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The Terms weren't discussed, but it's estimated to be around 25 - 30 Million US. AOL is beefing up their interest in the Blogging industry with this acquisition of Weblogs Inc., which touts some of the top listed blog sites today such as Engadget and acquires more than 30 million visitors a month across the full portfolio. 

Here is an interesting quote:

“Though the audience for blogs is small, their audience is attractive to advertisers since users tend to be educated and have high incomes.”

How can you tap into this potential? Well shoot me an email and I may be able to help.

MSNBC is speculating that Apple may unveil a new ipod for video during their special announcement scheduled for Oct 12th. The BBC also backs this notion while Thinksecret seems to disagree so there are some conflicting reports.

What I can say is if they do unveil any portable device that can subscribe to RSS feeds and play multiple video formats, then they could really revolutionize videocasting as much as they have podcasting.

I know there was allot of hype around pspcasting a few months ago when I posted this article, but after a customer asked me yesterday “Did anything ever happen with that?”… in all honesty and as far as I can tell, nothing really. This may have been due to the way psp's require a proprietary video format to work with their handheld which requires a combination of bittorrent and a special conversion software to work properly so the complexity level wasn't all that user friendly.

If the iPod video is announced, the true explosion will happen if the device supports all video formats, and not just the apple .avi format. We'll see what happens, but with this announcement coinciding with the second annual Quicktime Live! event, I personally don't see allot of hope for cross-platform support.

This is a very interesting press release since it involves some ideas I have been bouncing around as of late.

Bob touched on this topic on his blog a few weeks back…

“All of these ideas and proposals have the same basic “Web 2.0” theme: Make it easier for computers to process the data on the web by publishing that data in formats which are easily parsed and manipulated.”

Instead of figuring out a way to accurately categorize the immense amount of data coming through from the unstructured chaotic blogosphere, why not try and get the publishers and the platforms they use to “pre-structure” it as a standard for all indexing services before it's referenced. Absolutely a brilliant strategy on the part of Pubsub, but one of many that will emerge since there is allot of room to play in this space.

Lately I have been thinking about ways to mine blog content for more relevance and context around queries. Being able to micro-divide content along verticals with a high level of accuracy would lead to a unique positioning in the market and IMHO ultimately create more demand and consumption of blog content by readers which benefits the entire food chain. 

Today, searching blog content allows you the ability to find data based on key words without context. Imagine being able to search not only for keywords, but keywords within reviews of hotels by people who stayed there (not just books or movies) , or further clustering of that search to differentiate between hotels in New York or hotels that have New York in their name. That is a tool I would use, and I know many, many others would too…

For more info on the Open source Structured Blogging initiative take a look here.