The world’s 50 most powerful blogs – who cares?

I was talking to Sarah our friendly PR woman the other day about all this stuff to do with iPlayer, when I spotted a print out titled The world's 50 most powerful blogs. I launched into a rant about how full of crap these lists are. Just like the Technorati top 100, etc. the Blogosphere has finally grown up and dropped the need for such lists, but mainstream media still thrive on this type of stuff. I mean what the hell does powerful really mean anyway? Are we talking power in numbers of people, reach, hits, advertising revenue, influence or what? Its stupid and we're better off without these popularity contests. I mean how can you compare Engadget to Boingboing? There very different just like the huge long tail of the blogosphere (yes I hate the term too). Its all about personal preference and we're fools if we forget this. Subscribe to what you like, not whats popular. Rant over…

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Sam Sethi in hotwater once again

Blognation UK Launch

So I'm late to all this because I was tied up with meetings all day for reasons which will come out soon. But Sam Sethi of Blognation is in trouble again. I only heard about it from John tonight at the girl geekdinner christmas party (good party, shame I came late and didnt win the xbox 360, specially after the previous blog entry). And yes John was right, its now across many blogs and its become a real meal of a story now.

I don't usually read the over gossip driven valleywag but they have a decent summary.

In short, Starr charges, Sethi hasn't funded BlogNation, can't pay his contributors, lies to the press and his employees, and will have a hard time raising funding because he is a liar, not a CEO. Imagine that: Oliver Starr, burning bridges?

In this case, no one wins but Arrington. Never one to shy from a nerdfight, the prickly blog impresario has had a running feud with his former coworkers. If BlogNation ceases to exist, they'll be missed — if only for the entertaining feud.

There right about Arrington winning. Blognation was a good idea and actually had legs. Now I don't know Oliver Starr that well but when I read what Nicole Simon had to say, I was disappointed. Nicole is a very straight down the line kind of person, a person who I certainly trust and it sounds like she was getting a bit of a run around too.

Although I believed 100% that my hiatus would just be a temporary thing until payment would be in and then I would go back and continue working, it becomes now clear to me that this is unlikely to happen. I assume that I will find my postings deleted as are Oliver's soon, but of course I do have backups as well as documentation of posted items. Just because I am trusting other people does not mean that I am stupid.

No Nicole your not stupid, even Sam asked me to write on blognation at one point. (Imagine that, dyslexic writer?)

Anyway Sam did briefly reply on Techcrunch and Twitter saying Techcrunch isn't as clean as they may think. I'm sure Sam will more to say about this all soon, maybe via Jemima Kiss this time around? then maybe get back to unbalancing the mighty grip arrington has over this area of the startup business?

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Blogosphere is more international than ever before

I've been meaning to blog this for weeks now. Dave Sifry's latest report on the state of the blogosphere. So generally the blogosphere has becaome a lot more international with english taking a step down in the most used language in the blogosphere. Its actually better that you think too, because english now count for less than 35% of the blogosphere. Theres lots of other interesting things in the report like the Chinese blogosphere growing a lot due to MSN Spaces and Chinese and Bokee.com. Dave suggests that Japanese bloggers blog small posts from there phone, hence the huge jump. In the same post but not really realted Dave talks about how Tags and Categories are used by 47% of the blogosphere now.

Talking about languages and blogs, the BBC blogs has new additions to its own blognetwork. Spanish, Arabic and Persian blogs. The Chinese and new Urdu blog are just around the corner too. I guess this is perfectly fitting with the latest report. I have yet to try out Native text (a free web service that translates RSS feeds from blogs and podcasts into foreign languages) but it certainly sounds useful. I hear the Persian Blog already has a large audience visiting it.

Chinese just launched yesterday in simplfied chinese which causes it own problems because its all in UTF-8. It seems a lot of chinese reading people set there browsers to the encoding GB2312 or Traditional BIG5

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