TechScape

Blogging's taking over the world, right? Read a lot of media coverage, and you might think that every man, woman and stick insect in the Western world has a blog on the go, if not several. But that's not true. Is your mum blogging? Your grandad? Your technophobe best mate? Quite possibly not.Six Apart wants to change that. The company is already powering a good chunk of the blogosphere, seeing as it owns the LiveJournal, TypePad and Movable Type blogging platforms. And now it's beta-launched Vox, a blogging platform that throws in MySpace-esque social networking elements.

You have a virtual 'neighbourhood' of friends and family, and can restrict your posts to be read by some or all of them, or the wider Vox community. It also ties in neatly with the likes of Flickr and YouTube so you can import your own or other people's content.

"Join our happy hivemind," invites the homepage of Cambrian House.
"We're growing a collective to help decide the fate of sticky ideas.
Resistance is - oh, you know."This is open-source software,
Jim, but not as we know it. It's got a sense of humour, for a start. Cambrian House is the company behind 'crowdsourcing'. In a nutshell, this involves soliciting cool software ideas, getting its community to vote on which are the best, then getting a collective of developers to actually build them, before sharing out any profits.

So far, Cambrian House has launched two market tests, with another to follow that's the coolest Web 2.0 idea Tech Digest has heard in a long time. More of that later. I talked to the company's MD Michael J. Sikorsky to find out more.
"We share the rewards, but also share the risk," says Sikorsky. "If a project does well,
people will be phenomenally overpaid, but if it doesn't do well,
they'll be phenomenally underpaid!"

I've seen the future, and it's monkeys reading the news. Honest. I saw it on FreeBeTV, a new mobile TV service from ROK which launched last week. Monkey News Network (MNN for short) is one of the five launch channels on the service – the others have less monkeys but more extreme sports, comedy, cartoons and movies.It capped a busy period for ROK, which launched its Viper mobile Voice-over-IP service the week before, taking aim at operator call charges by allowing people to make internet calls if they're in range of a computer with Bluetooth.

ROK's marketing director Bruce Renny has plenty to say on both subjects, so I'm splitting the interview into two parts. Today deals with the mobile TV side, while on Friday I'll follow up with the VoIP area.

Relationships, eh? When they start, it's about establishing a connection and getting on well. But at some point, they always become more about money. Which is an only slightly contrived way of introducing Weblo, a new virtual world where the networking is more financial than social.Members can buy and sell property and virtual domain names, as well as become the online publicity manager for a celebrity of their choice. All this based on real-world assets too, from buildings to celebs, while the domain names are the sames as ones owned out on the 'real' Web.

Confused? Founder Rocky Mirza says the service is already a roaring success, having launched last week. I asked him what Weblo is aiming to do, why he thinks it'll be a success, and whether there are legal issues around creating and selling virtual versions of real-world places and celebrities.

When researching my post last week on mobile social networking, I canvassed several industry bigwigs to get their views on how well the likes of MySpace and Bebo would translate to mobile. Helpfully, Gmail chose to file the response from Angel Gambino, VP of commercial strategy and digital media at MTV Networks UK & Ireland, in the spam folder. It's not as if she mentioned viagra or offered to transfer a huge sum of money from a deposed dicator into my account either.Anyway, her answers are interesting, so I wanted to put them up. MTV recently launched its own user-generated service, MTV Flux, so the company has a direct interest in the evolution of social networking, including its transition to mobile. Read on to see what Angel had to say.

How well will sites like MySpace, Bebo etc transfer to mobile?

Social networking is primarily about communicating, so social networking translates well to mobile. Communication is still the primary use of mobile handsets. Mobile is also a highly personal screen, so the personalisation and self-expression common to many social networking sites is a natural fit with mobile as well. Whether these brands can maintain their current growth or can translate their growth trajectory in mobile is an entirely different matter.

The simplicity of Bebo is a great driver of its success. However, people who use Bebo are very young. Our research indicates that audiences of their demographic prefer free services. Bebo is free for now, but unless they are effective at working with mobile network operators and aggregators to create better bundled lower tariff services this demographic may not be as attracted to Bebo on mobile as it may be viewed as too expensive.

idiomag is the point where the Web 2.0 and print publishing worlds collide. It describes itself as "a virtual magazine personalised to your interests", which you might think was just a website. Instead, it really is a virtual magazine, complete with proper page-turning, adverts and a sticky bit on the front where the free CD fell off. Oh alright, maybe not that last one.Anyway, the big deal about idio is that you personalise it to your specific interests, telling it what subjects you're interested in, ensuring that when you load up the digital mag, it's just got articles that, in theory, you want to read. It's currently in its beta stage, focusing on digital design and music."It really came out of my personal experience," says founder Edward Barrow. "I'd find I wanted to buy four or five different magazines, but only wanted a few parts from each of those. So why should I buy them all?"