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Dave Winer, a man who was key to the creation and growth of blogging, RSS, podcasting, OPML and several more technical standards that helped social media become what it is today, announced this morning that he's working on a new technology, a simple blogging tool that keeps an archival copy of your content on your servers, but pushes it out onto whatever other publishing platform you choose, whether that be Tumblr, Twitter or "whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after."

"The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure," Winer wrote in a blog post today. "You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place." This is very good news. It appears that the tool will live first at My.ReallySimple.org (password protected).

Looking for a quick and easy way to get an app into the Android Market, but don't have the time, skills, or money to develop one? Feed.nu can help.

The site offers a way for you to make your own app, ready for the Market, in just a few minutes. Once you sign up for a Feed.nu account and upload your feed info, you're able to download a .apk that you can, in turn, upload to the Android Market.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest report today documenting how different generations use the Internet, and most of the findings won't come as a surprise. Across generations and almost across the board, we're spending more time engaged in online activities, as watching videos, listening to music, and reading the news, for example, become inceasingly popular. The one notable exception: a decline in blogging among teens, with only half as many blogging today as did in 2006.

As most business users of Google Apps know by now, Google recently added dozens of new services to Google Apps, including AdWords, Analytics, DoubleClick, Feedburner, Reader and Voice, among others.

The update gives Google Apps customers access to a whole suite of applications that were previously only available to individual users.

Posterous, the minimalist blogging platform, may have allowed users to post to their blogs via email, or even the specially-formatted Posterous for mobile devices, but now it's gone that one extra step. Posterous for the iPhone is here, allowing users to post, manage their settings, upload media and even geo-tag their updates.

Human-powered search site Mahalo, created by notable entrepreneur, investor and blogger Jason Calacanis, may soon be involved in a class-action lawsuit, the result of a change to its Terms and Conditions that may have affected the pay of its contractors and employees.

Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.

These days, blogging isn't just about sitting down at a keyboard with a cup of coffee and writing a wordy post. Blogging now also means sharing pictures, video and other media, and it means doing so at a moment's notice from wherever you are. WordPress, the Web's most popular content management system, has supported mobile blogging with its assortment of mobile apps for some time. Today, the iOS version has received a significant upgrade with added support for video and improved draft and autosave functionality.

I accepted a job offer with TechCrunch on June 7th, 2006 - days before the site celebrated its first birthday. I left AOL for the position. I worked there for less than a year but it made a huge impression on my life and career.

Today I got to see, on live streaming video, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington sign a contract on stage to sell the site to AOL. As co-editor today of a competing site, and as someone whose big break was joining TechCrunch as the site's first hired writer, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the deal and what it means.

Microsoft and WordPress just announced that WordPress.com will become the default blogging platform for Windows Live. Live Spaces' 30 million users will have six months to migrate their blogs over to WordPress.com and the two companies will offer a number of tools that should make this migration very easy. This announcement, which was made at TechCrunch Disrupt, comes as a bit of a surprise and will surely upset some of Windows Live Spaces' most active users. It does, however, fit into Microsoft's vision for its Live.com brand.

While blogging was still a major topic of discussion just a few years ago, things have been rather quiet around it in recent times. Even in the so-called blogosphere, we don't talk a lot about the actual activity of blogging anymore these days. According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, however, blogging is still alive and well. Today, half of all Internet users read blogs and while blogging itself remains somewhat of a niche activity, about 12% of U.S. Internet users update a blog at least once per month.