identified a group of influential US political bloggers, the media company gives content to these individuals in order to begin circulation, Mike Seery, chief information officer of The Economist Group, told delegates at an [...]

comScore Inc has introduced comScore Conversational Media Report, a new service that provides enhanced worldwide measurement of the audiences for blogging sites in the burgeoning conversational media space, which includes mainstream and niche blogs and social networking sites. In publishing a comprehensive reporting of audience behaviour for conversational media sites, comScore is again leading the industry [...]

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has launched a new weblog to report on and discuss the latest in newspaper strategies and other developments in the global newspaper industry. The Shaping the Future of the Newspaper weblog, www.sfnblog.org, is a product of the WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, which identifies, analyses and publicises [...]

Twenty leading blog service providers in China, including Yahoo.cn and MSN.cn, have signed a “self-discipline pact” to end anonymous blogging. People use computers at an internet cafe in Suining, southwest China’s Sichuan province, January 11, 2007. Under the new pact, blog service providers in China are being “encouraged” to register users under their real names and [...]

Telegraph.co.uk has launched a new blog with the aim of rapidly updating developing breaking news stories. Making News will offer “updates and commentary on the day’s stories” throughout a news day. There is a difference between niche comment blogs and breaking news, suggested site editor Marcus Warren. So the new site launched in test phase last week. “I, [...]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc. plans to launch a test of its overhauled news portal on Tuesday, drawing influences from the uncluttered design of popular Internet blogs. The online division of the world’s largest media company said it aimed to keep readers returning and to introduce a new generation of media consumers to the [...]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Six Apart, a blogging software pioneer that is the top blog supplier to businesses, is looking to help organizations create full-featured Web sites, blurring the lines between blogs and business sites. “Blogging is evolving,” said Chris Alden, general manager of the professional business unit at Six Apart. “Maybe the era of pundit [...]

While most newspapers are trying to stake bigger claims online, one new publication is pulling material off the Internet to be printed in ink. John Wilpers, editor in chief of BostonNow, a free weekday daily introduced last month, said he wanted to fill the paper with items that local bloggers submitted to the BostonNow Web site. Last [...]

My name is Anne and I’m a blogger. Bloggers come in many shapes and sizes. Some are professional journalists. Others are amateur fanboys. A few create original content, but most riff on other people’s blogs. (At thompsononhollywood.com, I do both.) Some are erudite and write with charm and brio. Others suck. But for better or worse, blogs [...]

Blogging, or weblogging, where people post content they generate online, is becoming big business. More than 120 000 new blogs are created each day, according to blog search engine Technorati. There are about 70m blogs worldwide, Technorati estimates, though only a fraction are updated regularly. Most blogs have only a handful of readers. But some, [...]

GamePolitics.com is reporting that U.S. District Judge Paul Huck has dismissed anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson’s lawsuit against Gawker Media, the publisher of game blog Kotaku. Thompson had claimed that Kotaku and Gawker Media had failed to honor his requests to remove “threatening” comments from several of their blog posts that were critical of his [...]