Steve Rubel’s new taxonomy for social media:
* Galaxies: centers of gravity that attract the like-minded – e.g. YouTube, Digg and Second Life
* Stars: online celebs, such as Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, AskaNiinja, etc.
* Planets: individuals who follow the stars, yet are influential in their own right
* Shooting Stars: insta-celebs that create viral videos or memes and then fade
* Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement
* Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think splogs

Steve Rubel reports that the Washington Post has launched a feature which allows users to mash up videos of themselves with footage of political reporter Dana Milbank asking a series of questions. The results are bound to be funny, maybe more than the Post is comfortable with, but it’s interesting to see how far one of the great names in the newspaper world is prepared to go to engage readers…

The news and blog search engine Topix which sorts results into themed pages has updated its design. It’s a useful tool for editorial teams to keep tabs on individual markets. Here’s one I did for “aviation”: News Search: aviation

Steve Rubel reports on the latest Technorati stats on the state of the blogosphere which includes the following facts:

* Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
* The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago
* It doubles in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months
* About 175,000 new weblogs are created each day
* Posting volume continues to rise to 1.6 Million postings per day

Google has signed a $900m exclusive search deal with MySpace, reports the AOP.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li compliments Dell on its new blog, launched in response to the deluge of criticism of its poor customer service. She points out that it even deals with the famous flaming notebook.

Spy Media is a kind of eBay meets Getty photo service. Members can post bounties for pictures that they want people to shoot for them. Current examples include $100 for “most creative photo with a Starbucks cup in it” and $250 for “Hezbollah rocket launchers in civilian area of Lebanon”.

Instapundit.com is celebrating its fifth birthday. The A-list media watching blog is written by law professor Glenn Reynolds in his “spare time”.

Korean super community Cyworld is launching in the US, according to PaidContent.org. The site will compete head-on with MySpace. It is very successful in Korea where a third of the population have signed up – and more than 90% of under-20s. It’s main revenue model is in selling virtual items (as in Second Life) which brings in $300,000 a day. It is making an average of $7 a user per year compared to MySpace’s $2.17.