WordPress, a very substantial blogging engine and CMS, has recently announced that all WordPress.com hosted blogs now have 3 GB of storage, up from the 50 MB they previously had. This is huge news. Blogger, the Google offering, today hands out 1 GB, and to get 3 GB from TypePad you would need to shell out $300 a year. Clearly Blogger and TypePad are real players in this market and will do something to keep their customers happy while growing their base; but WordPress has fired what might be seen as the opening shots in this war of storage for hosted bloggers.

WordPress.com is utilizing the Amazon S3 offering for online access-as-you-need-it storage, something Scott and I think is one of the waves of the future: cloud-based infrastructure.

Second Life Wants You to Build

Linden Labs has made developing your online presence a more robust experience. As they say, “Second Life Grid is a platform that enables your organization to create a public or secure private space using the leading 3D online virtual world technology.” Wordy, but basically this means they are offering a tool set to help organizations and companies, build and deploy online representations of themselves within the Second Life universe.

Linden Labs, founded in 1999, launched Second Life in 2003 and wants you to know something about Second Life: it is a virtual world, not a game. To demonstrate this just look at a small list of those companies who are using Second Life for communications, training, market research and sales, to name a few reasons to jump in: Aididas, Dell, Pontiac, Reuters and Sun.

Getting started has been turned into a procedure any IT group can manage as a project, visit this page to find out more: link or view a PowerPoint slide show about Second Life here: PPT

Matt