Blogger kicks off new beta…finally. (Wired)

Business Week takes a look at YouTube & competitors (BW)

Dave Sifry just put out another excellent State of the Blogosphere. Some interesting tidbits include:

• Technorati just tracked its 50 millionth blog
• Approximately 175,000 new blogs are created each day
• All these blogs generate about 1.6 million posts per day

There’s more where that came from over at Sifry’s Alerts.

Using the brand, sparkly new Technorati, I came across a great post about the mom blogger “revolution” - essentially, the growth of mothers starting and creating blogs. For anyone who has done random surfing on the blogosphere, its not a new thing, but there’s a lot going on with mom bloggers right now - particularly on the heels of the BlogHer convention - as well as a number of other great directories and the growing lists of top “Mom bloggers” (including a few of my favorites, like Busymom, SVMoms and many more).

It had to happen at some point: YouTube overtakes MySpace (Guardian UK)

In Japan, the DS Lite sells more than all other consoles combined. (Digital Battle)

Take Pew’s online version of the “Bloggers” survey (Pew Internet)

ArsTechnica takes a look at the newest Pew study on Bloggers - who they (Pew) call the “Internet’s New Storytellers.” The study is great and deserves a read, but here’s a few stats that I like:

• About 12 million Americans keep a blog
• 39% of Americans read blogs
• When asked to pick a focus for their blog, 37% of bloggers chose “My Life and experiences”

Lots of other stuff in there, but those are just a few highlights.

In probably what is the first “big” video blog defection/move/breakup, Amanda Congdon has left (or been fired from) popular video blog Rocketboom (click on the links - the story does shift depending on which side you look at).  In the world of video blogs - where often the sucess of the show rests not just on the content, but on the relationship the viewers feel they have with the host (something Congdon excelled at) - this will be interesting to watch. Will Rocketboom stay Rocketboom without Amanda Congdon? (Just as “Would Ask a Ninja be the same if they replaced him with another Ninja?”)

Newsgator and the future of RSS (TechCrunch)

NBC and YouTube make nice, run promos (Micro Persuasion)

Finally, a public service annoucement regarding the 4th of July, fireworks and your digital cameras from Gizmodo - and have a safe (and fun) holiday weekend!