Chyrp is a very lightweight blogging engine, created by the same person and ideas that worked on the Lingua Project, as profiled in this blog in April last year. When a blogging engine initially was designed as a very lightweight application, it tend to support a specific group of users that want to personalize it as easily as possible. On the other hand, it also means it will be less room for a user to build something out of it and trying to make this blogging engine a fully functional content management system (CMS).

The first version of Chyrp was released in December last year. I found myself delayed in writing the review of this application because of the immature of its functionality. And after the version 1.0.3, the last stable release, I can see some of the bugs or problems have been addressed by Chyrp. Chyrp indeed can be considered as a post-project of Lingua, driven by PHP and MySQL and the additional capability of Ajax. As I look at the availability of extensions in Chyrp community, there is a very small number of developers that currently working on improve the Chyrp engine. However, a differentiation advantage can arise if you compare this blogging engine with WordPress or Movable Type, both open source blogging engines, Chyrp seem to be relatively easy for beginners to maintain and they’re apparently headed in this direction.

PopShops is a new widget and store building service that is newly released in the market. As the service is optimized for bloggers that want to find new ways to monetize their site, we can expect PopShops widgets will be pervaded on the blogs that the bloggers want to make some pretty good money in cover the costs of server fee. If you are one of the regular readers at TagEdge, you’ll noticed that I’m a fan of widget, and I did some reviews on some of the widgets available on the Web. However, the available of this type of widgets really forcing me or other bloggers to think of their traditional ways of earning revenues, i.e. AdSense and Amazon in an entirely new way, and different channel. Of course, there is no answer as to which systems, the AdSense, Amazon, or the affiliate produces the highest income for the bloggers.

Apparently, PopShops is sounds attractive to the bloggers or Web site holders in the sense that they have more than 17 million of affiliate catalogs, as reported on their landing page. Easy installation, i.e. 3 steps (pick, click, pop). Easy to use, just copy and paste the code into a blog or Web site. Plug-in are available for TypePad and Blogger accounts at the time of writing. The beautiful part is the Affiliates keep 100% of their commissions: basic service is free and then there are two additional subscription levels. PopShops is currently associated with some other well-known affiliate advertisement networks such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and ShareASale, but I wonder whether they will build their own affiliate network in the near future. But my sense is that, in spite of the huge number of widgets available on the Web, this startup has done the ordinary affiliate system in a totally different way.

PopShops is built on the Ruby on Rails platform and it leverages the latest AJAX technologies with a major focus on usability. Competitors in this field include Tumri, Teracent and Wize Typepad Widget.

Update July 31, 2007: PopShops has over 20 million of affiliate products.

I’ve been tracking a new blogging engine, Lingua Project which powered by PHP, MySQL, and Ajax. If you really would like to know what a Lingua is all about, you can visit their official blog, that run with the Lingua software, i.e. version 0.1 Alpha. Their developers are completing some coding practices with respect to spam protection, such as the integration with Akismet software, default theme redesign, and improving its existing administration control panel. In other words, Lingua software still not completed yet, as you can see the progress on this Development Web page.

Lingua Project is found by Alex Suraci; (his home page is temporarily unavailable at the time of writing). In the recent years, the competition for blogging softwares is also intensified over the past few years. For a new player such as Lingua to stand out of the crowd, what they can do is developing the enhanced features of flexibility. Flexibility is critical for a newly released software. Thus, they planned to develop a WordPress importer, that allowed users of WordPress easily switch their blogs to this software. Also, I believe they need to find at least a few Web hosting companies that want to be their partners in offering a one-click install service for the users that want their blogs host under this engine.

I just came across an interesting and thoughtful article that entitled, “Microsoft is Dead.” From the article, the author has discussed when and why he realized that Microsoft was dead and he goes on talk about the 4 reasons, which are Google, Ajax, Broadband Internet, and Apple that caused Microsoft lost the dominant position in the market. The author further claimed that everyone can see the desktop is over, Web applications can work like a desktop software, and etc.

From the author’s point of view, its true and I also believe Microsoft has observed and predicted a new wave of software development has loomed. Some of the Internet companies such as Google, and many of the well-established Web 2.0 sites were now hailed as the “leaders of the Internet.” However, maybe the bureaucratic system (Microsoft is too big to implement change), or cultural issues, or even their deep confidence on the desktop softwares that caused them still far lag behind in the technology field especially in the Internet arena. Ironically, more and more of the programmers and developers were not using Microsoft’s operating system, tools and technology. Yet we can’t concluded Microsoft was dead, especially the size, in terms of financial, patents, and the talent pool they got in hands. Microsoft is consider dead when fail to switching their role from a successful desktop software leader into a company that could survive on the Web for many years to come.