The overall at-home global active Internet universe for 12 selected countries nudged up incrementally by 1.34 percent from August 2004 to September 2004, Nielsen//NetRatings found. The increase represents almost 4 million new active users for the month.

"With blogs and RSS feeds, content is updated in real time," said Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! "And people who want to get the updated information can get them. It is changing the way that people get their information from search engines; it is aggregating information. Since feeds are machine readable, there is no guessing game with constructing pages. The machine-readable nature makes this very precise and easy to work with. The technical challenge involved in getting into the RSS feed wasn't anywhere near the challenge that HTML was, and still is in many respects."

Not surprisingly, it is the abundance of this seemingly "trivial" information that makes blogs so compelling. Blogs have become increasingly popular to audiences because they offer a variety of new information sources on a multitude of very specific topics. "There are 4.1 million different blogs. That number is expected to grow to 10.3 million by the end of this year," said Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. The majority of blog readers are 25-50 years old, and they visit blogs because they provide news that isn't readily available elsewhere.

- Too many "under construction" signs
- Content clutter
- Too much flash, not enough substance
- Lack of consistent design
- Shifting URLs
- Overly secured site
- Poor search engine
- Repetitious content
- Roundabout navigation
- Stale content

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»Top 10 Ways to Lose Your Intranet Users

As Bloglines continues to grow, its subscription data becomes more interesting. Yesterday, while demonstrating the application to some folks, I showed how you can navigate from a feed to the list of subscribers to that feed. Only those subscribers who agree to make their data public are shown. So in my case, for example, there are only 755 public subscribers out of 2337 total subscribers. But that's more than enough transparency to do some useful data mining. Here, for example, are the 20 most popular feeds read by a sample of 100 of my subscribers:

Geweldig! Een Haagse Google!!

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Dit congres voor actieve merken met interactieve ambities staat niet in het teken van reclame of online advertising (banners, e-mail of zoekmachines). Moderne merken moeten namelijk meer doen dan alleen schreeuwen via advertenties. Om merken te revitaliseren in deze snel veranderende maatschappij moeten moderne merken namelijk ook luisteren, faciliteren en interactie bieden, met behulp van interactieve media.

Met online marketing kun je merken bouwen en verstevigen. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Dynamic Logic, in opdracht van de European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA).
Vooral fast movers zijn gebaat bij online adverteren: merkbekendheid stijgt in deze branche met 5,9 procent, merkvoorkeur met 9 procent.In het ‘EIAA online branding effectiviteitsonderzoek’ vergeleek de EIAA – een pan-europese organisatie voor ondernemingen die zich met interactieve media bezig houden- de resultaten van 200 afzonderlijke on-derzoeken naar online campagnes in Europa, waarbij ongeveer 160.000 respondenten ondervraagd werden. Het blijkt dat online adverteren merkbaar van invloed is op merkwaarden als herinnering van adverten-ties, merkbekendheid, merkvoorkeur, boodschapassociatie en aankoopintentie. De onderzochte online campagnes leidden gemiddeld tot een stijging van de merkbekendheid met 5,4%, dat is een duidelijke toename van de toch al hoge bekendheid van de onderzochte merken (gemiddeld 69%). Alle onderzochte branches laten een stijging zien, fast movers zien een stijging van 5,9%, de automobielbranche 5,7% en de elektronicabranche 3,4%. Daarnaast steeg de herinnering aan een online advertentie met 45%. De associatie met de boodschap steeg met 21%, terwijl de merkvoorkeur met 5,7% toenam. Ook hier lieten fast mover-merken met 9% de grootste stijging zien. De aankoopintentie steeg gemiddeld met 5%, waarbij fast moving-campagnes weer het meeste stegen.
Meer op de website van EIAA.

If you don't believe in the power of Weblogs, ask Dan Rather. The CBS anchorman found his journalistic reputation in tatters after several blogs helped expose as forgeries the documents Rather used on a "60 Minutes" report questioning President George W. Bush's National Guard service.
Bicycle lock manufacturer Kryptonite also had a first-hand experience with the nascent power of Weblogs after bloggers played a big role in exposing how one of its locks could be picked with a ballpoint pen. Kryptonite was slow to react, underestimating the power blogs have in allowing a company's customers to communicate with each other, according to some observers. The bottom line is that companies no longer control the flow of information as they used to.

"My interest in blogs in general flows out of my perception that society has become massively connected," said Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems' chief technology evangelist, who has three blogs himself. "I agree with `The Cluetrain Manifesto': Markets have become conversations."

The implication is that markets, prior to the rise of the Internet, were essentially monologues. Today, with the rise of technology in general and the Internet in particular, markets are increasingly becoming dialogues, and blogs represent a perfect example of the trend.

• Share and enjoy news updates from all over the world
• Get the latest site updates without visiting the webpage
• News comes to you. You don't have to gather it

• Another cool thing to make stupid people mad
• Ecstasy for information junkies that can't have enough of it.

By vocation and inclination, I’m primarily a writer. As such, respect for copyright is virtually encoded in my DNA. No writer could make a living, or probably even make a name for herself, if she couldn’t exercise basic control over her work – and get the credit for it. This is why in my copyright notice for CONTENTIOUS I clearly specify that I have reserved all rights. My writing is my intellectual property.