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 an 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 platforms 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 pervasive 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, but I’m not intend to make money out of using any type of widgets temporarily. 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 Website 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 Website. 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.