A great news today for the users of WordPress.com, a blogging platform as the company behind it, Automattic is granting more online storage. 3G instead of 50MB will likely make their users happy about it and no doubt, for anyone who embark on blogging initiative, the revised offer of online storage size will make WordPress.com as the number one choice among other blogging platforms such as Blogger and TypePad. As mentioned on the WordPress.com’s news, you only get 1G on Blogger free account while if you want to get 3G of online storage on TypePad, you need to pay $300 in TypePad’s Premium package. Nevertheless, if a user feel that 3G is still not enough, she can upgrade to 5G for 20 credits (Credits cost $1 each), 15G for 50 credits and 25G for 90 credits. If you want to learn more about the upgrade plan, there is a help page on this issue.

I always believed the more space offered in any consumer-oriented blogging platform is good for both the users and the company that developed it. First, there are countless blogging platforms, such as Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, TypePad, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal, Xanga, and social networking platforms like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook also allowed users blogging on their accounts. In order to stand out of the competition, more online space seemed to be a simple strategy. Secondly, to encourage the existing bloggers or would-be bloggers to create compelling content without worry of the space requirements, blogging platform providers must thus increase the online space incrementally.

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 just came across the blogging software, Blogger had added some new features for their users. Polls page element will let users add their polls to their blogs’ sidebar. The question and the answers can be decided by the blog owner for the voting purpose. The other one is the enclosure links that could turn the Blogger’s blog into a podcast. The up coming next feature will be the video uploading services.

Recognizing that blogging atmosphere is hot now, Google’s engineers are now engaging in developing more features for its blogging software. Would these new features have the influence of making more people to sign-up for the Blogger and use this software? However, I believed most bloggers are more concerned about the control availability, when deciding on a particular blogging engine.

Tumri, founded in 2004 is aimed to serve the future needs of the growing number of advertisers and bloggers. It is the world’s first integrated merchandising and advertising network that can intelligently deliver targeted products to the online consumers. In other words, if the owner of a site that didn’t like the advertisement units appeared on her site, she can tweak and choose over what the advertisements that should be displayed on her site. According to the newest press release of Tumri, they have just raised $10 million from Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, alongside with existing investors, Shasta Ventures and Accel Partners. Its proprietary technologies included AdPod that is an AJAX built-in and Tumri believed it would increase the click-through rate and customer interaction. Currently, Tumri’s advertiser network includes Zappos, Macy’s, Wal-Mart and Sears.

No doubt, they’re poise for growth now, albeit that several sites have the preference to use Google AdSense system in which this particular platform has recently introduced the beta testing of streaming video advertisements. But I believe it won’t stop Tumri from becoming the leader in the field of Advertising 2.0.

The other day I came across this Pictogame, a site that allowed users to upload their pictures, and turn their pictures into games and share with their friends. The games created are allowed to embed onto an user’s personal blog, or their Blogger, Friendster, Tagged, Multiply or their MySpace accounts. I can see this site will gain popular in the future based on several reasons here: the game creation process is truly simple, i.e. three steps involved as per their site stated, upload picture, choose a game template, and rotate the direction of the picture as one want. Moreover, this site invented is based on the belief that people nowadays want fun, and one of the funniest things to do is to create game. But I must say this site is very clever, for a new startup, offering the services that targeting at the niche and smaller market is a clever strategy. Maybe I’m wrong, blogging or social networking industry is not small, albeit perhaps the number of services that can be embedded into the social networking sites or blogs are too many to count for.

Below is the sample game that I made on Pictogame. Kick me!

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