Check out this site build with BuddyPress. I was reading this recently and had no idea it was using WordPress. It doesn’t look like a blog. That is the idea.

http://tdi.vw.com/leaderboard/

Didn’t know that WordPress.com hosted blog sites for CNN and People Magazine.

Looks good. I am upgrading now. Hope nothing gets killed.

Now there is plugin Twitter Updater will let you automatically update your Twitter.com status with your most recent blog post. There are a few options to how the display will look when it updates. Neat that it uses tiny url to shorten link to your blog post.

First a drag and drop UI builder, access to all OS X services, and extensive debugging and performance monitoring. The really big news is the free distribution via AppStore, a iPhone service that will allow WIFI or cell network download and install of new apps. Can you say instant gratification? Developer can charge any price and Apples handles all e-commerce and delivery for 30% fee. If price is free than there are no charges for developer or user. What company do you know will deliver your software for free? iPhone will also also auto-notify if is there is an update available.

This distribution model is a winner. Most software nowadays is given away and money made on premium versions, advertising or support services. Apple now has the hottest mobile platform by far.

We are going to see an absolute explosion of apps. Which will drive more iPhone sales leading to more apps etc.

Technorati Tags: iPhone SDK

New facts:

Yes, there were 9 million, but how many of them were active? Probably only a fraction. In early 2008, says Technorati Chairman David Sifry, the search company indexes 112 million blogs, with 120,000 new ones popping up each day. But only 11% of these blogs, he says, have posted within the past two months. That means the active universe is closer to 13 million blogs. Kevin Burton, CEO of FeedBlog, argues that the number should be lower, from 2 million to 4 million blogs.

Factoring in inactive one and 99% that are spam blogs still leaves 40 legitimate new blogs a day.

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

Sitting in his office at Edelman PR (he switched jobs in 2006) overlooking Times Square, Steve Rubel says that blogs have turned out to be less important for companies than he anticipated. “Outside of tech,” he says, “big companies didn’t jump in. They viewed the blog audience as niche. They weren’t ready to be open, transparent, and loose.” For advertising, he says companies are more drawn to social networks, where they have the potential to reach millions of customers. (We should stress that social networks, a megatrend in media, is not even mentioned in this 2005 story. The emergence of Facebook, MySpace, and others is one reason we should take “blogs” out of the headline.) In fact, it’s worth mentioning that Rubel doesn’t blog nearly as much as he used to. He regards blogs as just a piece of his communications arsenal. He uses it for longer pieces. For the short stuff, he sends out bursts of thought and links to what he’s seeing and reading on Twitter, a microblogging technology.

Google entered the industry in summer 2006. But more meaningful than its stand-alone blog search was its growing ability to incorporate blog posts with Web search. Google is helping to erase the distinction between blogs and the rest of the Web. In doing so, it extends its dominance.

Blogs have become a staple of mainstream media. BusinessWeek has 20 of them. Publications of all sizes mix blog posts with other news, both online and in print. We’re getting bloggier. And more and more publications are subscribing to services that link to related content. These links steer readers away from the media sites, which would have seemed unthinkable until recently for mainstream publishers. Why do it now? Because if sites provide interesting links, the thinking goes, readers will return. One telling example: The New York Times runs Blogrunner.com, a site that aggregates everything from Times articles to blog posts. Still, big media is not dominating blogs or social media by any stretch. No one is. At the same time, certain blogs are turning into influential and lucrative media businesses.

Blogs are also a good tool to stretch a publication’s content and expertise, to provide different angles on stories, and to venture into new forms of media. In a sense, blogs and related social media provide laboratories for experimentation, new products, and, above all, new relationships with readers and viewers.

I think this portends a merging of blogs and other social media sites. It is just a matter of time before the OpenSocial platform is adopted by blog engines, like it is being added to Facebook and LinkedIn this year.

See the technology headlines in the middle column.

Blogrunner automatically monitors news articles and blog posts and tracks news events as they develop across the Web. Blogrunner alerts you to topics that are frequently linked to and commented upon. The publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors.

Nice to see blog feeds getting adopted at the highest level of journalism.

So try these gems:

Sexy Widget This blog is all about distributed web strategy. Cutting edge ideas.

Thoughts and Philosophies  Social Media and more.

Blognoggle  Feeds from Top 100 business blogs.

Copyblogger  How do you write the best blog copy; good ideas here.

Small Business Trends  Anita Campbell has been blogging on this topic since 2004.

Enjoy and let me know what you think of these. You can add your intersting blogs suggestions in the comments.