Howard Kurtz, media critic for the Washington Post writes about how Weblogs are influencing big media organizations "It's called influencing the debate, in real time."

Heh … This actually sounds like a good idea … SpamBattle.com : Using cost-per-click search engines to make spammers pay!

From NY Times Magazine, William Safire traces the etymology of Blog.

Is your Blog HOT or NOT ?

OMG, I actually agree with Cam … a quote from a quote on Blogroots :

"Where I work, much of the company-wide memorandums and communication is done via e-mail, with some e-mails containing numerous attachments that sometimes weigh in at a hefty one-to-two megabytes. It'd be so much better if these e-mails only referenced documents somewhere on the intranet instead of including them as attachments. The intranet page for each department could be a regularly updated weblog of information currently being circulated. This would solve so many problems with disk space and deleted e-mails, it puzzles me that some corporate intranets haven't adopted these simple concepts for the easy distribution of information. —Cameron Barrett"

Note: The rest of the page is a chapter from an upcoming book about the use of weblogs in a business setting … worth reading as well [ more here ]

You all are probably aware of this and excuse me if someone mentioned this before, but I found a new and interesting article on XML.com by Matthew Langham and Carsten Ziegeler, which describe the portal components they built and donated to the Apache Cocoon Project. The donation consisted of components and tools for authentication (originally called "sunRise") and portals (originally called "sunSpot"). [ More here ]   

In addition, I found a Cocoon Weblog … However, I found it interesting that it ran on Radio :-)

And then, from the Cocoon Weblog, I found a link to an article comparing Cocoon and Struts , with this quote, "Struts IS NOT a portal framework or a multi-channel distribution server."

And finally, I found a mention on the Cocoon Weblog of a SourceForge Project called, CocoBlog , which "is a free weblogging software tool based on Apache Cocoon and Apache Xindice." Neat!

Heh …My trip was like "Six Degrees of Cocoon" :-)

Quotes from an InformationWeek article on Blogging's business value [Thanks John]:

"weblogging will be a grassroots movement in business in the same way that, say, instant messaging has been."

"… there's built-in motivation for people to participate in blogging: They get credit for their ideas. A blog is essentially a repository of a person's intellectual capital–a record of their thoughts, observations, contributions. People may switch employers, but they'll take with them electronic journals of their best ideas. Blogging is a way to protect the most important brand of all: yourself."

"Give individual employees within a company their own weblogs, encourage them to document their best ideas and personal experiences, link them, add search capabilities, and it's easy to imagine that at least some innovation will arise from the ordinary. "

"The flip side of blogging for business innovation would be this: hours wasted recording, reading, and responding to low-value meanderings. There's a risk of getting bogged down in blogs."

"Now, it's journalism's turn. Newspapers, magazines, and other media increasingly use blogging techniques to provide information in new ways and not only extend their reach to broader audiences, but also bring new and different voices into their circle. InformationWeek and our sister publication, Optimize, will introduce blogs in the weeks ahead on our respective Web sites, informationweek.com and optimizemag.com."

Quote from an article in the SF Gate: "… the blogging world hope that blogging's personal, collective, man-or-woman-on-the-street approach to newsgathering might breathe new life into stale mainstream media. Clearly, the hundreds of thousands creating their own blogs, as well as the collective millions who read the blogs, are looking for something they're not getting in the daily paper." [more here]

I found this while paging through the new releases on SourceForge:

"You would like to have your own erotic-porno-sex web site but you don't want to spend time on it? This project will create it for you, it will browse other erotic-porno-sex web sites and it will put their pictures on your!" [ more here ]

On the second day in the mountains, Armstrong takes another win at Stage 12, with his amazing Postal teammate Roberto Heras taking second after setting the pace on the climb to the finish for Lance. Kudos to Joseba Beloki for keeping up with the "Blue Bullet".

"Happy, happy, joy, joy! The Ren and Stimpy Show is coming back to TV!"

Why am I not surprised that soon after Operation TIPS   [aka Terrorism Information and Prevention System], was announced, Operation RATS [aka Retrograde Activities and Treachery System], was announced [funny :]

Quote from a review of  Traction in InfoWorld "THERE IS STILL NO sure-fire recipe for KM (knowledge management) success, but the ingredients must include the staples of the knowledge worker: e-mail, the Web, and Microsoft Office. With Traction Software's KM solution, content flowing through all these channels is easily captured by the Java-based Traction Server, which can be best described as an enterprise Weblog system . Documents posted to the server are stored as XML, tagged (in a Web interface) with system-and user-defined terms, made available for full-text and structured search, and served back out as team workspaces, enterprise information portals, or both." [ more here ]

"PeerCast uses the Gnutella protocol as the basis for all communications, and complies (mostly) to the Gnutella 0.6 protocol. It works in much the same way as other Gnutella clients except instead of downloading files, the users download streams. These streams are exchanged in real-time with other users."

From: PeerCast.org

Interesting article : "Every time we make a few songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot…"