Last November, I posted on a topic called “PageRank and RealRank,” and now the RealRank is available to the public. RealRank does offer an alternative solution for bloggers especially if their blogs’ PageRank values have been dropped to zero by Google. According to IZEA, RealRanks is the first ranking service site that heavily focused on the importance in terms of traffic and influence of a particular blog in the blogosphere. The way IZEA engaged in its efforts to provide this service is appealing to bloggers, although its long-range goal on how this ranking service is heading remain opaque. So far, there is unquestioned that the RealRank is created on a direct basis that all blogs that participated in IZEA’s PayPerPost program will resume their blog’s Google PageRank from zero to the value they previously held. However, I wonder those bloggers are happy with the value they got from RealRank is the same value as PageRank before but their blogs’ PageRank values still remain as zero.

IZEA stresses the benefits of their new formula, i.e. 70% visitors, 20% inbound links, and the remaining 10% page views. They positioned this ranking service as the one with more reliability, and blog compatibility as this RealRank is targeted barely on blogs. At first glance, RealRank could form a basis for a future online advertising network that provides the pre-determined advertising value for a blog.

It is important to note that this ranking service still in Alpha mode and the immature of the service is expected. However, they have published their API of this RealRank in order to make this service mashable.

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 this 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, there also mean it will be less room for an 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.

Today CNNIC is releasing the 2007 China Bloggers Survey Report. The data below is based on the analysis of the responses to this survey which was collected from November 20 through 30, 2007 in China. There were 1,862 responses (randomly selected) received and utilized in which 486 survey participants are the bloggers.

- Internet users represented by 73.9%, bloggers comprised of 26.1% in China, as shown in picture 1 below.
- Bloggers that update their blogs in a regular basis represented by 36%; the remaining 64% neither not update their blogs nor registered, but not visit their blogs in a long period of time.
- Bloggers in China amounted to 46.98 million, each has 1.55% account which bring a total blogging accounts to 72.82 million blogs.
- Of which 16.91 million active bloggers, 55% hold one blog account, 27% hold two blog accounts, and 18% are the bloggers with three (3) and more blog accounts.
- Bloggers in China that joined the blog networks represented by 20%, the remaining 80% are not.
- 40% of the bloggers provide links to other blogs or Websites, while 60% wrote their blogs without any other external links.
- 43% of bloggers in China are males whereas 57% are females.
- 93% of bloggers in China visited other blogs before while 7% are not.
- From year 2002 to 2007, the universe of blogging was still evolving rapidly in China, see the picture 2 in below.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Today Six Apart has announced that its blogging software, LiveJournal, that bought by them in January 2005 has been sold to Russia’s SUP, the latter has launched an American company in order to run this new entity. In fact, SUP was a partner of Six Apart, it signed an agreement with Six Apart in October 2006 and thus has an exclusive right to offer this blogging software to the Russian people there. LiveJournal is very popular in Russia, for over a year, they have more than 610,000 users actively using this blogging software.

Though the value of this deal is not mentioned in the official news of LiveJournal, but the popular Russian news provider Kommersant reported that this acquisition costs nearly $30 million.

For those who have experienced difficulty in accessing this technology blog some hours ago, I am very sorry. TagEdge currently is hosted on the Media Temple Grid Server, and there was a very important data center maintenance from November 30th 2007 9:30 PM to December 1st 3:00AM which affected customers, including TagEdge that hosted on Cluster.1. I should post an announcement to all of you in prior to this maintenance.

Sorry for any inconvenient caused.

Today TagEdge.com is one year old. I moved all my content from kennylee.wordpress.com to TagEdge on November 20, 2006. Over the last year, many things happened to me. This technology blog has seen me through unemployed times, working as a freelance Web designer, and then a shift to Web programming as well as worked with a team provide IT consultation. When I started it last year (few days after my birthday, I am very sure of this), I thought of writing the reviews of some good startups from South-East Asian countries, but now the startups that I covered in this blog almost all the regions except Latin America. Sorry about the shift of the focus.

In fact, I really enjoyed writing about the Internet startups that I came across everyday. There are many startups, new things happened everyday, and one thing that I know is I don’t have enough time to post all the reviews of such startups, as TagEdge still considered as my part-time gig. From now on, I hope to increase the volume of my postings and am looking forward to another year or more of technology postings.

Anyway, thanks for reading, whether you are with me for exactly one year, or just a couple of days.

Source: available at http://blog.yupoo.com/?p=219, accessed 30 October 2007

To support the China Blogger Conference 2007 that to be held in Beijing this weekend, an online photo Web 2.0 in China Yupoo has prepared a Web 2.0 logo postcard, as shown in the above picture. In the meantime, they also urge all the China Web 2.0 sites submit their company logos to this site for the purpose of promoting the local Web development. My sense is that the more Web 2.0 sites launched in China, the more mature the China Web industry is.

Today it’s exactly one year since I started blogging on the Web. If you read my archive posts, I started my blogging journey by using kennylee.wordpress.com, and move all the posts on that site to TagEdge.com on November 20. Thus, the first anniversary of this blog will fall on November 20, and not today.

In fact, I’m very happy that today marks a one-year of my blogging adventure. Writing the review on new startup is not easy and managing a blog is even more difficult but it is often a great deal of fun. Month after month I saw the traffic of this blog grow. I also received a lot of emails, and sorry if I didn’t cover the startup that you mentioned in the email. Moreover, my resources on the new startups are growing and now I’m tracking more than 2,000 startups every week. Most important, my emotions are ebullient everyday.

Finally, thank you. I am grateful to each one of you that read this blog.