Social networking sites gained a lot of eyeball-share last year. The time that users spent on sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace nearly doubled in the past year, increasing by 83% relative to April 2008. The number of minutes spent on Facebook by its 200 million active members spiked 700% year-over-year to 13.9 billion. The second most popular social networking site, MySpace, saw a 31% fall in minutes spent on the site to 4.97 billion, but ranked number one in video stream consumption.

Blogger, Tagged and Twitter took the third, fourth and fifth spots. In April 2009, the number of tweets unleashed shot up 3,712% from April 2008.

The missing link? Money.

When Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) bought RSS company Feedburner, experts seemed to think it made a good match with the search companies big blog business, Blogger. Most people who keep blogs use RSS as a way to get their content out. Google could offer a platform for blogging with Blogger, selling ads with AdSense, and distributing content with FeedBurner.

The system has one flaw. Google did not set up a system for selling ads in Feedburner so that consumers looking at a site's RSS feed would also see targeted ads next to the headlines. It was a break in the system which made it incomplete in terms of helping blogs drive profits.

Google has fixed that. According to Alley Insider, "for content publishers who have long feared RSS as a monetization-killer, AdSense for feeds somewhat levels the playing field." The trouble with running blogs or other small websites is the lack of ways to bring in revenue. Google is offering a partial solution to that.

Of course, since Google keeps a large portion of the AdSense for Feedburner revenue, the huge tech company is looking after its own interests.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com and author of the Ten Stocks Under $10 Newsletter.

I'm not writing this piece for my associate bloggers here on BloggingStocks. The fact of the matter is that most, if not all of them are far better, more well versed and more professional than myself. I don't even consider myself a professional writer. Basically I'm a hack commentator with some creative potential. But be that as it may, I do know a thing or two about presentation, and if there's one thing I've learned about blogging is that the presentation is what garners the healthy numbers. So, for the aspiring and struggling bloggers out there who want to expand their potential, this one's for you.

I get quite a lot of my material from three major news services. United Press International, Associated Press International, and The Financial News Wire. The angle is that I tend to quickly skip past the stories that I know everyone else is reporting. I know what's being reported because I research that fairly well. So when I get down to sifting through the news to determine what I'll present to you, I already have a pretty well formed picture of what stories are not requiring another go around. Sometimes I do present a piece regarding a story that has been hashed over pretty well, but in those cases you'll notice that I don't just put out a carbon copy of the press release. In the cases when I grab onto a hot headline to present content to the readers, it is my purpose to give them more of a scoop of my opinionated brain matter than just another carbon copied dateline.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has purchased RSS feed leader FeedBurner. Terms were not disclosed, but the cost was rumored to be about $100 million. The company provides feeds for about 400,000 customers, many of them blogs. It will be a good fit with Google's Blogger platform, which is widely used.

More menacing for Google's competition is the fact that Google will control the largest banner ad serving company, DoubleClick, the premier search text ad business, AdSense, and, with FeedBurner, the largest RSS advertising platform. Firms, including AOL and The Wall Street Journal, participate in the FeedBurner advertising network. Advertising is sold by channels like "business" and "news' with feeds from the appropriate sites banded together.

Once again, it is surprising that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) were not buyers. The price of the company was not so high as to be out of reach.

Google's M&A seems to be as good as its search tools.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media, which is a top publisher of computer books and a producer of a variety of conferences. He is also a pretty good writer and has been ahead of the curve on a variety of areas, such as open source and Web2.0.

Over the years, he has put this experience to work in terms of savvy investments. An example is Blogger, which was sold to Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in 2003.

Well, he now has a VC fund called AlphaTech Ventures, which has about $51 million. Not a lot of money for a VC fund, true. But it's just the right amount for early stage companies. It's difficult for early stage companies to get financing, so there is a niche for AlphaTech to help fill.

Besides, O'Reilly has certainly leveraged his Rolodex. Some of his investors include Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Pierre Omidyar , who is the founder of eBay (NASDAQ EBAY).

I think the timing is pretty good on this, as tech IPOs are starting to make a comeback. Indeed, the fund has already put its money to work. The investments include: Instructables, Chumby, and Wesabe.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

I'm attending the 2006 Blogher Conference in San Jose, California, and many of the net femarati are here. I just finished listening to an enlightening talk by the co-founder of Blogger (now owned by Google), Meg Hourihan, and the co-founder of flickr (now owned by Yahoo!), Caterina Fake. Moderator Marnie Webb pointed out that both of the products for which the two speakers are famous, were accidental by-products of their respective companies' original mission.

Fake was working with her co-founders on a role-playing game, while Hourihan was working on project management software. Declaring the concept of a stealth period "dead," the flickr co-founder mentioned that user feedback was central in determining how the photo sharing software would be shaped; and Hourihan echoed that sentiment with regards to the very useful blogging software her company, Pyra, developed just for fun. "If we had started out to create a photo sharing site, it never would have happened," said Fake. "We would have done market research, and discovered that all the money was in on-demand printing, and that took too much capital investment, and we'd never make money. We would have decided it wasn't worth it."

It's quite an interesting detail of product history and it's amazing to think how many great, world-changing products were accidental. What's more, it's worth considering from a management strategy point of view: how does a company encourage its employees to invest time in offshoots of the central strategy, and then fail to analyze those happy accidents to death? Are big companies forever destined to buy these providential mistakes simply because they never would have made sense, had they been "product developed"? Even Google, king of the entrepreneurial, "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks" spirit, had to buy Blogger. Which companies are best positioned to find and care for accidental successes?

Do you spend the day glued to the your favorite finance news source, waiting for breaking stories to brighten your day? Are the stock quotes for your favorite companies always an Alt-Tab away? Do you know the difference between P/E and EPS and MSFT? Most importantly, are you passionate? And can you write with wit, charm and a tad bit of snark?

If this describes you, and you'd like to share your passion with the blogosphere, go to our main site and click on the "more info" button under the "Bloggers" tab. Don't forget to submit three samples of between 100 and 400 words.

The stocks we cover now include:

• Apple Computer (AAPL)
• eBay Inc (EBAY)
• Genl Electric (GE)
• Google, Inc (GOOG)
• Microsoft Corp (MSFT)
• Time Warner (TWX)
• Wal-Mart Stores (WMT)
• Yahoo Inc (YHOO)

We've asked each of our bloggers to introduce themselves and talk a little about why they love the market and what positions they call their own. We encourage our bloggers to own common stock and abide by a common code of conduct.

Who are you, and why are you passionate about stocks?
I live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

I have degrees from the University of Virginia. My academic specialty was economic theory and phenomenology. At least the theory side explains part of my interest in the market.

Before my writing career, I worked as a print and runway model here in the U.S. and in Milan. I’ve also run a non-profit construction company. I’ve picked tomatoes on an organic farm. And I’ve delivered mail. Lots and lots of mail. 

Currently, I’m a  writer for Live Investment News, a personal finance and investing website geared towards the average invididual investor.  I’m also a principal of Proofrock Copy, a freelance copywriting company. In my free time, I write fiction and carry on in a rather cheeky blog called The Cool Honey.

My interest in the stock market comes out of a somewhat wonkish interest in popular culture. Essentially, I think the marketplace is where pop culture plays itself out; if you want to understand culture right now, you’ve got to know something about the companies that produce it.