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.

Web 2.0 isn't just about groovy startups, y'know. The firms who rode the internet boom the first time around are coming out with their own attempts to keep pace with the user-generated content phenomenon.Services like Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo 360 combine blogging, social networking, and tight integration with these companies' other web tools. Mecca Ibrahim is in charge of Yahoo 360 in Europe, overseeing its launch in Germany, France and the UK, with Spain and Italy planned for next year.

"It's very hard to say whether it's more of a social networking product, a blogging product, or just a place to collect things that are important to you," she says. "We do see it as a central place within Yahoo where people can publish what's important to them, and share it with their friends and the wider community if they want to do that."

Another interesting partnership from CES was Nokia and Six Apart, after the handset maker agreed to preload SA's Vox Mobile application on its new N93i handset, and other Nseries phones going forward.

As a hardened Vox user, this is good news, but it makes me wonder what Nokia's approach to moblogging is from now on. Does this mean its focus has shifted away from its own Lifeblog application? Or will Nokia sign similar deals with other blogging companies, to have a suite of applications sitting on its handsets when users get them out of the box?

I'm a big fan of Vox Mobile, and the demo I saw of it running on the N93i last week was slick and effective. It'll be interesting to see how other blogging firms and handset manufacturers roll out similar partnerships in the coming months - Sony Ericsson already tied up with Blogger last year, but hasn't shouted about it much since then.

Bit late on this one, but if you were wondering what TechCrunch UK's Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher would do next after the messy demise of that blog, well, you don't have to wait any more. The pair have popped up at Vecosys, whose strapline is "Tracking Europe's Tech Venture Ecosystem". It's sure to be required reading for anyone wanting a European slant on this whole Web 2.0 malarkey.

Fascinating post over at The Next Net about how we'll be seeing a helluva lot more Web widgets in 2007:

"The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don't matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web."

Writer Erick Schonfeld also makes the point that widgets could herald the death of the page view as a measure of site popularity. Will advertisers be demanding to know site-owners' widget rating instead? Which should at least be entertaining if Jonathan Ross ever presents any new media industry awards...

Mobile social networking on both sides of the pond is dominated by MySpace and Windows Live Spaces, new research from Telephia has found. Brits uploading mobile phone content onto the web are most likely to use MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, and YouTube, while in America YouTube is replaced with the college students' favourite, Facebook.

Telephia's statistics, reported by Mobile Marketing Magazine, shows that 21% of British mobile social networkers are devoted to MySpace, 18% are enamoured with Windows Live Spaces, 9% are dedicated YouTubers, and a further 9% love Bebo. While PCs are still used to upload media onto the internet, Telephia points to the recent rise in mobile social networking as a sign that 2007 will be the year in which the medium begins to benefit from its staggering growth potential.

The majority of mobile social networkers are in their teens and early twenties, with twice as many UK mobile social networkers coming from the 15-17 age group as from the population as a whole.

In the US MySpace has effectively cornered the market in mobile social networking in the 15-17 market, with 69% of that age group using it as their primary host of photos and videos. Mobile social networkers as a whole also prefer to use MySpace, which was the top choice of 32% of mobile social networkers. Facebook has a 13% share, and Windows Live Spaces 11%.

Hurrah for January, the time when experts everywhere can make their predictions for the year ahead, safe in the knowledge that in 12 months time, they'll have been forgotten, ready for the next round of futuregazing.

Deloitte's Technology, Media and Telecoms industry group has just unveiled its predictions for 2007. The most relevant (to this blog at least) are:

The evolution of social networking. Including improvements in identification, and making it quicker and easier for services to remove copyrighted material quickly. I'm wondering if 2007 could also some lawsuits being flung around in this area, likely aimed at the few user-generated content services that are actually making money.

As more and more companies enter the emerging Mobile 2.0 space (I'm not sure if that term has caught on yet, or if someone can sue my arse for using it...) there's a pressing need for categorisation, to make it easier to figure out who's doing what, how they're doing it, and why they think it'll be bought by Google change the world.

Well, kudos to Rudy De Waele, who's created a wiki space for Mobile 2.0 companies. You can find it here, and there's already a bunch of pages up and running there. He's hoping companies will keep the site updated with news, pitches, presentations etc.

(via m-trends)

Sorry, didn't write this up on Friday. Emap Consumer Media has bought mobile firm Yospace for £8.7 million, plus up to a further £5.7 million depending on Yospace's operating performance in the next three years.

Yospace is the company behind 3 UK's See Me TV service, which lets users upload video clips from their cameraphones, and then get paid when other users download them. Emap hasn't said much about its plans for the company, other than it'll sit within its Emap Performance division.

Mobile blogging isn't going to be about text. Instead, it’s going to be about photos and video that you upload semi-automatically from your phone as you take them, with the bare minimum of words required. Of course, you might go in later and write some proper captions from your PC, but for the most part, moblogging will be visual. Which answers those questions about why anyone would blog from their phone.

That was certainly the message on the Motorola stand, where the company was showing off its mobile blogging application which basically makes it quick and easy to post pics and videos to a range of online file-sharing services. It’s nothing that the ShoZu application doesn’t do already, but since it’ll be on Motorola handsets out of the box, it’ll find a wide audience.