Chronos released an update to its SOHO Notes Information Manager (formerly StickyBrain) over the weekend.

The new version features improvements to the app’s blogging and clipboard features as well as a raft of bugfixes, including a fix for handling URLs from Firefox.

Users will benefit most from the new clipboard functions in the DockNote.

Clippings can now be opened, edited and deleted from the clipboard recorder.

A clipping can be saved into Notes as a new note or be replaced with a selection from the current application.

In addition, when the clipboard recorder is turned off, it now stays off.

This means the the DockNote now contains a viable clipboard recorder, which could potentially replace apps like JumpCut or CuteClips.

Other improvements include the option to specify which folder the “Print to PDF” service will save to, better remembering of column width and position between launches (still a problem for me), better explanation of the SOHO sync service, and imrpvoements to Sync’s tolerance of sync faults.

Blogging features have also been improved. A bug preventing notes from being published to TypePad accounts has been fixed.

The app’s Preferences now include a new pane for its blogging features.

It can handle multiple blogging accounts and authentications:

SOHO Notes is shareware (USD 39.99) and is available from the Chronos web site .

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One in three bloggers regard their work as journalism according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Although Apple has now dropped its law suit against Think Secret et al., one of the key issues was whether bloggers are journalists and enjoy the same rights as more traditional media.

Pew Internet’s ambitious study which covers the demographics, motivation, activity, audience and technology of bloggers found that most bloggers write to be creative or express themselves. (Apparently journalists don’t do this).

Only a minority engaged in what the survey called “journalistic activities”:

Oddly, several important journalistic activities are missing. On the one hand there’s nothing about a thirst for the truth or a commitment to the public interest. On the other, no mention of a knack for pounding out product placements as if they were reviews, taking care not to upset companies that advertise in the same enterprise and writing whatever the editor serves up whether they know anything about it or not.

It is unfortunate that the survey is not very reliable. While the survey concludes that 12 million people in the USA maintain a blog, it only conducted telephone interviews with 233 of them and the self-declared margin of error is +/- 7%.

It also seems untroubled by the semantic can of worms opened up by words like blogger and journalist open up.

Still, if you are interested in the snapshot of bloggers that the survey offers, you can download a 33 page PDF summary of its findings.

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Web 2.0 sites like Flickr are massively over-hyped out of all proportion to real usage patterns, according to a survey conducted by HitWise this week.

Although Flickr seems to be on the lips of every high-impact blogger, the survey of photo-sharing sites concluded that Flickr ranks only sixth (5.95%) by market share (hits), a long way behind sites like Photobucket (43%) and Yahoo! Photos (18.3%):

Why is this so? Much comment revolves around a perceived social hierarchy among bloggers. The Register, who claims that mainstream media aggravates the situation by only listening to blogging royalty, prints the following opinion:

Photobucket is all over Myspace and LiveJournal, and it gets the hits, but the San Francisco myopia only sees their web 2.0 darlings.

HitWise analyst Leann Prescott suggests that the results reflect the cultural habits of the hoi polloi at LiveJournal and MySpace:

Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide’s traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket’s traffic, and 50% of Imageshack’s traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites…

Demonstrating exactly the elitism (or intelligence, depending on your point of view) under examination, Marshall Kilpatrick at TechCrunch agrees that the aristocrats and bloggerati may be out of touch, but says it’s all in a good cause:

High-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption.

It seems an odd debate to me. First, “hype” is obviously about what’s coming not about what is. If everyone was using Web 2.0 services like flickr, the hype would be about Web 3.0.

Secondly, hits are a very crude measure of importance. They only tell me what people are visiting. They tell me nothing qualitative, nothing about how interesting, useful, stimulating, innovative (or not) the destination is, only how popular it is.

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I’ve switched Hawk Wings to Markdown, partly because I keep reading how excellent it is, partly because I’m playing with the TextMate Blogging bundle and partly because it’s the weekend, so that if I bugger anything up no one will see.

If you see any messed-up posts as a result, please let me know.

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John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has an announcement up his sleeve.

Responding to criticism that he doesn’t blog often enough, he says , “I’ll be announcing the fix for that one later today.”

I guess this means we will read more of John’s writing and that can only be a good thing.

Half the time I don’t understand what he is writing, but even then it is still good. He probably deserves his reputation as the most influential individual Mac blogger.

And he is not a stuck-up wiener either. Which is refreshing.

When an unknown Australian approached him out of the blue asking for an interview on what he thinks of Mail.app, he cheerfully agreed.

He sent in a great piece on Mail and what’s good and bad about it. He threw in some free advice too on how blogs should be formatted, which has made Hawk Wings nicer to look at and easier to read.

You can’t beat that. Intelligent, witty and a gentleman.

I imagine that’s enough adulation now. Keep your eyes on Daring Fireball and enjoy with me more Gruber more often (I hope).

UPDATE: John Gruber quits job, goes full-time on Daring Fireball .

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A few months ago Hawk Wings blogged a Business Week report that claimed email has had its day. Generation Xers and corporations alike are switching to instant messaging, wikis, collaborative blogging and other Web 2.0 innovations in order to get things done.

It turns out that Stowe Boyd predicted the death of email in the Summer of 2004 at the Supernova conference. He was hounded from the podium by cynical hecklers.

We shouldn’t mourn email’s passing, Boyd says:

It should be obvious that the only thing that email is well-suited for is things that look suspiciously like spam: broadcasting a static message to many, many people…

…So this will be the year when it becomes truly obvious — even to those dinosaurs who wanted to tar-and-feather me at Supernova — that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Better start a blog about iChat.

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