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Blogs Audience – Q2 2005

An interesting research conducted by comScore Media Metrix, and sponsored in part by SixApart and Gawker Media is giving us an overall image of the Behaviors of the Blogosphere, scale, composition and activities of weblogs audiences.

The research is conducted on a panel of more than 2 million Internet users (out of which 75% are US based).  An analysis of the traffic of thousands of blogs identified some 350 top blog sites and blog networks; that list was supplemented with other popular blogs in smaller segments, such as business blogs.  The analysis also included more than two dozen large weblog hosting services, including Blogspot, Xanga, TypePad and others, which collectively represent millions of blog sites.

Key findings of the report:

  • 400 blog domains tracked by comScore were visited by 50 million U.S. Internet users in Q1 2005.  This represents an increase of 45 percent compared to Q1 2004.
  • Traffic to the top blog hosting services has grown considerably in the past year. Six of the top ten hosts have grown by more than 100 percent compared to last year.  Top gainers included Blogs.com (+241 percent), TypePad (+240 percent) and Blogdrive (+223 percent).
  • Politcs/News weblogs are preffered by 43 percent of blog readers followed by Hipster Blogs (17%) and Tech blogs (15%), with business blogs ending the list with only 3 percent.
  • Blog visitors are 30 percent more likely than the average Internet user to live in households where the household head is 18 to 34 years old and are 11 percent more likely to access the Internet using a broadband connection.

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Google vs. Yahoo – the battle moves on

Whenever we think that things are cooling down for a while, not one, but both search engine giants jump up to remind us the war is not over yet.

Just yesterday Yahoo! announced that:

we have grown our index and just reached a significant milestone at Yahoo! Search – our index now provides access to over 20 billion items. While we typically don’t disclose size (since we’ve always said that size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine), for those who are curious this update includes just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files.

Yahoo vs. GoogleWow! That was more than double that Google index claims. Well, Google didn’t stay behind for more than just one day. As such, they (finally)

announced that starting today you’ll be able to get Google News results in two feed flavors, Atom and RSS. You can use either format in your favorite feed reader

Think that this is all? Well if rumors were spreading around that Google has plans with Instant Messaging, even since last autumn, Google took it seriously. They’re rumored to be announcing the purchase of Meetroduction, a combined IM/social networking offering that tries to combine instant messaging with the ability to find someone who’s physically near you.

This isn’t a separate instant messaging product, but one that plugs into existing IM offerings which might make a lot of sense for Google, since it wouldn’t need to build up a new userbase, Techdirt says and this seems like the sort of thing that could easily be merged with Google’s Dodgeball offering to create something that goes beyond mobile devices to instant messaging as well. Smart move indeed, I have to admin I’m looking forward into it.

Remaining in this field, of Yahoo vs. Google battle and rumors in the same time the latest buzz shaking around the blogsphere is that Skype is looking for buyers, and with this in mind, approached Yahoo! but they balked at the asking price. Price supposedly asked: $1 billion. Hmmm!! Another one to think about…

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Entrepreneurship Resources

If you’re looking for an extensive and valuable resource center for entreprenership and managing business than you will really appreciate Stanford Technology Venture Program’s Educators Corner.

The Center is basically a free collection of 779 high-technology entrepreneurship teaching resources, including:

via: Lifehacker

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10 Years on the web – 1995

March 1995 – Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporate Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle – YAHOO! and raise $32 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. In the same month, WWW surpases ftp-data as the service with the greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count.

Yahoo 1996 screenshot

July 1995 – Amazon starts selling books online. Founder Jeff Bezos drives Amazon orders to the post office in his ’87 Chevy Blazer

August 1995 – More than any other stock, Netscape Communication’s IPO defined the arrival of the Internet as an economic force. With just $16 million in revenues at the time it went public, the seminal Web browser company was valued at more than $2 billion. More important than any specific numbers, Netscape’s IPO created the frenzy of day trading and venture capitalist investments that would become a hallmark of the dot-com era.

August 1995 – Microsoft introduces Windows 95 and gives away crappy new browser Internet Explorer 1.0

September 1995 –  The first version of what would become eBay went online. It became a legend that eBay Chairman, Omidyar, while working at General Magic, wrote a software for a Web site that would help his girlfirend trade with other Pez collectors.

Altavista screenshot

December 1995– AltaVista gets off the ground with 16 million indexed pages, making it the Web’s largest search engine (Today Google indexes mode than 8 billion).

1995 in other news:

  • The Apache web server project is started
  • The java programming site for websites
  • The registration of domain names is no longer free. Beggining 14 September, a $50 annual fee has been imposed
  • Experimental CD-ROM disk can carry full-length film
  • “Internet addiction” is identified
  • Denmark announces plan to put much of the nation online within 5 years
  • Major US dailies create national online newspaper network
  • Lamar Alexander chooses internet to announce its presidential candidacy
  • Audio of live events can be heard on the Internet
  • Vatican develops a website
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10 Years on the Web – 2002

It began as a seemingly innocuous marketing tool, but spyware soon became one of the most pernicious problems the Internet has ever faced. Whether through pop-ups, privacy invasion, or drained computer power, practically anyone who has used the Internet has been victimized by this trend. The issue, which continues in full force today, has been increasingly scrutinized by the courts and legislators.

As programmer Bram Cohen unveils BitTorrent at a hacker conference in San Francisco, file sharing becomes Hollywood’s problem.

Corporate troubles across US, after Enron, SEC files fraud charges against WorldCom after the company admits to inflating profits by $3.9 billion; 17.000 people lose their jobs.

In other news:

  • Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market peaks at 96 percent.
  • 9 of 10 American school children have access to computers at home or school.
  • On the Web, creators of online journals, or “web logs,” now “blog on.”
  • Pop-ups and pop-unders clutter computer screens.
  • DVD sales pass VCR sales; 40+ million U.S. homes have DVD.
  • 70% of U.S. households could have broadband service; 15% use it.
  • Amazon.com stocks more than 350,000 titles.
  • UK workers spend more time with email than with their children.
  • Apple computer that can create movies in DVD format.
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10 Years on the Web – 1996

January 1996 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin work on a search engine called BackRub, name for its unique ability to analyze back-links pointing to a given website. We’ll here about it again, two years later, and still hearing.

March 1996
– Polaroid’s first 1 megapixel digicam hits. Pricetag: a cool $3,695.
Meanwhile Digital Associated Press cameras send Super Bowl pix to
newspapers in minutes

April 1996 – Yahoo! goes public and
raises $35 million, as shares triple in the first day of trading.
Market capitalization hits $1 billion. In three years its market value
will be $70 billion.

Netscape Communicator

1996
is the year Microsoft launches the web attack with the oppening of its
web-based email, hotmail.com. More than that, the browsers war begins
as Netscape’s share of market peaks at 87 percent, while the newly
launched Internet Explorer 3 begins its climb from 4 percent.

ebayDecember 1996 – EBay’s AuctionWeb recevie its millionth bid and shortens its name to just eBay

The
Supreme Court’s rejection of the Communcation Decency Act defined the
Internet as we know it today. Until that ruling, no one knew if the
medium would be a limitless, unfiltered universe, or a
government-regulated entity like television and radio.

In other news:

  • More that 100.000 World Wide Web sites and growing fast
  • 82 percent of americans heve heard of web, up from 45 percent in 1995
  • 45 million internet users, including 30 million in US
  • optical fiber cable line stretches across Pacific
  • 28% of US public libraries offer Internet access
  • several large newspapersoffers Web access to their archives
  • Wolrd Exposition is a world’s fair held on the Internet
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10 Years Online

1995 is definetly the year that started it all for the online world.

Sharing millions of songs online with friends, googling around, buying and auctioning everything online, being able to set up your own webpage in couple of minutes, dowloading tons of information, watching TV, seeing your friends from the other side of the world and chatting with them online, unlimited online storage…

All these are part of our daily lifes, and some of them seem to be here forever. Well, hardly to believe, they are here for only 10 years or less, and 1995 was the year when all of them actually started.

Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the internet did not exist for most of the people. If it was aknowledged at all, it was mischaracterizedas either corporate email or a clubhouse for adolescent nerds. And it was hard to used too. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?

Some months later, on August 9th, 1995, Netscape’s public offering took off, and in a blink, a world of do-it-yourself possibilities was born. Suddenly it became clear that people could create material that anyone with a connection could view. The burgeoning online audience no longer needed traditional media for content. Well, not in an instant, it took almost ten years, but with the Netscape’s stock peaking at $75 on its first day of trading, the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or the start of something new?

See a year by year, short history of the last decade online.

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10 Years on the Web

Is not like Internet is only 10 years old, but 1995 is definetly the year that started it all for real.

Sharing millions of songs online with friends, googling around, buying and auctioning everything online, being able to set up your own webpage in couple of minutes, dowloading tons of information, watching TV, seeing your friends from the other side of the world and chatting with them online, unlimited online storage… All these are part of our daily lifes, and some of them seem to be here forever.

Well, hardly to believe,  they are here for only 10 years or less, and 1995 was the year when all of them actually started.

Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the internet did not exist for most of the people. If it was aknowledged at all, it was mischaracterizedas either corporate email or a clubhouse for adolescent nerds. And it was hard to used too. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?

In 1994, Time magazine explained why the internet would never go mainstream: It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accomodate new arrivals, while the February 1995 Newsweek headline readed: The Internet? BAH!.

NetscapeSome months later, in August 1995, Netscape’s public offering took off, and in a blink, a world of do-it-yourself possibilities was born. Suddenly it became clear that people could create material that anyone with a connection could view. The burgeoning online audience no longer needed traditional media for content. Well, not in an instant, it took almost ten years, but with the Netscape’s stock peaking at $75 on its first day of trading, the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or the start of something new?

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10 Years on the Web – 2004

Long before it became the center of international controversy, the practice of offshore outsourcing could be traced to the technology sector. As a result, many looked to Silicon Valley as the topic rose to political prominence in last year’s presidential election, during which both George Bush and John Kerry included the trend in their platforms. But beyond the immediate labor issues, the technology industry has been more concerned with the competitive and security risks in offshoring intellectual property.

The House of Representatives holds hearings on Indian out-sourcing. More than 3 million US IT jobs are predicted to go offshore by 2015.

Jon Stewart’s Crossfire appearance reaches a bigger audience online than on TV.

Another bubble hits as Google raises $1,7 billion in its IPO in August.

The number of Americans trading songs online at any given moment doubles to 8.6 million. Also some 57 million american taxpayers filed their 2004 tax returns by computer.

The amount spent online by shoppers nears $150 billions. Browser War

Browser war is back as Mozilla foundation launches the next-generation browser. Firefox, launched in November tops nearly 80 million downloads in a little more than 6 months, and reaches nearly 25% of the market in countries as Germany.

IBM sells its PC division to Chinese IT power Lenovo.

In other news:

  • iPod holds 10,000 tunes, but fits into a shirt pocket.
  • 95% of U.S. public libraries offer Internet access.
  • Google gets 138,000 requests a minute in 90 languages.
  • 1 in 5 people under 30 say Internet is main information source.
  • $21 billion spent on online ads in U.S. alone.
  • 1.5 billion cellphones worldwide.
  • Multi-million dollar mapping programs now cost less than $100.
  • University in San Diego offers degree in wireless communication.
  • Employers can use GPS tracking to see if service workers are on the job.