Dave Winer provides a tutorial on what makes a weblog a weblog. "A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser...The center of the hierarchy, in some sense, is a sequence of weblog "posts" that forms the index of the weblog, that link to all the content in sequence."

The Economist has a story on online advertising and how it is working for both advertisers and consumers. After the search-related text ads and pay-for-performance pioneered by Google and Overture, the next horizon is advertising linked to the content of the page.

This is done by using software to boil text down to a handful of keywords and to serve up related ads next to it. Just as with search-based advertising, the idea is that surfers are more likely to click on ads relevant to a web page's content than on a scattershot banner ad.

This time, Google was first. Since March, its ads have also been appearing on the pages of such websites as HowStuffWorks.com and Slashdot.org. Content targeting also explains why the firm recently acquired two start-ups, Applied Semantics and Pyra Labs. The first is a developer of content-targeting software; the second sells software to create personal web pages called “web logs”, or “blogs”, which could make excellent homes for Google's ads.

The Economist writes about the next-generation wireless networks:

What if you could combine Wi-Fi-style internet access with the blanket coverage, and fewer base-stations, of a mobile network? The various 4G technologies developed by such firms as IPWireless, Flarion, Navini, ArrayComm and Broadstorm offer just such a blend. There is no formal definition of 4G, but what such technologies have in common, says Andy Fuertes, an analyst at Visant Strategies, a research firm, is that they are high-speed wireless networks covering a wide area, designed above all for carrying data, rather than voice or a mixture of the two. They can pipe data to and from mobile devices at “broadband” speed, typically 10-20 times faster than a dial-up modem connection.

Such 4G wireless-broadband systems can be seen in two ways: as a rival to Wi-Fi that offers wider coverage, or as a wireless alternative to the cable and digital subscriber-line (DSL) technologies that now provide broadband access to homes and offices. Mostly, the wireless operators evaluating 4G see it as the first, and fixed-line telecoms operators as the second. But the convergence of wireless and broadband, argues Chris Gilbert of IPWireless, is actually entirely new: a fast internet connection that follows you around. Navini calls it “nomadic broadband”; ArrayComm's term is “personal broadband”. Mike Gallagher of Flarion, a firm backed by Cisco, likens Wi-Fi to cordless phones that work within a limited range of a base-station, whereas 4G is akin to mobile phones that work anywhere.