Google is updating PageRank this two days and my Exploring Bogosphere now has a Google PageRank of 3. Pretty good for a 1-month-old blog 🙂 How about your blog?

Where do you find the blogs you read?? Everyone has different answers to this question. Below is the survey result from VizuAnswer, an online poll website. What’s your answers to this poll?

If “Content is King”,  then “Theme is Queen”, because the first impression of your blog/site decides if visitors will stay to look around or leave right away.

Today I spent a lot of time looking for a new 3 column WordPress template. After I installed this Tech-O-Crunch Theme, I started to tweak the HTML codes and CSS and used PhotoShop to edit the header graphic. I like the clean & nice layout and the white & wide post area – very Web 2.0 🙂

Do you like my new template? 

If you like surfing the Internet, you probably have heard about Web 2.0

Based on Wikipedia –  Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services – such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

     Web 1.0                                                   Web 2.0
DoubleClick                                       –> Google AdSense
Ofoto                                                 –> Flickr
Akamai                                            –> BitTorrent
mp3.com                                          –> Napster
Britannica Online                            –> Wikipedia
personal websites                           –> blogging
evite                                                  –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation               –> search engine optimization
page views                                        –> cost per click
screen scraping                                –> web services
publishing                                         –> participation
content management systems      –> wikis
directories (taxonomy)                  –> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness                                         –> syndication

I just stumbled upon Technorati’s quarterly State of the Blogosphere and would like to share with you.

Below are some figures from the report:

• Over 70 million weblogs tracked
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or…
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
  English second at 33%
  Chinese third at 8%
  Italian fourth at 3%
  Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
  English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

What’s hot at this weekend? Check out Google News and you will find out on Friday April 13, 2007, Google announced another super big deal on the Internet economy.

At a price of $3.1 billion, Google is buying DoubleClick, a New York-based firm that acts as an intermediary in the buying and selling of webpage advertising. Google has dominated pay-per-click search-based advertising. Through this acquisition, Google outbid Microsoft and successfully extended its business to the display advertising market. Now Google has advantage over Microsoft and Yahoo! on competing the estimated $US28.8 billion online ad market.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said: “We feel the combination will accelerate the display advertising capabilities and we will be able to produce a better experience for advertisers, end users and publishers.”

YouTube video clips have been ubiquitous on the net since last year. I guess pretty soon we will find a lot of DoubleClick display ads on the blogosphere. More opportunities for blogger publishers to make money, right? 🙂

• $1.6 billion – You Tube, a video-sharing site; September, 2006
• $3.1 billion – DoubleClick, online advertising company; April, 2007
• Who is Google’s next target?

A couple of my fellow bloggers have left comments asking me if I like WordPress more than Blogger. Based on my experience, I would say that both WordPress and Blogger have their own advantages and disadvantages; below I will discuss this topic. WordPress here refers to free WordPress blogs, not those with custom domains like Exploring Blogosphere. Blogger refers to free Blog*Spot blogs.

The new Blogger is very simple and easy to use, especially for beginners. You can use drag-and-drop template editing to edit page elements such as pictures, feeds, HTML/Java Script, adsense, link list, etc. You can change your template and tweak HTML codes if you wish. However, there are not very many Blogger templates available on the net. You have to spend plenty of time learning HTML or pay someone else to do it for you.

On the other hand, WordPress has many free templates (Themes) for their users. WordPress also has more features, such as blog stats, feed stats, categories, etc. You can edit the blog header image easily by entering the image URL, and arrange the sidebar by using the sidebar widget. It takes a little extra time to get familiar with all these features for the first time users. Once you master it, you will have more fun.

Therefore, if you are interested in learning new stuff, WordPress is a better choice. If you just want to share your daily ramblings with friends and don’t want to handle possible tech issues, go for New Blogger. Anyway, Blogger is owned by Google. It’s not likely that Google will let it down; although, Blogger has its own issues. Plus, there are more Blogger users participating in the weekly MeMes 🙂

Blogger or WordPress? What’s your opinion?

Since I upgraded Exploring Blogosphere blog to WordPress version 2.1.3, I’ve found that the visual editor disappeared.  I didn’t solve this problem until tonight when I searched the WordPress support forum. Here is the thread of this issue. For some unknown reason,  the visual edit button just becomes invisible after WordPress version upgrade.

If you have the same issue, here is what you should do: go to Users -> Your Profile -> enable the top checkbox “Use the visual editor when writing” -> Update the Profile. The visual editor will show up again. It’s just a small button; however, without it, your WordPress blogging experience won’t be as enjoyable as it should be.

Below is the survey result from VizuAnswer, an online poll website. What are you looking for when you visit blogs?

If you are a BlogSpot blogger, you can get your own domain name and still host your blog on BlogSpot.com for free. However, there are a few unsolved issues when transferring you Blogger blog to your own domain.

Before I started Exploring Blogosphere, I’d tried to use this domain name with my blogspot blog, but I found that it’s not worthwhile. The main reason is that the process is not as simple as it should be, and the result is not what you want.

After registering your domain, you’ll need to create a corresponding CNAME record for that address, associating it with ghs.google.com. A CNAME (Canonical Name) record is an entry within the DNS (Domain Name System) that specifies where a user can find your web pages. You’ll use this to associate your custom domain with your blog. Each domain registrar has different ways to create CNAME records. After I completed the DNS setting based on the instructions provided by Google, I found that www.exploringblogospher.com worked fine, but https://exploringblogosphere.com simply didn’t work. I did an online search and discovered that it is a known issue in Blogger Status. Blogger is trying to but has not solved this problem.

So if you want to have your own domain, you should either start a brand new WordPress blog like Exploring Blogosphere, or wait untill Blogger resolves this issue. Or otherwise, you will be annoyed and frustrated. 🙁