Microsoft just launched Popfly - a web-based service for creating and sharing mashups, websites, widgets and other apps. It’s still in private Alpha so sign up for the waitlist and install the Silverlight plugin in the meantime.

[via]

With Barbie Girls Mattel just launched the virtual world exclusively for girls and will also sell a Barbie-like MP3 device that allows to interact with the website and unlock more content. And to prevent old dirty men from hanging out in there the site features stuff like word filters. [via]

I come across more and more reports that Gaia Online is the new MySpace or Second Life for the kids. I had a quick crack myself but am definitely too old for this. Way too many avatars.

Nice one but they should have done a Flashturbation exercise instead.

Technorati just published their latest report on the state of the blogosphere. You can view the full comprehensive report with heaps of charts here. Below an excerpt of the summary:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or…
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%