BusinessWeek runs a story about tagging, especially covering the new way to use del.icio.us — a social bookmark service — to monitor the level of buzz generated online after an event.

Wiredset is on the leading edge. It’s developing a service for record labels that pulls together a variety of online data — sales on Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ), number of blog posts, tags on del.icio.us. The idea? Allow labels to see, in real time, the impact of their marketing. If Sony BMG Music Entertainment releases an MP3 from the band Franz Ferdinand on MySpace, it can track the buzz. Or watch how an MTV video affects Amazon sales.

Tagging has been used to tag all kind of information for later retrieval, sort of an extended categorization system. But I don’t think many of Internet users are power users. I mean most of them are not savvy enough to use, or know if it exists and how it works.

If we are going to use such information to track buzz, I would suggest looking at the numbers more suspiciously. The numbers could mean one thing today and totally different a week or month later, across multiple industries.

To use this accurately, one has to know how the tagging user base represents a specific industry at that time. The release of new version of popular blog software will generate more buzz than the invention of new medicine to cure cancer, for example.

I think the reason is obvious.

Nevertheless, I am pumped up to see another good use of social tool like this. It seems to appear from every corner in a daily basis.

Link: Tagging - Keeping Tabs on the Net.

FeedBurner announces a new service called PingShot, which notifies aggregators, search engines, and directories about content updates as quickly as possible.

Much like Ping-O-Matic, it will ping a collection of services whenever there is new content, in this case in your feed.

First of all, PingShot is a service just for FeedBurner users. Basically you just turn that feature on (from the Publicize menu) and forget it. You can even customize which services to notify, including Technorati, MyYahoo, PubSub, Ping-O-Matic, NewsGator, Feedster, IceRocket, and Weblogs.com. Technorati and MyYahoo are turned on by default and I can’t turn it off.

It also supports podcast feed and automatically notify Odeo when such feed is detected. FeedBurner has built several mechanisms into PingShot that are designed to make it useless to blog spammers. FeedBurner receives submission for new services to participate.

Here is a notable feature:

Open Registry
PingShot presents aggregators, directories, and search engines with an open ping registry, so that any service can participate in this service, not just those that we know about or decide to include. Any third party that would like to be included as one of the notification options can submit their service name and ping interface to us, and we’ll go through a process here to validate that it’s functioning appropriately and then include it as an option. As we begin to manage more feeds around the world, there is simply no way that we’ll keep up on our own with language and geography-specific aggregators, search engines, etc. and an open registry hopefully addresses this.

So what’s make it different from Ping-O-Matic, pingoat or other similar services? If current service can do it, why reinvent the wheel? Won’t it be redundant if PingShot can be used to ping Ping-O-Matic too?

I think that for now, as PingShot is really new, it doesn’t provide much value in additional to existing services. If your weblog software allows you to configure it to notify Ping-O-Matic and others, then turning this feature on will only send the same information multiple times.

As more services join PingShot, I think I will like the control and all-in-one interface it provides.

Link: Burning Questions - FeedBurner weblog.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net posts on hig blog asking readers:

But in the mean time I thought it might be fun to have some discussion about blog networks and where people see the gaps in the market as being? What do you notice about existing blog networks? What is missing? What is being overdone? How would you go about starting a network?

There are many interesting comments pour in, of which I would like to add my point of view or twist if you will.

First of all, I think a Blog Network is just another creative idea and business model build upon content.

Obviously this is not the first time you’ve heard that content is the king on the Web. Quality content wins the heart of information seekers and prospects.

Blog Network differentiate from the crowd by inventing new model that will help a bunch of people who are good at one thing but lack on others. Sounds nothing new, because in fact this model has been used so commonly both in offline and online business.

Think about joint venture. People who are good at creating products work together with marketers to get their business out and increase their sales. Very simple and common joint venture but still compare both cases perfectly.

Not all blog networks adapt the same model, but I know some of them leverage the networking principles where a group of people can share their experience, outsource some of the work to focus on things they are good at and to certain extent share many other resources like recycled traffic.

If a blogger or writer is passionate about what he/she writes, blog network can help them do what they really like by outsourcing other concerns such as monetizing and promotion.

Like a typical web businesses, an individual blog is just another website which has the content readers demand. They don’t care about which blog belongs to which network, nor they should know about it.

What a blog can do is give out content and drive the visitors to its most wanted response. It can be as easy as clicking on AdSense ads, request more information, opt-in as a lead for pay per lead program, or click-through and purchase whatever products or affiliate programs.

A blog still has to go through the whole profitability research and adopt a business model before it can succeed. Like a typical website, there is always room for more. Exactly the same answer I would give if people ask me if it’s not too late to start or expand their current business on the web.

The key is to tap into less competitive niche markets, find out what gap they can fill in and satisfy the market’s needs.

Blog network can share the assets they currently have with others who want to be part of them. It really simplifies things for typical bloggers who are not web savvy enough to control an online business.

Link: Discussion at ProBlogger.

Since Google purchased Pyra Labs (the company that built Blogger) two and a half years ago, it has been promising to create a blog search engine since then.

Google’s product manager for blog search, Jason Goldman, says that Google’s Blog Search beta is not including news sources in blog search, except in rare cases to avoid overlap between Google News and the news service.

Users can search for linkbank to a particular blog domain by using the link: command.

Subscription to Atom or RSS feed is available too, which make it very useful to monitor specific blog index in the search engine.

One of the downside probably worth mentioning:

Although Google Blog search focuses primarily on content published to the blogosphere, it’s not a true full-text search across all sources, according to Goldman. This is because some publishers only syndicate excerpts of content via RSS. Google’s blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher’s web server.

Source: Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.
Link: Access the search engine at Google or Blogger.

Recently the topic about comment policy on blog has been discussed everywhere. It’s getting more attention after Aaron Wall sued for comments others left on his blog.

Many people argue about their free speech, of which I fully agree with Scoble:

Here’s a clue: you want free speech? Get your own blog. Comments are owned by the person who’s blog they are on. They aren’t a place you’re gonna get free speech (although, my policy here is to not delete any comment).

I HATE entitlement. That attitude has gotta go. You don’t have the right to take me down by posting illegal stuff or stuff that’ll get me sued or spam or really anything in my comment area.

Because it’s on my blog I’m responsible for it. It has my name associated with it. So, no, you TOTALLY don’t get what free speech is if you think you should have free and unfettered speech in everyone’s comment area. Get a clue about what free speech is.

Paul Short of Bloglogic adds his own blurb.

What’s my take on it? I personally have not deleted any comment other than what I categorize as spam. Visitors can write about anything as long as it adds value to the post instead of just blatantly promote their URL. This may or may not change in the future though.