Yesterday Ross announced that Skydasher was officially in public beta----it kicked off with an e-mail to current Tucows resellers (Qumana is a Blogware reseller) and later this post by Ross himself--Random Bytes...by Ross Rader -- Skydasher lands....  Qumana has already signed up for the beta program and put up its own portal--myQumana--which besides changing the weather to Vancouver instead of Toronto I haven't customized much.  Look for this to become a hub for information related to Qumana, Lektora, and other folks we like to read (like Ross).

 

In a related note this morning, Steve Rubel has tipped us off to a new--very similar--Yahoo service called Yahoo 360--Micro Persuasion- Yahoo 360 Fuses Social Networking and Blogs.  This service (screenshots and more info on Steve's site), is supposed to connect blogs and social networking.   Maybe something like, hey we're all reading similar stuff, what's your take. Steve says that this is going to be invite only, like GMail.  So of course we're all going to be wrangling and asking friends to see who's got an invite to spare (hint, hint--will blog for invite).

 

These two announcements mean two things to me. First, the "portal" isn't dead, it has just morphed into something that is far less corporate and more personal and more high tech too--listening to podcasts from within Skydasher...how cool is that!  Second, I think we are beginning the move into the Blogosphere 2.0 (1.5?).

 

The blogosphere has been around for a long time, just under the radar of most folks.  Now, it's on everybody's mind (and eyeballs).  But the paradigm of blogs is moving, shifting, into more of a way to receive dynamic, expert commentary on the topics you're interested in.  It started with myYahoo allowing RSS feeds to be added to your page.  Now with Skydasher and Yahoo 360 both having RSS feeds as integral parts of the information flow, not just an also ran, blogs are moving into this new realm.  Blogosphere 2.0.  We're moving towards not only blogs being mainstream, but blogs being just another kind of website.  Who cares if it's published with Frontpage (yuck!), through a web-based interface, or Qumana :-)...it's published.  Publishing.  Publishing is what the Blogosphere 2.0 is all about.