--- UKB Announce ------------------------------------------------
A weekly overview of the UKB mailing lists
More information: http://weblogs.co.uk/ukb/
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This week:
- Nobody expects the Blogger acquisition
- Blog population smaller than expected?
- Advertising on weblogs
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NOBODY EXPECTS THE BLOGGER ACQUISITION
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In what interesting times we live. Google's purchase of Blogger threw
weblogging right into the limelight, making any previous coverage by the
mainstream media seem like footnotes. There has been staggering coverage
of not only the story itself, but of opinions and speculations as to the
future of the market-leading weblog application.

Already, we've seen Google adopt at least the hardware side of
operations and have plugged many of Blogger's security short-fallings.
Although there has been some skepticism about the web company it's okay
to like, the majority opinion of Google seems to remain positive.

There's not been a huge amount of discussion about all this on the lists
but, to be fair, we have not (yet) been given a huge variety of things
to talk about. All the same, most people have put their thoughts on
their sites, which seems to be far more sensible.


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BLOG POPULATION SMALLER THAN ESTIMATED?
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On UKB Discuss, there was some early discussion about one of the first
visible developments following the takeover - many abandoned Blogspot
sites have been taken out of service. In the UK, this would seem to be
about 30% of them. This number is interesting by correlation: during the
process of cleaning up the UK Blogs list, it seems that about 30% of UK
weblogs that were going last summer have now shut down.

It wouldn't be a wild assumption, therefore, that the estimated
blogosphere population figures that are thrown around could be an
overestimation by the same amount.

Obviously, at the same time, there's plenty of new weblogs turning up
every day - but they're exceptionally difficult for us to find out about
unless their authors turn up on the lists. Maybe someone at Google will
have the bright idea of creating a proper definitive weblog directory...


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ADVERTISING ON WEBLOGS
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With Dr Pepper stumbling into the world of weblogs (possibly misguided),
and the emergence of Project Blogger, the issue of advertising on
weblogs is raised again on UKB Discuss.

As highlighted by Tom of http://plasticbag.org/ there's an ethical
dilemma that seems to be ever more present: are webloggers responsible
to their visitors about what they display? Either way, people will need
to think about this more and more. Jon of http://curnow.org/ points out
that, while it not affect the author, it may well affect the audience.

Is it possible to maintain complete editorial independence *and* carry
advertising?


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