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.

In this latest version, the metadata you're able to see includes the number of FriendFeed conversations, the number of Diggs, and the number of times the post has been shared in Google Reader or Feedly. To the right of those informational icons are more buttons that let you share the post in Google Reader/Feedly, save the page for later reading (star in Google Reader), Twitter the page, or email it to a friend.

When you've finished reading (and interacting) with the content on your screen, there's a "next" button which you can click to go to the next recommendation in your Feedly/Google Reader.

Integrated Twitter and FriendFeed

In addition to providing tools that help you better understand and share the blog posts you read, Feedly also reminds you how you came across them in the first place. If you originally saw the post on Twitter, a small notification will pop-up to remind you of that tweet and on the notification window there's an option to reply or re-tweet the information directly from the web page you're currently on.

Alternately, if the article you're reading is hot on FriendFeed, Feedly Mini's pop-up will notify you of a popular conversation around the blog's content occurring on FriendFeed. With one click, you can then join that conversation.

If you're not a fan of notifications or just want to dial them back a bit, you can do so from a preference knob called "Mini Friendfeed Notifications" which allows you to control and customize the behavior of these notifications.

How To Get It

All these new features will be made available today as part of a Feedly update to v 1.2 patch 170. If you're not seeing these features yet, don't worry - Feedly is good about delivering automatic updates to their users. In other words, you can install Feedly now, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. If you do end up trying the new version, you can let @feedly on Twitter know what you think. If you run into any problems, you can log it on get satisfaction where every ticket is responded to within 24 hours.

You never know what Feedly will add next. Past updates includes integration with Ubiquity, integration with your Google Search, and more. Based on the image below, it appears that Twitter and FriendFeed are only the start of Feedly's planned integrations for this increasingly useful tool.

Originally called "Blog Networks," the creators decided to change the application's name to "NetworkedBlogs" when they purchased the external, independent web site at networkedblogs.com where an online blog directory is maintained. The application itself has not changed - it has only grown and improved. The company recently ramped up their infrastructure to handle pulling a lot more feeds and released a feature to pull the blog feed directly to your profile on Facebook. They're also continuing to improve their feed reader by adding more social elements to it.

Although we saw the potential for a simple but powerful community-building app such as this back in June, there was no way to know for sure whether or not it would catch on with Facebook users whose app preferences tend to favor games and other time-wasting applications.

As it turns out, NetworkedBlogs is fairly popular...at least among blog applications.  They currently boast nearly 450,000 active users - that is, people who interact with the application by reading, commenting, adding a blog, etc. And the total number of installs sits at just over 700,000. That's huge when compared to the other blogging apps out there. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't have a category just for blogging apps, but a search for "blog," "blogs," and "blogging" shows that their nearest competitor hasn't even cracked 100K, and, in many cases, other apps haven't even gathered 5000 users. 

Additionally, bloggers who are using the NetworkedBlogs application are adding about 500 blogs per day, bringing the current total to 125,000 blogs available via this Facebook blog network.

What's New: A Network Widget for Your Blog (+Invites)

The latest big addition to the network is a new Network Widget which can be added to your blog's web site. When the widget is clicked, a Facebook Connect window pops up allowing your visitors the opportunity to follow your blog on Facebook. The widget is currently in beta, but the first 50 ReadWriteWeb users interested in trying it out can let us know in the comments. You can see the widget in action here on this blog (see the column on the right).

That's what a new service called FeedVis offers. Give it a bundle of blogs (in OPML format) and it will give you a scrollable, searchable tag cloud - a visual representation of the most-used words in a given period of time among a defined group of blogs on any topic.

Users can put FeedVis on their servers, upload a collection of blogs in OPML format and add a list of "stop words" to exclude from those terms from the popularity contest. The end result is a beautiful scrollable and searchable chart of the most popular words being used in one day, a seven day period or throughout the recent history of that collection of blogs. Increases and decreases in usage are displayed and clicking on any word will bring up the recent blog posts where it was found.

The source code to put FeedVis on your own server is quite simple and easy to customize. We think a lot of people could find this service useful.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

We'll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we've got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though.

If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work - check out this post, where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could.

In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post.

No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method - but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to "join the conversation" - because they aren't sure where to find the conversation. Here's how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn't a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it's a good place to start from.

Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow.

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.

So there you go. If you follow these steps, you'll be able to discover the top bloggers in any field, view or subscribe to just their most popular posts, search against their archives and befriend them elsewhere around the web! We hope this has been useful. Thanks for following along. If you can suggest better steps to take at any point in this process, or additional things you like to do - we'd love to hear about it!

McCarthy's new job is really interesting in a number of ways. Rivera says with her addition "it really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived." It's also very interesting because of who McCarthy is. Most of all it's interesting because it's an absolute dream job for any tech news junky. We discuss the hire in depth over on Jobwire, our site dedicated to covering new hires in tech and new media.

The program launched over the weekend through via this lighthearted post over on TypePad.com which reminds you that "Tumblr...will not pay your bills." According to the company, they've already seen hundreds of journalists signing up to participate.

As detailed in the TypePad blog post, the bailout program includes the following, a dollar value of at least $150 per year (the price of the TypePad service alone), if not more :

A free TypePad Pro blog account, the same service that powers many big-name media blogs. It includes professional support so Six Apart will answer any questions you have.

The blog is enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are display ads that pay a more than Google text ads, and bloggers get to keep the revenue.

Six Apart will promote the new site on Blogs.com, a directory of the best in blogs. Blogs.com will be a way for all of the bloggers peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for their independent sites.

Lots more. Six Apart can also introduce you to their VIP program to help drive traffic to the site, help connect blogs to LinkedIn profiles, make it easy to manage your comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote posts to your Facebook friends

There are no rules on how the blog must be used. Journalists can use the blog showcase their best work, launch something new, or hang onto the site, you know, "just in case."

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

We're in the midst of a great upheaval. The internet is impacting the business models of so many established ventures. Newspapers and magazines aren't the only industries affected by any means. The internet has left nothing untouched, whether music, video, news, sports, communication, marketing, advertsing and more, those wishing to stave off its force of change are simply trying to outswim a tidal wave.

What's better for those being impacted is to be prepared and thinking ahead for the future - what is Plan B? As we mentioned earlier this week, not everyone sees the death of the journalism ahead - media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example, sees opportunity.

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you're wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington's recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

So journalists, get your platforms ready...there's no better time than now and no better price than free.

Note: Six Apart's Movable Type weblogging platform is what powers our blog here at ReadWriteWeb.

When over 1,000 social media users were asked what companies' role in social media should be, their answers were somewhat surprising. For all the griping about intrusive internet ads, lame marketing campaigns, and lousy customer service, you would think that the last thing users would want is to have companies invading the platforms they use for communicating and socializing with their friends and colleagues. As it turns out, the opposite is true.

It seems that users are actually receptive to the idea of companies getting involved on social media platforms and interacting with them while there. Out of the 85% of users who want companies to have a presence in social media, 34% want companies to actively interact with them and 51% want companies to interact with them as needed or by request. 8% think companies should only be passively involved on social media and 7% think companies should not be involved at all.

This desire for business-to-consumer interaction goes beyond simply offering customer service via Twitter. Although 43% would like to see companies offering customer service through social media, 41% would like companies to solicit feedback and 37% would like companies to provide new ways to interact with the brand via social media. These numbers could not be more clear: these consumers are practically begging for businesses to get involved in social media.

Not So Shocking: Social Media Users Like To See Social Media Used

If these numbers seem a little skewed it's because the survey was only given to social media users. They're more likely to understand and appreciate how social media operates. Where traditional advertising and marketing campaigns broadcast messages one way (business to consumer), social media encourages conversations. And these open dialogues are exactly what today's social media users desire and participate in regularly. Give their active use of this medium for social communications, it's not a huge leap for them to say they want to use social media in new and different ways - such as for communicating with businesses.

Although it can be scary for businesses to take that initial plunge, once they get in and get involved, it will be worth their effort. The numbers from this study back that up, too: 56% of users say they feel better about companies when they can interact with them on social media and 57% say they feel better served.

We definitely agree with those numbers. Most people don't think to call customer service over minor complaints, feeling that it's just not worth the effort. But if you have a brand representative respond to one of your Twitter posts like this, the experience is so much better:

The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.

Context

Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate the site sees almost one million visitors each month from the US. For context, Facebook says it sees 100 million unique visitors per month from around the world.

Another 32% of Mail.ru is owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, the same company that we reported acquired African social media aggregator Afrigator earlier this month. Naspers says that Mail.ru generated $56 million in revenue last year, meaning presumably that it's either growing revenues quickly and/or is now drastically over-valued. 40X annual revenue is the kind of valuation that people make fun of Silicon Valley for.

The moral of the story here is that there is huge internet activity all around the world and not just in Silicon Valley. Many of our international readers are fully aware of that but even we need occasional comments or multi-billion dollar valuations in order to remember.

There are many different types of bloggers in the world today - new media journalists, "journalers," video bloggers, and others. One of the types - "diaryists" - record their innermost thoughts and feelings in a way that's very much similar to how people (yes, usually girls) once recorded their thoughts in small books kept under lock and key and stuffed beneath their mattresses.

Of course in this day and age, the thought of actually putting pen to paper seems like something from a bygone era. But the urge to create a diary hasn't been abandoned - it's just that the format has changed.

There are a few sites today that allow you to go private easily. LiveJournal and Vox cater more to the journaling crowd than WordPress does, for example, but there are many smaller sites like www.opendiary.com, www.mydeardiary.com, www.webbookdiary.com, and www.digitalexpressions.nu, that provide an online diary application.

Unfortunately, outside the larger blogging communities like LJ and the like, the quality of the online diary offerings is somewhat lacking. The digital scrapbook site, Kronomy, kicks it up a notch in terms of being a more modern tool than those previously mentioned sites above, but it's more focused on letting you share your digital, multimedia memories. And other sites like Our Story, Story Of My Life, dandelife, and My Family are more family-focused than private. None are really a quiet hideaway on the web for true diary writing.

Introducing Diary.com

But now online diaryists and diaryist wannabees can rejoice - there's a new site that's tailored just for them. With a big focus on privacy - it is your diary after all - Diary.com is a great starter blog for the little (over)sharers of Generation Z who are at the perfect age to begin their very own start blog, err, diary, right now.

Entries can be up to 1000 words max or you can paste in the URLs for photos or videos found elsewhere on the web. The site then displays the video or photo embedded in your diary. Amazingly, even just pasting in the URL of a YouTube video manages to post the video into the diary - no messing around with embed codes here - it's dead simple. Click the thumbnail of the video and you'll go to the permalinked page for the entry where the video can be played - all without having to leave the diary.com site.

Gen Z's First Lifestream

Diary.com isn't really very blog-like at all though. It's more like a lifestream than a blog, which furthers solidifies the argument that lifestreaming is encroaching in on blogging's territory. Here's a whole generation whose first blogging experience will be more like a FriendFeed sharing experience than an attempt at long, thought out writing. In fact, Diary.com's format is more like a cross between FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr combined. It's like FriendFeed because of its multimedia capabilities and stream-like look and feel, but the structure also resembles Twitter with its entry box at the top and posted items below. Of course, the idea of posting multimedia along with text is a lot like Tumblr, except this Tumblog is for your eyes only - no peeking.

Shared Diaries

Private diaries aren't the only feature of the site at Diary.com. On today's social web, there is a desire to share with friends, so in addition to supporting private diaries, the option to create a shared diary is available, too. A shared diary can be sent to anyone you choose - you simply enter in their email address and share. You can create multiple shared diaries and they're available from a drop-down at the top of your screen. It's easy to envision the shared diary option used as the digital age slambook, filled with naughty observations about fellow classmates.

Conclusion

Although Diary.com isn't doing anything dramatically new, it's taking some of the best features of the social web sites we grownups know and love and simplifying them for use by first time bloggers/lifestreamers. It's worth noting that the Diary.com folks seem to think their demographic extends beyond kids - they suggest their shared diaries can be used for anything from travel diaries to baby diaries, for example. We suppose they're right, but we're betting that their best customers will be a bit younger than that.