The Blog Herald reports on the launch of The Blooker Prize a new literary award set up to honour books which started life as blogs…

Steve Rubel picks his top 10 blogs, listed in “no particular order”

Technorati charts the rise in daily blog postings with an interesting chart detailing significant events.

Intelligent Bacon has 16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Micro Persuasion has the answer…

Qumana Blog has a survey on bloggers.

Chris Horrie has done lots of stuff around journalism, writing and lecturing, and he’s also a writer of books including “Stick it up your punter!”.

He predicts journalism will become an all female professional based on the evidence of the students coming through his post graduate journalism course at the University of Westminster – 70% female at least. And he is now considering abolishing the twin tracks of print and broadcast in favour of one multi-media track.

He demonstrates tools like Wordtracker to determine what key words works best for which audience group.

Chris urged B2B companies to be more visible in the colleges in order to help attract more people into business journalism.

Quote: “All you need to work for Heat magazine is a powerful camera, a blackbelt in Karate and a motorbike”.

“A story is a story no matter what the medium may be”

“Old fashioned TV news was over produced”. Modern technology allows for much more immediate journalism.

Drew Cullen editor in chief of the Register says 300,000 readers come in through RSS, partly driven by good naming conventions (story links read back to normal URLs). 15,000 come from Bloglines, reading 6 or 7 pages each, compared to average 11 or 12 pages for mainstream readers. The home page is now only 17% of traffic.

He says print weeklies make a classic mistake of holding back stories for the web. He say, just publish – because someone else will.

“Spam has killed newsletters”. Advertising with RSS is the next big thing, he says.

Angus Bankes, founder and CTO of Moreover, suggests we should all to move to full content feeds and then use advertising to monetise it. He also says the field is very important and often under-used.

Drew says “the blogging debate is very much an American debate – journalists in the States are thorough but boy are they boring“. This is what has created the fertile ground for blogs.

Sue Shimmin shares some impressive figures about licensing growth in RBI. Web content is a very low percentage of what is licensed and as it is a very easy format this looks an obvious area for growth. She pointed to Information Week’s “license this” link as a good example of how technology can help.

David Shepherd talks about our highly successful content site, Xpert HR. It’s success, he says, is that it is designed for the web, constantly updated and backed by a powerful taxonomy. Interestingly the editorial team is modelled on book publishing with individual editors responsible for their own areas with no separate subs etc.

Trevor Goodman presents on a very interesting new product idea in the public sector which is currently in its secret research stage. If it comes off, it will revolutionise a sector.

Iain Melville pointed out PaidContent.org as a good resource