The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

Screenshot comes from Fred Wilson's AVC blog

Fehrenbacher says she started the site when a student, as a way to engage in public conversation about specific topics of interest to her. That sounds like the kind of founding story that many of the first wave of commercially viable blogs of the era can tell. The site speaks to a lucrative young readership with disposable income and now gets 15 million unique visitors each month, up from 11 million at the beginning of this year. Fehrenbacher told the story of Inhabitat's birth in depth in a long post this Spring. No acquisition price was named but given the site's growth, audience and angel fundraising, it was presumably a life-changing event for Fehrenbacher. She'll stay on as the site's manager and Editor in Chief.

"There was never really one specific 'big break' that helped me get my business off the ground," Fehrenbacher writes, "but really more a series of 'small breaks' over a long period of perseverance that added up, brick by brick, to help me build the foundations of my business."

Fehrenbacher offered some interesting advice to other students of design on the sustainability of the design school lifestyle in a notable guest post on design blog Core77 when she was a grad student at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Inhabitat included a number of related sites as well, including kid-focused Inhabitots, which launched three years ago last month, just weeks before Fehrenbacher had a child. That's some remarkable ambition.

Where can you learn about all this geo-creativity? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've come up with a system for efficiently discovering a large number of the top blogs on any subject - and we track the top stories in Geolocation closely. We've decided to open up a little bit of our research and share with you our list of the Top Blogs in Geolocation This Week. Read on to find out which top 10 blogs are writing the hottest stuff now and see all 300 of the blogs we're tracking.

Here are the top 10 blogs about geolocation this week, in terms of how much buzz their articles got with readers around the web. To see the full list of 300 we're tracking (and to let us know if your geoblog isn't on the list!) please visit this page on Postrank. Big thanks to Justin Houk for helping run the machine that unearthed these blogs. Please do help us build the list out even more.

The Top Ten Geo Blogs for September 27- October 1, 2010

1. The Foursquare Blog Up from #12 last week

   The company blog of hot location based social network Foursquare made a big splash this week with posts about the new push notifications for Blackberry users and a new partnership with CNN to incentivize healthy eating through patronage of farmers' markets around the country.

   I don't know what I think of the whole CNN/Farmers' Market thing specifically, but it does feel like we're getting somewhere, doesn't it?

2. Google Maps Mania
   #2, just like last week

   This incredibly prolific blog that highlights cool uses of Google Maps products is unaffiliated with the company, but really shows what Google location technology can do. This week's big hit was a post about making animated driving directions.

   Really, go check out this blog - the amount of cool stuff it finds is amazing.

3. Google LatLong
   Down from #1 last week

   The official Google Maps and Earth team blog made a big announcement about the spread of Street View onto every continent on the planet - but it also posted news about a revamped "photos" layer on Google Maps.

   There are cooler things going on around location than Google Maps, but everyone knows about it and the product changes frequently compared to other major tools from the giant company.

4. Planet OSGeo
   Was #3 last week

   This geo community posted big hits all week long last week, but the biggest was in-depth coverage of the Free and Open Source Software for Geomatics Conference (FOSS4G) in Barcelona.

   That's some detailed, wonky stuff - but the wonks were buzzing!



5. Ogle Earth
   Boom! Was #285 last week!

   Ogle Earth spent most of this month in hiatus, but came back with a big story about the new iPhone 4 in China being shipped with censored maps onboard! See also subsequent coverage on ReadWriteWeb.

   Censored maps! Who thinks they can still get away with that these days? Not so cool that Apple went a long with it.

6. Google Earth Blog
   Last week #4

   The independent blog Google Earth: Amazing Things About Google Earth wrote two big posts this week: a report on the first episode of a new short video series about geospatial technology (see below) and a short review of a new game authoring platform for Google Earth.

7. All Points Blog Up from #21

   All Points is a must-read site and publishes a great podcast, but this week the site's biggest hit was a short post about a 2 day, multi-organization experiment in the use of social media in disaster response.

   Disaster response is one of the big areas of focus in geo - because when things turn real bad, you want to know exactly where everything is!

8. Slashgeo
   Was #7 last week

   SlashGeo is like Slashdot for all things Geo. The biggest hit this week was a news item about DataPlace.org's big database of housing and demographic data made available under an Open Source license. Hello, mashups!

9. The AnyGeo Blog - Anything Geospatial
   Holding steady at #9

   The AnyGeo aggregator's community was most responsive this week to its post about the new Sony Ericcson LiveView: a cool little device that looks like an iPod nano but is actually a rich interface for reading and writing data to and from almost any Android phone in your pocket. It's pretty awesome.
   

10. GISUser.com - The complete GIS, LBS, and Geospatial Technology Resource
    #10

    GIS newswire GISUser.com published videos of the 5 minute Ignite-style Lightning Talks from this year's user conference of ESRI, a massive geo services company. Historical GIS, augmented reality, and many other subjects are discussed in a high-energy format. I haven't watched these videos yet but I've got them all queued up on my iPhone and look forward to it.

Those were just a few of the biggest hits from the very most-buzzed-about geo blogs this week. There was so much more reported on that was super interesting. Check out this page for the full list of nearly 300 geo blogs we're tracking and their top posts this week. If you write an exciting geo blog that's not on that list, let us know!

Onward, in an era when location is an unprecedented platform for world-changing technology innovation!

This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? Read on.

How to Search Google for Blogs by Topic

The Google Blogsearch service has for a long time surfaced a small number of blogs related to any search query, above the list of results from a search of blog posts, or entries. This new search is different, though, and surfaces different results.

Do a search on the general web search interface, google.com. Then, click on the "more" link in the left-hand sidebar if "blogs" doesn't already appear as an option. Once you're looking at blogs from this perspective, then a new option will appear in the sidebar: search for posts or blog home pages related to your query.

I searched for ceramics blogs, semantic web blogs, cloud blogs, social media blogs and more. All those searches brought up pages and pages of clearly topical sources. I imagine that different searches may have different degrees of success, but this is Google - so it ought to work well.

How Good Are the Search Results?

The search results in this new search by blog feature look pretty good to me. The ranking of those results, however, seems questionable. The more closely tied the title of the blog is to your search query, the higher the blog shows up in search results. That's not the best indicator of quality or authority.

That said, in as much as I know about the topics I searched for, the top blogs in those fields definitely peppered the search results, to greater or lesser degrees.

What would I do with these search results? To be honest, I'd ask our fabulous staff developer (whom you may not steal from us) to whip up some scripts that pulled down the first 300 search results (or more) from any query I searched for, grab the RSS feeds from those sites using another script and autodiscovery, turn the feeds into an OPML file, upload them to Postrank, sort them by degrees of reader engagement, then chop off the top number from that list as suits your needs. Your mileage may vary, of course. I'd likely then use some other processes to make sure I wasn't missing too many obvious sites or including too many false positives. (And then I'd do some other stuff with it too.)

Now that the sun has set of the Technorati blog directory, and no one has done as good a job in its place as it once did, it's great to see a new option at all. The fact that full-text search is the method employed here, along with some patented analysis of the sites, is great. The patent that Slawski points to, (Indexing and retrieval of blogs, filed September 2005), "describes how it may create a 'hybrid document' about a blog out of information from both XML feeds, blog posts, and pages linked to from those feeds and posts such as profile pages," he writes.

That great. Add some ranking, some OPML export, and then we're really talking.

Long live blog search!

The MOG Music Network (MMN) includes music-related news from the company's network of 1,200 music blogs plus in-house news, reviews another other features. According to MOG, its network of blogs now generates more than 20 million monthly unique visitors and its goal is to become the largest music network online.

You may know of MOG only as one of the many new "cloud"-based streaming services which are poised to overtake iTunes as the preferred way to listen to music while mobile. For low monthly fees - $10/mo. for MOG or its competitors Rdio and Rhapsody, and only $3 for the questionably legal (and now disappeared) Grooveshark - you can stream unlimited tracks to your mobile handset. No longer is disk space a concern and you have access to the majority of new releases too, as well as older albums, thanks to online catalogs of tunes numbering in the millions, regardless of which service you pick.

While the merits of each service are varied, MOG is clearly hoping to differentiate itself by being known not just as an app, but as a brand associated with music content. In fact, music related content came first in its case, not the apps.

MOG, the Network

Originally, www.mog.com was a network of music blogs on the Web prior to its launch of the music-streaming service in December 2009.

Now the MOG Music Network will serve as a digest of this content, at a separate URL from MOG.com: MOGMusicNetwork.com. In addition to the news, reviews and interviews you would expect, MMN will also deliver exclusive MP3s, explains a company blog post.

However, in checking out one of these exclusive tracks here, it didn't appear there was an easy way to download the tune - it was accessible for playing online only via a Flash-based widget. We couldn't find it in MOG's streaming service, either. Instead, the track just served as a teaser for an upcoming album, and the only way to hear it was on MMN. For dedicated music fans, that level of access may be a big selling point for the new online portal.

It may be a key selling point for advertisers, too. MOG CEO David Hyman told MediaWeek that the site aims to serve as a central hub for advertisers. "Think of this as like Glam.com is to the Glam Network," he said, referring to the women's content portal which uses the same model. Monetizing digital music has been a difficult business so far, but Hyman believes his advantage is that he's monetizing content, not the streaming itself. "This is a real network of readers," he said, "not just listeners."

We asked educators what is the one new tech tool they are most looking forward to taking into the classroom with them this fall - hardware or software, a new tool, or just one that's new to their class.

1. The iPad: Mobile Learning

The iPad and Twitter tied for the number of votes in our back-to-school survey. But if you combine those teachers who listed the iPad with those who voted for tablets, along with the shout-out for the 15 netbook mini-lab, then the educators who responded are most excited about bringing mobile hardware in the classroom. Many teachers noted this will be their first experience with 1-to-1 technologies.

2. Twitter: Real-Time Information

It's not surprising, perhaps, since requests to complete our survey were passed around via Twitter, that many educators who responded said they were looking forward to incorporating Twitter into their work routines this fall. Teachers said they planned to use Twitter as a microblogging tool in the classroom, as a way to communicate with parents and the community, and as a part of a teacher's own professional development and personal learning network.

3. Google Apps for Education: Cloud-Based Collaboration

Several teachers who responded said they're looking forward to using various apps in the Google Apps for Education suite this fall. Some teachers said they're planning to have students submit their assignments or complete quizzes using Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Forms. Other teachers said they're looking forward to having students collaborate on projects via Google Apps.

4. Blogs: Student Portfolios

Blogging remains an important and popular classroom tool as blogs can be incorporated into the curriculum at almost every grade level. Indeed, the teachers who mentioned blogs as their most anticipated tool ranged from those working in elementary school to those teaching at the college-level. Several teachers indicated they planned to use blogs for portfolio-based assessments.

5. Sharing and Collaboration Tools: 21st Century Teaching and Learning

Other than the repeated responses of "iPad," "Twitter," "Google Apps," and "blogs," the answers we received on our back-to-school survey were remarkably varied, and many of the tools only appeared in one answer. But one thing that over twenty of the products teachers mentioned had in common: they were tools for sharing and collaboration, tools like as Wikispaces, VoiceThread, and SlideShare. In general, then, these are the most anticipated tools for the school year. That educators are incorporating these tools into the classroom isn't a surprise as collaboration is an important part of 21st century teaching and learning.

Despite all the money spent on back-to-school supplies (and all the money spent on equipping school districts with various hardware and software), it is notable that most of the tools that teachers mentioned are available for free (or have a free version).

Thanks to the educators who filled out our survey. If you have another tech tool you're looking forward to bringing into the classroom with you this fall, please let us know!

Focus on Mainstream, But With Some Nifty Advanced Features

While Regator's core features are mainly aimed at mainstream users, advanced users and news junkies can use more advanced features like Regator's trend graphs and blog monitor to stay updated about whatever topics interest them. The blog monitor, for example, allows you to keep up with news about your specific interests. Now, as part of the redesign, the blog monitor also features personalized RSS feeds for your topics, so that you can even use Regator to stay updated if you mostly use a feed reader.

To make use of these advanced features, you have to sign up for a free account or sign in to Regator with your Facebook account.

More New and Improved Features

Some of the major new updates to Regator also include grouped trends lists (currently, for example, Elena Kagan, Supreme Court and White House are grouped together), an improved search engine that also shows you which blogs typically cover the topic you are looking for, as well as integration with Facebook Connect. For new users, the site now also features a very easy to use sign-up wizard that gets you set up with a fully functioning Regator account in seconds.

As the Regator team told us at SXSW earlier this year, getting new users to sign up for the service and making the service more intuitive and easier to use were the driving factors behind this redesign. Judging from what we have seen so far, the team has definitely succeeded in this mission.

"There is an art to what you do," he said to the real journalists. "And if you're ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That's all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are."

First, I am a journalist. I mean an I-worked-for-a-newspaper, I-was-a-stringer-for-Reuters, I-was-a-host-for-NPR, I-freelanced-for-Newsweek type journalist, the sort of journalist our CEO friend was presumably talking about. But I've also been a blogger since 2004. This blog I now write for is in the top ten of blogs for readership and has a sterling rep for...can you guess? JOURNALISM, you blowhard.

How many journalists blog? How many bloggers are journalists? How many blogs are chockablock with journalism? This motif of the whirly-eyed blogger in his pajamas was getting stale before I started my blog. (And for the record, I haven't owned pajamas since I was old enough to shave.)

"We have goals in common," Schmidt oozed. "Google believes in the power of information. We believe that it's better to have more information than less."

Well. It's funny he should mention that.

Schmidt, if you've been rusticating outside the Kuiper belt, first attracted journalistic attention, for more than his balliwick as head bean-counter at Google, when he blackballed all CNET journalists. This was a reaction to a journalist doing her job. In response to his pooh-poohing privacy questions, Elinor Mills Googled him and then published what she found. How...dare she?

He's also gained some WTF-points by trying to silence his alleged former mistress, Kate Bohmer. She had what appeared to be a fictionalized portrait of him on her blog until he marshaled a horde of lawyer-bots and sicced them on her.

But being creepy is not enough to warrant coverage, not on this blog anyway. The problem is, Schmidt's actions create a pattern of hypocrisy in relationship to the information and privacy issues on which he has so frequently pontificated. If Schmidt were the CEO of the world's largest culvert manufacturer, it would hardly matter. But he isn't and it does.

Schmidt is a man who guides one of the world's largest online information chaebols. He sets, or influences, policy that affects millions of people. And his Byronesque declamations of Google's position in the moral vanguard of the Internet age seem difficult to countenance when they are set off at every turn with actions that contravene the company's public values.

Maybe Google needs some sort of guiding trope, a first-principal that all of its people could refer to; something that, if Google employees found themselves unable to harmonize with it, would oblige them to give notice and maybe run off to develop more efficient well-poisoning systems for orphanages.

Something like...

DON'T BE EVIL.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Works With Just About Anything

Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field

There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you're looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post. Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order - the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we're running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity. Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes.. These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity.

So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two.

Add The Feeds to a Reader

We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it's easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn't matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it's the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources.

We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes.

Once you've got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it's time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there's more that we're going to do with these blogs. When you're in the "add feed" screen, you'll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It's really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We're now going to edit an OPML file - but don't be scared! It's easy, we promise. Anyone can do it.

Pull Out Your New Tab's Feeds

This step assumes you've using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that's not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step.

The Top of the OPML File.

Don't delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don't you feel smart? That was really easy though!

Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs

Now that you've got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You'll need to create an account, and the service doesn't allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails - Gmail considers them the same thing? It's true, that's an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that's how you've got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file.

Rank the Blog Posts With Robots!

Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you'll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they've processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it's been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It's then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed.

What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs' own communities of readers. That's valuable information! It's a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you'll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank!

Banish Content Overload

By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step!

Pretty Up Your Collection

We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful.

Check Out the Hotness

By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too.

Import Into a Feed Reader

Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do!

Make a List of the Links You Found

There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step.

Make a Reference Search Engine!

Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb.

Finally, Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too

Blogs are great, but they aren't the only place where important discussion is going on online - not in almost any field anymore. Thought leaders in the education blogosphere are also having a lot of conversation on Twitter and FriendFeed, they are uploading presentations to SlideShare and participating in other online communities. You can connect with them quickly and easily by using the Google Social Graph API. Martin Atkins has built a very handy little interface that anyone can use to discover social media accounts registered to a person's name. We use that daily.

In the example above, Dave Perry of Academhack mentioned his Twitter account, so we searched for his Twitter name in the Google People Search site and found his Slideshare account too. This will work better for some people than for others, but sometimes it's a really big help.

Bloggers have always been somewhat nervous about 'comment fragmentation' when it comes to services like Blogged, but there can be no doubt that these services also bring new readers to these blogs. The new widget that Blogged introduced today should help to alleviate some of these fears, as it will allow bloggers to showcase the discussions about their posts on Blogged back to their blogs.

After this redesign, Blogged definitely feels like a mix between Google News and the Facebook news feed, which is not a bad thing. The blog directory, which once formed the basis of Blogged, has now been relegated to the back pages of the site, though it still provides a valuable service in its own right.

With a catchphrase like, "Where the Blogosphere and Twittersphere meet" it will be interesting to see which sphere will hype the service more. Some of the featured bloggerati include ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, Huffington Post Editor Arianna Huffington and Zen Habits founder Leo Babauta.

Like any good Twitter-related service, Twittorati also has its own Twitter account with a feed to the site's hottest trending topics. We'll be watching closely to see how the site's trend results differ from those displayed on Twitter's newly redesigned landing page.

While many different Google projects push the envelope with features and interface innovation - users are excited just to see Blog Search make catch-up moves, since it's a sign that the product is still breathing at all. No news about much needed spam control, no response to Twitter stealing many blogs' thunder, no personalization, no visualization, no semantics, no mobile play - nothing. It's really disappointing. Google Blog Search remains the best option if you're looking for fast results, but other options are better if you have any needs other than speed.

Google Blog Search is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with meme-tracking on the front page. Google Blog Search spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. [Update: that appears to have been fixed now.] It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It's painful to look at Google Blog Search results pages, but if you've got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries - then it's a good option.

Day in and day out, I use Ask.com's blog search instead. It's nothing earth-shattering, but there's a whole lot less spam.

Is blogging such old news that only Twitter search is interesting to innovators anymore? When it comes to more thought-out, long-form, researched, discussed news and opinion, blogs still matter. We wish Google felt the same way. The web is a really exciting place these days - why isn't Google Blog Search?

The M.insight application sorts the feeds into four main categories: social media, public relations, marketing and branding, and advertising. It also includes two "in-house" categories which feature feeds from the MWW Group themselves ("MWW/DialogueMedia" and "D.insight").

M.insight functions like an RSS reader, but one that you don't have to set up on your own, meticulously adding feeds one-by-one. Instead, this blog reader is already configured and ready to go. You can, though, add and delete feeds within a category if you so desire.

The app is available on three mobile platforms: the iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. On all three platforms, the app does full feed caching (including images) so you can read your feeds even when offline - a feature more useful on the WiFi-only iPod than the others. On the Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, M.insight lets you email articles from within the app or post them to Twitter or Delicious. You can also access other news and info like weather, stocks, sports, flights, etc. 

Although targeted toward the PR/Marketing niche, we think many of you would also enjoy this application, especially the "social media" category which features feeds from top blogs like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Chris Brogan, Web Strategist, CenterNetworks and Scobleizer.

To try M.insight for yourself, you can download it from the iTunes App Store by clicking here or for Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, click here.

I spoke to GigaOM founder Om Malik to find out more about the new offering. Om explained that the Analyst Network will go hand in hand with their blog editorial. While the analysts tend to gather the data and analyze that, the bloggers will "connect the dots" and offer extra analysis of the higher level trends. Om believes that there needs to be a closer link between analysts and bloggers in this media landscape. At ReadWriteWeb we have good relationships with analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner, so we certainly agree that the ecosystem has changed and that analysts and bloggers can co-exist happily.

Subscriptions services aren't without precedence in the blogging world. Some bloggers have supported themselves for a long time using subscriptions, for example Daring Fireball charges $19 per year for added extras such as full-content RSS feed. Ars Technica had a subscription service for a long time, although now that it's owned by Conde Naste it appears to have closed that. The most famous example of subscriptions in the new media world though is the Wall St Journal, which charges $1.99 per week ($103.48 per annum) for online only and $2.69 per week for the print and online editions.

These aren't large sums of money - $103 per year for WSJ.com and $79 for GigaOM Pro. The low pricing is because most consumers expect content on the Web to be free - we've become conditioned to this. We'll have to wait and see if subscriptions has legs among generally reluctant consumers and in the current market, but it's certainly worked so far for WSJ and so it's worth a shot by blogs.

In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.

A Few Caveats

Because LinkWithin does most of the computing on its own servers, it can take a little while before its results appear on your blog (usually around one hour). The plugin also doesn't play nice with every theme, though the team promises to fix any problem you might encounter within a few hours after you contact them.

Verdict

LinkWithin is still a bit rough around the edges. It would be great, for example, if you could actually customize how the related items are displayed on your blog. For now, you are restricted to showing three related stories, for example, and the related stories will appear on both your homepage and on individual posts.

If you are looking for a different way to showcase more of your blogposts on your blog, however, LinkWithin is definitely worth a try.

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for telling us about this new service.