Blogs are the new black. Whether you are a Fortune 500 CEO, an ambitious engineer working the late shift or a promiscuous Singaporean teen – you’ve got to have one. For the uninitiated, the prospect of adding yet more words to the ocean of information on the web may seem futile. But fame and power await those who manage to break out of the mass of hyperlinked opinion.
No wonder that media companies are also starting to get religion. Readers secretly want to be moguls too.

Robert Cringely had some interesting things to say today about the Supreme Court's ruling on P2P filetrading networks Grokster and Streamcast, and its implications on the emerging Web 2.0 meme.

If you want to know where degree zero of the Web 2.0 world is - it is Gnomedex 2005 and you have just missed it.  The blogosphere is going crazy with speculation and comment, driven largely by Microsoft's announced plans to deeply integrate RSS technology into Longhorn. Exciting news, certainly. But also, a bit like getting a smile from a crocodile.

If you think TiVo has got the network advertisers running scared, imagine a world in which not only advertising but the configuration of your product itself becomes a matter of choice for consumers. The genius of the Firefox browser is not just that it is wickedly fast, but that it also allows third party developers to extend its functionality. As you can imagine, when the world’s ubergeeks contemplate hotting up their browsers, ad skipping and site modification are at the top of their list. But this is not just a web fringe phenomenon. With global Firefox adoption rates now gaining momentum, publishers will soon have to accept that it will be readers and not editors who will decide not only what they look at, but also in what form and at what cost. 

As any good librarian knows, classification is a hell of a tough job. Clay Shirky puts it well - you have to be part mind reader, part fortune teller. No matter how clever a taxonomy of subjects you come up with, second guessing search behaviour let alone the future development of new topic areas makes the job near impossible. Dewey had it easy.

Here is an irony for you. There is a growing number of people who consume their news and information exclusively through aggregated headline readers, made possible by the magic of RSS feeds. If you are reading this in your mail client, you are clearly not one of them. Your reluctance is entirely reasonable. After all, push content is nothing new and for the most part, nothing spectacular. In the late nineties, Microsoft experimented with web channel subscriptions in Internet Explorer. And then there was push pioneer Pointcast, who we all remember for the $450 million deal that they didn't do. However this time round, the buzz around syndication has a different flavour and not one that may be as pleasant tasting to the media status quo.

It seems that people have discovered a new hobby - talking about themselves online. And if uploading millions of pages every day about their ordinary lives and loves wasn’t enough – this rising legion of gonzo laureates are demanding their place in the sun. By all acounts, they are getting it. According to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly a third of US internet users read blogs. Eight million of these have created one of their own. The next phase, however, is even more interesting – distributed publicity.

When it comes to advertising space, you can really have too much of a good thing. However traditional ways of dealing with remnant inventory - discounting and supply restriction - have caused chronic problems for online publishers. So, just how do you give advertisers more of what they want, and less of what they don't?