A lot of people ask me how I came to write for ReadWriteWeb. Before RWW I was basically completely unknown in the tech blogosphere. I was writing for a large political blog/news site (though I wasn't very well known in that realm either), and my personal blog had an RSS readership of about 10 people.

The first time Richard became aware of me was in January 2007 when I left a comment on a poll asking if AJAX was an RIA technology. To my surprise, Richard apparently liked my comment so much that he turned it into a full post. A few days later, I saw RWW feature writer Alex Iskold leave a comment on my personal blog and struck up an email conversation with him -- which I continued a month later when I sent him a congratulations note about the funding he landed for his company, AdaptiveBlue.

Toward the end of February, ReadWriteWeb wrote a post about OpenID that I thought I had a killer response to. So I wrote up my thoughts on my personal blog (sadly, that post has been lost to the ether) and emailed a link to Richard. After receiving a reply, I followed up with an offer to write some guest posts for RWW, saying that I'd been planning to write up a comparison of online IPTV providers. And that's exactly what I did -- my first post was published about 2 weeks later.

After a couple of more guest posts, all three of which landed on the front page of Digg, Richard invited me to hold down the fort while he was away at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in April 2007. I was still writing for that political site, but I thought -- who needs sleep for a week if it gets me a crack at writing for my favorite blog? After that first trial week, Richard hired me on a part time basis, and I worked both jobs until July 2007 when I joined RWW on a more full-time basis.

In the 15 months I have worked here I have learned a ton about blogging, made a lot of great friends, and met a lot of awesome people. ReadWriteWeb has been very good to me, and I'll certainly miss it. It was, however, time for a new chapter in my life. I'll still be blogging, but I'll be joining a new outfit. Where I'm headed isn't exactly a secret (I've told plenty of people), but I'll leave off saying here. If you're curious, I'll announce it soon on my personal blog, mockriot (a very occasionally updated tumblog).

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has read and commented on my work over the past year. It means a lot to me that anyone cares what I have to say and I hope to continue interacting with you at my new gig. ReadWriteWeb will remain my first daily read, and I want to extend my congratulations to Corvida and Frederic. Richard: You've assembled one hell of a team, and RWW rocks because of it!

Thanks again, everyone!

The reason it took Facebook so long to add search, said Malik, is that the company "wanted to take the time to make sure we built the right solution that would scale to support everyone using the site." MySpace recently adopted Google Gears to encourage users to search and sort their emails offline, which will almost certainly make the service easier to scale.

Image via Inside Facebook.

Facebook's Inbox is still a long way toward being a "Gmail-killer" -- or any other full email option killer, for that matter. Though the site does email full copies of messages -- a practice it began last December -- and though it lets users send messages to email addresses, it still lacks many of the "must have" features of an email client. Message organizing features, for example, are almost non-existent, as is the ability to reply to all recipients of a group message. There's also no way to reply to message sent from Facebook via an outside email client (i.e., the way you can reply to Basecamp message by replying to the notification email), nor is there a way to send messages to Facebook users from outside email clients (the latter is an effective type of spam control, however).

For some younger users, though, messages on sites like Facebook and MySpace have already supplanted email as the defacto method of asynchronous communication on the web. Our own Bernard Lunn argued last week that LinkedIn could do the same thing for him and Outlook by adding more robust messaging features. I've long argued that Facebook could transition into a network suitable for business, and better messaging capabilities is definitely a step in the right direction.

"Ameritocracy is an online community founded to level the playing field in political information by allowing any user to report, rate, and respond to brief quotes from politicians, the media, and other organizations," the site's Outreach Director, Bobby Kennedy III told us in an email. "Anyone can contribute content, and our reputation system encourages quality user participation while building an index of how reliable different information gatekeepers are."

In addition to rating quotes on credibility and relevance to the reader (because relevance is so subjective, that makes it the less useful of the two metrics), users can also post challenging or supporting statements. In that respect, Ameritocracy is something like a crowdsourced version of Annenberg's FactCheck.org. Users can also add context to quotes and discuss and debate quotes via a comment system.

According to the About page on the site, its goal is to "help people cut through the noise and gain quick access to the whole picture." When we asked Kennedy if taking quotes out of context really helped reveal the full picture or just presented an even more limited view, he told us that "whole picture" was probably not the best term to use to describe what the site does. "Our intent is that the short quotes, short user responses (Supporting, Challenging, and Adding Context), and the ratings make it far more efficient for people to get a broader view," he said. "The quote should be enough in-context that it captures the speaker's intent. If not, the community can flag the quote as being Out of Context, and the contributing user will take a reputation hit."

Ameritocracy is attempting to create a non-partisan community that keeps the focus on fact checking and credibility and not on political ideology. We like the idea of Ameritocracy. Giving people a way to rate the credibility of political information or statements and challenge facts publicly helps to level the playing field and keep politicians, organizations, and the media honest.

If you're interested in participating at Ameritocracy, you can sign up with the invite code "readwrite" -- there are 100 invites available on a first come, first serve basis.

Mobile video firm, Berggi, released Berggi Search, a mobile search application that lets users search Hakia's index via the API from mobile phones. Berggi is leveraging the part of the Hakia's API that lets developers lean on the company's search platform -- that, however, is not the part that really interests us.

What is more interesting are the XML feed calls that Hakia is offering that give access to their underlying NLP engine. Right now, only the "Summarizer" element is available. Summarizer, which Hakia says can be used to suggest tags or abstracts, analyzes and extracts meaning from large blocks of text or the contents of URLs. Other elements that are not yet available are Categorizer, which identifies "categorical phrases" in text, Characterizer, which "identifies and expands descriptive keywords or tags," and Text Meaning Representation.

Hakia has an XML testing form up on their Club Hakia page, and in our testing it seemed a little rough around the edges. Compared to our testing of Open Calais from Reuters (our coverage), the summaries and tags the XML testing form returned using the Summarizer element weren't very impressive. Mostly, it seemed to just return the headline or first sentence as the summary for articles we threw at it. And for RWW articles, Hakia Summarizer would suggest as tags the tags that we entered by hand in MovableType.

Hakia's Syndication Web Services are free for up to 30,000 requests per day for search services (unlimited free queries for Quotes and Cartoons), and free for up to 1,000 requests per day for XML feed calls. Have you had a chance to play with Hakia's new semantic API? If so, what did you think? How does it compare to Calais or Semantic Hacker? Let us know in the comments below.

Full Disclosure: Occasional ReadWriteWeb contributor Emre Sokullu is a technology evangelist at Hakia.

"It (high oil prices) may have a positive impact on the Internet," Cerf told a group yesterday in Seoul, South Korea. "We may turn increasingly to video conferencing or other kinds of electronic media in order to avoid having to travel."

Indeed, the demand for telecommuting is on the rise as a result of rising energy costs. While not all jobs can be done from home, one study found that if every worker in the United States who could telecommute -- 53% of white collar workers -- did so twice per week, 9.7 billion gallons of gas and $38.2 billion would be saved annually. Another recent study found that 37% of IT workers in the US would be willing to take a 10% pay cut if telecommuting were offered as an option -- 22% would take a pay cut to work form home in the UK. A bill requiring federal workers in the US who are eligible to work from home be allowed to at least 20% of the time recently passed in the House of Representatives and a similar bill is making its way through the Senate.

So how does that help the web? More home workers, means a larger market for applications designed to help remote workers collaborate. Things like Google Docs, Basecamp, Dimdim, and PalBee will all benefit from a larger contingent of home workers.

Do you work from home? Would you be willing to take a pay cut if you were given that option? Do you agree with Cerf, will the high cost of oil will force more people to work via the web rather than face to face? Let us know in the comments below.

Launched three years ago in May of 2005 as a politics-focused celebrity group blog, the Huffington Post has since grown up -- a lot. It added original reporting in November 2006, has taken $10 million in venture financing over 2 rounds, has expanded beyond politics to cover media, business, the environment, and other hot button issues, and is the most linked to blog on the web according to Technorati. Now HuffPo wants to taken on local newspapers.

That makes sense given that analysts have predicted that local ad spending will jump 48% this year to $12.6 billion. The majority of those ads will be search advertising, but clearly, local information is hot with consumers. We've written about the rise of hyperlocal information on ReadWriteWeb before -- Huffington and company are seeking to take advantage of this trend. They want to turn the Huffington Post into a national, virtual newspaper group -- think Gannett or McClatchy but completely online.

And that makes sense, too. A comScore study that we reported on in March revealed that 38% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 are unlikely to read a physical newspaper during a typical week, but non-news readers are still voracious consumers of news. They just get their news online -- and not just from traditional newspaper sites.

"Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier than average news consumers - they just prefer to consume it in a digital format," said comScore executive vice president Jack Flanagan. "That they are receptive to print, TV, and Internet news brands indicates a broad opportunity online, but the brands that will ultimately win over these key news consumers are the ones that successfully integrate cutting edge digital content with high quality journalism." Clearly, that is a message that HuffPo gets -- their tag line is "The Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community," and Arianna Huffington said last night that much of their venture funding will go toward building out a team of reporters. Last year they hired BBC reporter Elinor Shields to become the sites managing editor.

However, the Huffington Post is an edited aggregator -- a team of editors oversees the site and specifically decides what links get space on the sites, writes headlines by hand, selects images, etc. Last year I wrote for a competitor to the Huffington Post in the political news blogosphere, and from first hand experience I can tell you that it is hard work to gather and post news links and manage original and wire content. It will be interesting to see if HuffPo will be able to scale their local strategy to compete with automated local news aggregators like Outsite.in and YourStreet (our coverage).

Image credit: jdlasica

The VeriSign report didn't break down domain numbers, but the running total from Germany's DENIC shows that China's .cn domain has about 11.8 million active registrations -- good enough for 3rd place and 230,000 more than fourth place .net domains. Germany's .de extension is in second place, about a quarter million registrations ahead of China, and the grand daddy of all domain extensions, .com, is comfortably in first place with 76.5 million domain registrations.

It's not surprising that China's web site ecosystem is seeing such huge growth -- their Internet user population is as well. In February, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information reported that the country had 221 million Internet users, which means that it has effectively passed the United States as the world's largest net population. And there's still a lot of room to grow -- China only has about 16% of its population on the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, compared to 71.4% of Americans who are online.

In our 2008 web predictions, Richard MacManus predicted that this would be a break out year for China on the Internet. "The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won't happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia (China, Japan, Korea)," wrote MacManus. "At least one startup from China will break through in the US market with Twitter-like success in 2008 - and it will almost certainly be a Mobile Web app."

We haven't had a Twitter-like success come out of China year (it's still early in 2008, though), but China is definitely experiencing a web boom. Doing business in China, however, can be very tricky. Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, a company that has had a tough go in China, said that doing business in other countries was difficult because of legal "gray areas." Google has also taken heat for cooperating with Chinese censors.

You can watch the live count as it streams in from Mozilla's raw server logs, and according to the download day page, the majority of downloads have come from the US. Despite some hiccups yesterday, Firefox had no problem setting the record (though no one really seems to know if there was any old mark to break -- so anything might have been a record with Guinness watching).

Net Applications has been tracking the uptake of Firefox 3 since yesterday morning, and it is now at around 4.5% -- not bad for its first 24 hours. Firefox on the whole is closing in on 20% market share and is higher among tech savvy crowds (over 50% on this blog, for example). That 4.5% of Firefox web browser users are already using version 3 indicates that about 25% of its user base has upgraded overnight -- that's very impressive.

If you're still on the fence about upgrading, check out the pair of great overviews of FF3 from Lifehacker here and here.

Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Let us know in the comments and vote in our poll below.

The code is available at an official Trac page and is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License, which means that anyone running the code must publish changes publicly, but that the software is free for commercial use. Some of Reddit's code is not being made public, mostly stuff that deals with anti-spam and anti-cheating algorithms, according to Reddit.

"Since reddit's beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open," said the announcement blog post. "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we're finally giving back to the community that has given us so much."

It makes sense for Reddit, which has grown because of very passionate and technically savvy community, might go this route. Open sourcing Reddit's code will very likely lead to a stronger product and tighter community, and not to the birth of strong competitors. Anyone who wants to create niche Reddits on topics that the site doesn't adequately cover is now free to do so, however.

Reddit is written in Python. An explanatory video from the company is below.

According to Jama, the average cost-per-click and cost-per-lead for Google AdWords -- which was eating up 80% of their monthly marketing budget -- was 2-3x their target despite their best optimization efforts. So in short, Google wasn't providing the ROI they were after.

"So, we had an idea. We had been sponsoring Kiva.org for the past few months as an organization we really admire and believe in - they're the online micro-lending site that helps entrepreneurs in the developing world. And, we wanted to figure out a way to funnel the dollars we were sending to Google ads over to Kiva loans," wrote Jama's Director of Customer Outreach & Marketing, John Simpson in a blog post today.

The idea is the same as the original "You try. We give." program. Jama is hoping that press coverage of their unusual marketing plan (such as this), as well as word of mouth, will send as much traffic -- perhaps higher quality traffic -- as Google AdWords. And because Kiva loans are theoretically repaid (currently 97.97% of the time), any traffic Jama receives via this experiment is bound to end up being a lot cheaper, and perhaps even free.

"In the pursuit of growing our own business, we decided we'd much rather help a small store owner in Uganda feed her village than support the Google billionaires' hobby of flying to space," said Eric Winquist, CEO and founder of Jama Software in an emailed press release. Simpson told us he's excited to see if innovative social marketing tactics can out perform traditional search marketing.

"This program just gives people an added incentive to try our product versus the traditional enterprise tools from IBM and Telelogic, or to pass it along to a colleague or friend," Simpson told ReadWriteWeb in an email. "We're going up against 'the institutional big blue' so we differentiate ourselves by being a company with personality and more of a personal touch - we could never outspend them. The Kiva programs serves as a positive first impression and it illustrates our commitment as a company to giving back, whether big or small."

According to Simpson, eventually Jama might supplement their social public relations strategy with more traditional ad buys from Google or elsewhere. Once loans start being repaid, Jama could theoretically put last month's ad budget toward traditional advertising while this month's ad budget is being used to fund a microloan in the developing world.

Kiva co-founder and chief marketing officer Jessica Jackley Flannery was overjoyed by Jama's decision to choose Kiva over AdWords. "We're thrilled when a company like Jama Software develops an innovative program that supports both our global mission at Kiva and their own goals. It's such a simple concept, but that's the beauty of it," she said. We tend to agree, and we wish Jama the best in their efforts, and luck to anyone who receives loans via Kiva.

Since it seems likely that regular people don't read blogs (at least not, er, regularly), the market for a dedicated blog search engine is possibly a very small one. Even Google buries their Blog Search option way down in the "More" drop down menu on their site.

However, blogs are still big business. While most "regular" people might not be avid blog readers, they still read them passively when encountering blog content via links from mainstream sources, links in emails, or search results. All that adds up to a lot of monetizable, niche traffic. That's where Technorati is hoping to score big. The company says that it "collects, organizes, highlights, and distributes the online global conversation," which is short hand for, "we have a lot of data on who's saying what about what."

This morning I talked to Alan Levy, CEO of BlogTalkRadio, which has been an early beta tester of the new Technorati Media ad network. Levy had nothing but nice things to say about Technorati. "There's no doubt that major brands want to be part of the conversation with the blogosphere," Levy told me, and Technorati has a reputation as a company that understands that conversation. Blogs are conversational in nature, Levy said, and the long tail network that Technorati is assembling will allow brands to be part of that via very targeted advertising.

Appealing to the long tail is a smart play for Technorati. As we wrote last November, there's no money in the long tail, but there is plenty to be made on the long tail because there is volume there. That's essentially how AdSense works -- sell targeted ads to specific niches across a huge inventory assembled from low traffic sites. If Technorati, which sells on a CPM basis and is willing to negotiate the revenue split with blogs -- something Google won't do except with its largest publishers -- can out perform AdSense for long tail bloggers, they'll have a real winner on their hands.

One third of the world's largest banks are planning to launch mobile services in the next 1-2 years, according to a February 2008 survey. In the US, 53% of banks plan mobile services roll outs over the next two years. And it's easy to see why. The Pew Internet & American Life Project Online Shopping report (PDF) from February found that 39% of Americans are doing their banking on the Internet, and analysts predict that mobile banking will grow to 884 million users worldwide by 2012.

With mobile usage on the rise one major US bank launched a suite of mobile banking services last year. A year later, Bank of America's mobile site has a million unique active user accounts. On peak days, Bank of America sees 100,000 users sign into its mobile services, with more use coming from mobile-savvy city dwellers (where cellular data and wifi coverage are generally better). 80% of the bank's mobile users are under the age of 45, and Bank of America reports that 2/3rds of users are under the age of 35.

Not surprisingly, the most popular devices are smart phones like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile-based phones. With some analysts expecting iPhone sales to triple this holiday season, we're likely to see the up trend in online banking continue. Where do you do your banking? Let us know in the comments.

The newsroom site runs off of Wordpress, and it's being used to push out press releases, media, and information about shelters. The Red Cross is using Utterz to post audio reports from the field, Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos, as well as a Slide-powered slideshow widget that allows anyone to upload photos of disaster areas. The site also features a Google Maps mashup that depicts the surprisingly large number of relief operations currently being run by the American Red Cross (hint: click the "view larger map" link, because viewing the informative popups inside the widget on site is next to impossible).

That the Red Cross is using social media sharing sites like Utterz, Flickr, and YouTube (they even have a Twitter account) is not surprising. We reported in April on a study that appeared in New Scientist magazine that found that social media sites, blogs, and instant messaging services are better at connecting people and providing warnings during emergencies than traditional sources of such information.

During last fall's California wildfires, for example, the best source of breaking information was a combination of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, and other tools of citizen journalists. As the fires continued to rage out of control, media poured into CNN's i-Report section, which collects user submitted news photos and videos, and the value of citizen journalism became so apparent that the company eventually spun i-Report off as a standalone web site.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Last spring, when tragedy struck Virginia Tech University, the "I'm ok at VT" group on Facebook famously connected students with families and friends. Hundreds of other support groups, blogs, and web site sprung up on social networking sites and around the web as a way to connect students and help them through troubling times. The Red Cross operates a similar site for connecting disaster survivors with friends and family.

From disaster relief and other non-governmental organizations to citizen journalists and the mainstream media, web 2.0 and mobile technology is being used to connect, inform, and mobilize people during disasters.

Novels written and delivered on cell phones have been a huge fad in Japan, with 5 of the 10 bestselling novels of 2007 in the island nation originally composed on cell phones. My critique of the trend last December drew the ire of many commenters here, who accused me of being antediluvian for saying that the idea of cell phone novels "made me wince."

Having read some of the stories on Quillpill my initial assessment may have been a bit harsh. While Pulitzer material they are not, many of these are not as bad as the images that the term "cell phone novel" evokes. Quillpill writers have so far found a way to embrace the 140 character constraint without resorting to emoticons and chat acronyms, even if punctuation and grammar in some of the stories leaves something to be desired.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about a competition that challenged people to write an entire story in just 140 characters. "Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation," said Copyblogger's Brian Clark in introducing the contest, and the results were quite awesome. Quillpill expands on the idea that constraints have the potential to lead to more creative and innovative output. While I still cringe at calling anything written in this manner a novel -- even if it is of novel length -- and I'd certainly not care to read a novel on my phone, I have changed my mind on the potential for the cell phone as a creative writing medium.

Beyond making C-SPAN-like unfiltered material more sexy, the Internet is also getting more people involved. The Pew study found that 5% of Americans have posted their own political commentary to newsgroups, discussion boards, or blogs, a figure that grows to 12% when looking at the 18-29 year old set, which indicates that the web as a major factor in politics is a trend that is likely to continue.

That young votes are more likely to be involved with politics online is an advantage for Democrats, because young voters tend to lean toward presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, according to Pew. Obama's supporters are more web savvy than those of his competitors, and even though the study found that just 6% of American's have given to a presidential campaign via the web, Barack Obama's record haul owes a far greater percentage to online contributions. Just 2% of Americans gave online during the last presidential election. Given the increased web involvement of the millennial generation, we can probably expect 2012 to be another record setting cycle in terms of online involvement and fundraising.

However, is all this information gathering shifting online a good thing? Americans aren't so sure. While 22% of Americans say that they wouldn't even be involved with a campaign in any way if not for the Internet, 35% feel that the web magnifies the most extreme voices, which can "drown out average people's views." And a majority of Americans surveyed feel that the web is full of propaganda and misinformation that too many people believe.

We noted last week that the echo chamber effect of the blogosphere has a way of making rumors go wild and have far-reaching consequences outside of the web. That said, it is exciting that such a large percentage of Americans are now using the web to seek primary sources that were previously unavailable or hard to attain. Whereas in the past people had to rely on information filtered by reporters, now voters are able to use the web to find videos, transcripts and position papers to see the quotes in context, so to speak -- and then offer their own opinions back to fellow voters. That has to be a net positive.

According to Computer World, eBay has 700,000 merchants who subscribe to their Selling Manager, and 70,000 developers currently working with their API. eBay's senior director of mobile platform and disruptive innovation, Max Mancini, described Project Echo as taking the company's app development platform to the "next level."

But what we've heard from sellers over the past couple of weeks doesn't lead us to believe that fancier selling tools will be enough to keep many of them on the site. What has sellers leaving the site is changes in policy that many sellers feel have negatively affected their ability to sell on the site, or unfairly given preferential treatment to corporate partners.

eBay has appeared to be taking steps over the past six months to transition the company toward an emphasis on fixed price selling over their traditional auction format. If sellers really are leaving the site, that spells trouble for eBay, where fewer seller options, no organized product reviews, and no "Amazon option" that offers free shipping means eBay will face difficulty attempting to compete seriously in the fixed price market.

While better integration of seller tools will certainly be a welcome change for many sellers, it by no means fixes the potentially major problem eBay is facing: the rift that has developed between management and top sellers on the site.

For my part, I use a mixture of Google Blog Search and Technorati. In my opinion, Technorati tends to be better at finding recent blog posts, and the organization of results makes it easier to find things most recently written. Plus, their blog weighting helps when you want to find posts specifically written by known voices in the online community. Google, on the other hand, offers the convenience of being able to almost seamlessly switch between blog, web, and news search -- something that can be very helpful when researching a post.

Vote in our poll below and let us know your thoughts about Technorati's relevance in the comments below.

Year over year, the number of auction listings at eBay are up according to independent tracking firm MedVed.net. But there is evidence that the listings numbers over the past month or two are being artificially boosted by eBay's recent partnership with Buy.com.

Buy.com, a traditional fixed-price online retailer in the vein of Amazon, signed a listing deal with eBay in May. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Buy.com is generally listing around 500,000 items on the site at once -- or are they? Sellers on eBay's forums discovered that a number of the company's listings appear to be empty.

The listings appear in searches labeled as just "NEW." Clicking through displays listings pages that inform users they are bidding on "a brand new item," with no indication of what that item actually is.

This is important for two reasons. First, because it means that Buy.com is being given preferential treatment over individual sellers -- who would not be allowed to create empty listings to flood category search results with their brand. Sellers in the areas were Buy.com sells are feeling increasing competitive pressure -- and this indicates that the playing field is not level. As the auction-watching blog AuctionBytes indicates, that goes against what former eBay CEO Meg Whitman promised sellers.

The second reason this matters is that the number of new listings on the site is a key metric that eBay reports to shareholders in their financial reports. If those numbers are being artificially inflated with empty listings it could indicate that information being fed to investors is not accurate.

Nancy Scola over at TechPresident, on the other hand, disagrees. Scola thinks that the Obama campaign simply decided that a fun-to-read campaign blog isn't a great use of resources. And she might be right -- how many people really read blogs, anyway?

While it would be easy to look at McCain's blog as a runaway success because the posts routinely have thousands of comments (Obama's posts get hundreds of comments each, but the blog has a higher post volume), there is likely more to it than meets the eye.

A Harris Poll from earlier this year found that 56% of Americans never read political blogs, and just 22% read them several times per month or more. Interestingly, those over the age of 63 were the most likely to be readers of political blogs -- just 17-19% of Gen X and Gen Y (called "echo boomers" in the Harris Poll report) read political blogs.

That certainly explains why Obama has eschewed building a conversational blog while McCain has hired a well-known and experienced blogger -- Obama appeals to the specific demographic that doesn't read political blogs, while McCain appeals to the demographic more likely to subscribe to them. But could that speak to a larger trend in the blogosphere as a whole?

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any recent polling data on how many people are reading blogs. In 2005, comScore found that about 30% of American Internet users read blogs (PDF), though their study didn't really delve into how often people were reading blogs. Is that 30% who read them every day? Or 30% who have visited a blog in the past year? The study doesn't make that clear. Very likely, things have changed since 2005 -- when the comScore report was published, for example, TechCrunch -- now one of the world's largest blogs -- was only 2 months old.

However, if the Harris Poll data is at all representative of the mainstream public's reading habits toward blogs in general, things don't look particularly rosy. The Harris Poll found that of those who visit at least one political blog at least one time each week, 76% read under four of them -- a third read just one. So even though blog readership may be up, people are reading only a small number of blogs on a regular basis.

Further, 69% of political blog readers don't comment on blogs. That indicates that those thousands of comments on McCain's blog are coming from a small subset of political junkies who closely track the political blogosphere. And that makes sense anecdotally. I have a number of friends who are political and tech junkies and consume tens or hundreds of blogs daily and comment on them regularly. But I have an even greater number of friends who are average, mainstream web users. They may read blogs once in awhile -- but generally only in topics they are very interested in (i.e., even though they might be casually interested in politics, and read political news that pops up on their MyYahoo! page, or watch it on TV, they'd never think to read DailyKos or Little Green Footballs unless specifically pointed there).

Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Sarah Perez has observed the same thing with her friends, who might occasionally read an industry blog or visit ICanHasCheezBurger, but generally don't regularly consume blogs every day. So really, just how mainstream are blogs? If avid blog readers tend to be those who are deeply passionate about a subject, and if most of the mainstream's interactions with blogs are on a limited basis, it could be that blog reading is still a very niche activity. What do you see anecdotally from your non-geek friends? Do you know of any recent studies into blog readership that we've overlooked? Let us know in the comments.

Image via factoryjoe.

Update: Yahoo! and Google have indeed announced a partnership in the form of a non-exclusive deal allowing Yahoo! to run Google advertising alongside search results. The press release is here.

The clumsy $44 billion mating dance that began in February between Microsoft and Yahoo! officially came to an end today. Yahoo! and Microsoft each issued statements saying that talks had been concluded, though Microsoft left the door open for non-outright-acquisition partnerships. Meanwhile, multiple sources are reporting that Yahoo! and Google are set to announce some sort of search deal, perhaps as early as today. So what's next for both companies?

Yahoo!

Yahoo!'s stock sank 10% on the news that the Microsoft deal was definitely off the table. And the company reportedly lost three key employees today as well. Usama Fayyad, the Executive Vice President of Research, Technology Evangelist and key open source advocate Jeremy Zawodny, and EVP of the Network Division Jeff Weiner are all supposedly planning leave the company. Definitely not a good day for Yahoo!

Plan B prospects don't look great for the Sunnyvale, CA-based company. The brightest alternative is the prospect of a search outsourcing deal with Google. That deal, if it happens, could take any number of forms -- Google takes control of all Yahoo! search marketing, Google takes control of a portion of search marketing, Yahoo! open sources their search marketing allowing both Google and Microsoft to sell on their inventory, etc.

Given that Microsoft left the door open to an "alternative transaction," which we have speculated may be the acquisition of Yahoo!'s search business, it might be unlikely that a Google-Yahoo! deal would shut Microsoft out completely.

The dissolution of the Yahoo!-Microsoft acquisition talks also means more pressure is put on Yahoo!'s in house efforts to bolster their search business -- which slipped again last month -- such as SearchMonkey (our coverage) and Panama (our coverage). Last summer we wrote that the path to fixing Yahoo! started with a developer platform -- that's the direction they are headed with SearchMonkey. Without Microsoft, they have a lot riding on its success.

Microsoft

Microsoft has more options than Yahoo! Without Yahoo!, making a dent in Google's dominant search market share seems even more implausible, but the company can do other things to shake up their web business. We suggested a detail plan B in February that would have Microsoft "split up the search advertising atom" and basically open source their web marketing business. By breaking advertising up into inventory, placement, and parameters and allowing anyone to sell over this open model, we predicted that Microsoft could potentially make a huge impact on Google's web advertising dominance.

"Let Google be the search giant. Instead, focus on shaking up the advertising industry by pushing it toward a democratized structure, make it work for everyone, and weaken Google's business model," we wrote.

We've also suggested that Microsoft could put search on Facebook. "There are two ways people find information on the Internet: via search (which Google is great at), and via their friends (which Facebook is great at). The former we also know how to monetize. If Facebook can get good at search, it could stand to make a lot of money for whoever it partners with for that -- the logical choice being Microsoft," we wrote last month. Microsoft might even consider buying Facebook as an alternative to Yahoo!

Of course, not buying Yahoo! (or Facebook) would free up a ton of cash for Microsoft to do what it said it would last October: start investing heavily in small, web 2.0 start ups. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company would buy 20 companies per year ranging from $50 million to $1 billion for the next five years (likely they can acquire a lot of great technology for even less than that).

Our advice: invest heavily in mobile. If you can't beat Apple in the handset or software market, at least make a move to become the dominant content and advertising provider on the mobile web and beat Google to it.

What do you think are Microsoft and Yahoo!'s next moves? Let us know in the comments below.