PUBLIC MARKS from vista with tag blogs

MediaGuardian reports on the BBC's foray into the world of Web 2.0 - blogs, podcasts, bookmark sharing et al.: "The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com."

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago. New blog creation continues to grow. Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That's an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity.

This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organization's "conversational human voice" to be greater than participants who were assigned to read traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversational human voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantly with relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).

How do we know that we have the right 43 blogs listed at any one time? Easy, you are the "we" at 43 Best. We are you. You spin me right round. Other lists depend on the work of one or two individuals. See your blog on the list? Grab the 43 Best Blog badge and put it on your site. Congratulations to the winners! Add a blog, delete a blog. The answer to Web 2.0 is '43', so please leave the site with the same Zen as you found it. FYI - just click on approve to approve the links.