I had a post about What’s Web 2.0 ? back on April 16, 2007. Web 2.0 is popular now but still new for most people who don’t spend too much time online. Web 2.0 represents the recent evolution of the World Wide Web. Nowadays, many technologists, journalists, and industry leaders have used the term “Web 3.0” to hypothesize about a future wave of Internet innovation.

Among those views from industry leaders, I like what Jerry Yang, founder and Chief of Yahoo, talked about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 :

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium…the distinction between professional, semi-professional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.

ExploringBlogosphere has been waiting for WordPress 2.5 for a long time. Based on WordPress website, “The improvements in 2.5 are numerous: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages”.

I will let you know my opinions about WordPress2.5 later.

I just started my new website HappyTutors.com and I need a new theme for it. Today I went to WordPress Theme Viewer and found that there are hundreds of great WordPress themes avaiable. I remember that last year when I started ExploringBlogosphere, there were not so many themes that I like. The blogosphere has developed so fast in the last two year. It’s really a good thing for bloggers that so many internet and website designers out there offering us free templates. Thanks a lot!

I came across a very interesting research at Analyst Webblog Hitwise Intelligence about Google and Yahoo! users. The research concludes that Yahoo! Search attracts more younger audience and Google users are more likely to be big online spenders.

I always use Google and hardly use Yahoo!. I sometimes do online shopping through Google. How about you?

Look at the post Social Neworking Sites I wrote in October 2007, Facebook grew fastest among social networking sites. Now we know that Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240m at the end of last year, valuing Facebook at $15b! As far as I know, in the blogosphere, WordPress is the higher profile, while Facebook is perceived as “Teenager”. However, Facebook demonstrates the stronger power of social networking and larger share of searching market. Anything can happen in the web – One day my ExploringBlogosphere might be acquired by a giant:-)

Want to know what’s happening in the blogosphere in 2007? According to internet research firm comScore, Blogger had the largest number of unique visitors of all social-networking sites in September, but Facebook grew the fastest. WordPress.com ranks 6th in this competition.

Yesterday the blogosphere was talking about probably the 3rd or 4th round of Google PageRank change this year. As far as I know the last time was far back in April when my Exploring Blogosphere got Google PageRank 3. Fortunately, Exploring Blogosphere PageRank still stays 3, considering I didn’t post for almost 3 months. My Sunflower Blog also keeps PageRank 4 🙂

But some of giant bloggers such as Problogger and John Chow, their Google PageRank were down to 4 🙁 How about yours?

Looking at my last post, you will notice that I’ve been lazy in the last 4 month. So what’s new in the blogosphere?

 My Google PageRank still stays the same -3; Alexa Ranking is down to zero. Anyway, not too bad at all considering I did nothing in the past.

In addition, I received more than 5,000 spam comments due to lack of anti-spam plug-in. When I tried to pending comment field, the site was frozen because it took forever to load those spam comments 🙁

I have to install an anti-spam plug-in –any suggestions?

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?

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