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3 Most Expensive Blogs Sold in 2008 and Lessons LearnedOctober 3

Yesterday the blogosphere was abuzz over yet another acquisition in the blogging world with one-man blog Bankaholic purchased by BankRate financial information website and service provider for reported $15 million (with $2.5 million to be paid over the next 12 months if certain conditions are met).

The irony of the announcement is that the overall financial climate in the country does not seem to be favorable for any acquisitions at all - especially those that don’t seem to be backed by any significant revenue (and while we can only guess Bankaholic revenue, plastering a few Adsense blocks and affiliate banners over irregularly-updated content has hardly brought anyone millions - even though in finance affiliates pay higher than in tech).

We have all seen big acquisitions in the blogging world, of course, though this one does not seem to be a typical one to me since we rarely have such huge amounts associated with blogs no one seems to have heard about until the day of the ac

Google Chrome One Month Later: Too Early To JudgeOctober 2

Exactly one month ago Google launched a browser of its own - Chrome. Blogosphere was abuzz for a couple of weeks and the interest still seems to be here to a certain extent (though much less than initially) so I wanted to share with you some results from the first month of operation of Google’s very own browser.

Given the entire buzz that surrounded Google’s browser launch, it is no wonder that everyone was immediately excited about the browser and its performance - especially since the speed we saw was definitely remarkable. Unfortunately, after the initial excitement subsided people started to notice various problems in the shiny and new Chrome - like repeated crashes of the browser for numerous reasons (take a look at the comments on this post and you will see that the reasons are really numerous).

But as soon as Chrome started to appear in Google Analytics as a browser used by visitors, we immediately started to share our amazing

Google Blog Search Completely Revamped to Add Meme Tracking but Not to Kill TechmemeOctober 2

A few hours ago Google updated Google Blog Search functionality with some very profound changes. When up until now the Blog Search represented mainly a usual search page dedicated to searching within a particular group of websites (blogs in this case), today the homepage of the blog search by Google is completely revamped to showcase the most popular topics right upon arrival.

The homepage now shows the most discussed stories in all topics (a total of 11 categories are present). Stories are clustered and ranked depending on popularity of a topic (that is calculated based on the number of blogs discussing them and time since the story first appeared). It is also possible to choose a particular category to see what’s hot in politics or technology or entertainment. Right now the hottest section is obviously politics since the homepage features political stories on the top three positions but the fact that you can always focus on the category that you are particularly interested in makes it easier to track exactly what you want instead of what is popular in the blogosphere in general.

Right no

NewsCred Begins to Pay Members for ParticipationOctober 1

We first covered the information consumption startup NewsCred when it launched in public beta back in August. NewsCred is intended to provide you with a customizable digital newspaper tailored to your taste and taking into account credibility of various news sources so that all the information a user receives could be trusted.

At the time of the beta launch I was particularly unhappy about one thing - NewsCred used the full RSS feed content from the sources to feature on its own site, thus failing to send people back to original stories when they were interested. Since then this problem has been fixed and the “Read more” link appeared for each item to send a visitor to the original article or post.

The only thing that I am still unhappy about is the somewhat elitist feeling on NewsCred where users are supposed to make the choice of the news sources out of the limited options available on the site (a little over 100 sources now). Without functionality to add news sources of your own if you find them more credible for yourself it did not sound like a correct approach but I do hope that with the speed

Getting Addicted to Gmail? Chances Are Google Will Charge You OnceSeptember 30

There’s a very thought-provoking article in the Guardian today about the dangers of cloud computing that resulted in quite an animated discussion in the blogosphere making people forget the tech companies stock valuations for a moment and try to figure out if we are really locking ourselves up in a trap of the much-hyped cloud computing.

True, cloud computing is obviously one of the most hyped terms these days and everyone thinks it is kind of hip and cool to rely on web applications that will take as much of your digital life as possible to the clouds from your own desktop - and keep it in the cloud.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the GNU free operating system, thinks that there is a big danger in cloud computing as we are losing control to the companies