The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

Last year, I wrote a piece called best of 2004, where I enumerated the top 10 blogosphere events of the previous year. Following on the same theme, here's my 10 best blogosphere events of 2005.

  1. flickr sold to Yahoo! - The biggest news of the year was the rise of Flickr and sale in February 2005 to Yahoo!
  2. YouTube rises - Newcomer YouTube jumped on the seen and out-maneuvered both Google and Yahoo! video. In October, they secured financing from Sequoia. YouTube is to video as flickr was to photos. Expect YouTube to be snatched up in 2006 and make my list again next year.
  3. Weblogsinc sold to AOL - First came Weblogsinc's rise as a publisher, then came the news that Jason Calacanis sold his growing empire to AOL, followed by the How much is your blog worth permathread.
  4. del.icio.us sold to Yahoo! - On the verge of major scaling issues, del.icio.us sells it's folksonomy engine to Yahoo!
  5. MySpace sold to News Corp - Blogosphere unsavvy NewsCorp buys MySpace for $580m, then blocks YouTube videos.
  6. YPN beta launched - Yahoo! launches a competitor to Google's AdSense.
  7. Rise and Fall of Chitika eMinimalls - Darren Rowse introduces the blogosphere to eMinimalls, an excellent AdSense alternative and compliment. A massive amount of bloggers begin pasting eMinimalls across the Web and quickly find themselves in a nightmare.
  8. About.com sold to New York Times - New York Times massively overpays ($400m) for about.com.
  9. LiveJournal sold to 6apart - The year started with a merger of two of the biggest blog hosting platforms (Typepad and LiveJournal).
  10. FeedDemon/NetNewsWire sold to NewsGator - NewsGator bought not one, but two of the most popular RSS readers.

This year (2006), we can expect some more great news from OperaFirefoxMemeorandum, Wordpress, YouTube, NewsGator, 6Apart and RSS in Vista.

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