Internet giant Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) sent out invitations to 100,000 developers to come in a test the waters of its newest creation, Google Wave.

Unfortunately, for most of us, since the service is being offered on an invitation only basis, we will have to wait a bit longer to see what Google Wave is all about, but it does seem to offer some really nice features that will probably become very popular with internet users.

The business model of The Huffington Post, the largest and most famous political blogging and opinion site, fell apart completely yesterday. According to Hitwise, Huffington's traffic grew by 21% from October 28 to November 4. It has been rising sharply over the last year as interest in the election picked up speed.

With the election over, Huffington's traffic is certain to drop sharply and all of the reporters and editors it has hired since the beginning of the year may not have much to do.

Traditional wisdom is that old media will have to cut costs to stay alive, but there are some very successful Internet properties that may have to cut more since their natural audiences are leaving them. Political sites may turn to business and lifestyle reporting, but those categories are already crowded.

The Wall Street Journal writes "History, however, indicates that news outlets that benefit significantly from an election suffer about the same amount when it's over, so the Web sites will expand now at their peril."

Looking at Huffington, audience measurement service Compete shows the political website's traffic up 711% for the year ending in September. That number probably got even more impressive last month. In September, Huffington had 5.3 million visitors. In 2008, that figure was never above one million.

With all of the audience that Huffington is almost certain to lose it will also part with most of its advertising. And, with that, the large staff it will not be able to afford.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

A little while back, I sat down and asked a few questions of $30,000/month blogger John Chow in this post and it was a big hit. Few people realize there was so much money to be made from blogging.

A few months later, everything's changed: John Chow isn't reporting his monthly numbers anymore and even if he was, my personal blog, TimothySykes.com, would be blowing him away as just the other day, I detailed in this post how my little blog earned $70,000 in August.

Yes, you read that correctly, I might write for AOL and TradingMarkets.com, but I'm also an internet entrepreneur and judging from my blog's monetary growth -- $15,000 in May, $25,000 in June (both estimated since the figures weren't bragworthy), $45,000 in July (see detailed breakdown here) and of course August's blowout month which is made even more impressive considering I took a trip to Japan for the last 10 days of the month (see itinerary here), I'm succeeding rather nicely.

So, in honor of my religion -- Judaism (at Passover we ask ourselves four questions) -- I asked myself the four questions that matter most about what's worked and what hasn't. Obviously I'm biased, but I'll try to be as brutally honest as possible, as usual.

Q: Timothy, to what do you attribute your blog's astounding ability to make money even as traffic growth has flatlined somewhat?
A: Good question (and I must say you're looking rather handsome as you write this). I'd say No. 1 it's not holding anything back. Brutal honesty. With a lot of joking around/sarcasm. In a word: real.

I have no long one page sales sheets nor overly technical posts. It's all about writing from the heart -- whether some/many take offense or not. Considering I've been a profitable stock trader for the vast majority of my decade-long career, my experience and knowledge is worth something...especially considering that 90% of traders lose money!

Associated Press has made it quite clear that the organization intends to put the hammer down on bloggers who quote that news service. As one who routinely quotes and links to Associated Press content, all I can say is, "Yeah, good luck with that."

At first, AP took a hard-line stance, demanding that one particular blog should remove seven pieces of content which featured quotes from AP articles and stating that bloggers across the internet should curtail the use of AP content. However, when faced with a swift backlash from a cross section of well-known and heavily-read bloggers, the news service took a big step back. The New York Times reported that Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., stated in an interview that the agency was "heavy-handed" and that A.P. would "rethink its policies toward bloggers."

Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ: WFMI) CEO John Mackey nearly derailed his company's acquisition of Wild Oats with a series of blog entries and bizarre anonymous message board posting doing everything from trashing competitors to complimenting his own hairstyle.

The SEC opened an investigation that was recently closed without any action and now Mackey is back to blogging on the Whole Foods site. In a rambling post, Mackey explained the reasoning behind his postings and thanked his board of directors and the SEC for their support. He strongly denied that his postings critical of Wild Oats were designed to beat down that company's stock price, and also said that he had not intended to inflate this price of Whole Foods Market stock with his enthusiastic posts on that message board.

He added that "I wish to apologize to all the stakeholders of Whole Foods Market-customers, Team Members, investors, suppliers, and our communities."

Great. Now if he could just lower the prices so us poor folks could afford a 12 ounce bottle of organic carrot juice.

I often spend a little time over at Blogmaverick.com, where Mark Cuban recently sought to give the world of blogging a little of his insightful perspective. It seems that Mr. Cuban finds little to respect in the world of blogging, or at least in the world of slipshod ,cookie-cutter blogging. Though I found Mark's blog entry a trifle difficult to read, which is quite unusual coming from him, I nonetheless agree with most of the body of his post. I especially agree with his assertion that just because a blog is backed by the name of a well-known media organization does not in itself render that blog worthy of special notice.

Mark Cuban wrote, "...newspapers having 'bloggers' is easily one of the many bad decisions that newspapers have made over the past 10 years." If newspapers are going in a wrong direction by producing blogs, perhaps they need to reinstall the title reporter and drop the title blogger to give a different perspective to the reader. If newspapers are using the term blog simply as a culture hook, then they have it all wrong and they're just selling their reporters short. I believe that I'm in agreement with Mark Cuban when I say that true reporters should be releasing content within some format other than blogs. Blogging is what I do, and I'll be the first to tell you that I'm no reporter. The titles are absolutely not interchangeable, though they may sometimes be used correctly in tandem.

It was just an average Wednesday night for me-researching potential stock plays, working on some blog posts and catching up on many overdue emails, all to further my goal of becoming Cramer 2.0-when I saw a post on EliteTrader.com that linked to The Smoking Gun exposing Governor Spitzer's call girl "Kristen" as 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Apparently, Kristen was/is her professional name. Always one to jump when opportunity knocks, I raced to dig up everything I could on Ms. Dupre to post on my blog and break some news of my own. What happened next might or might not blow your mind.

Several websites had already linked to her MySpace profile (owned by News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) so I went there and grabbed her photos to add to my story. The other sites had used the photos, too, but the pictures were all tiny and spread out over multiple pages (no doubt to increase their hits and subsequently their Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) ads, so I saw opportunity in providing them all on one page just as they were. But I didn't stop there.

I also searched other social networks like Facebook and bingo, she had a profile there! That would be "my exclusive." A few more clicks and the post was published. Within minutes, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has indexed my article and while I was late to the party, my "Facebook Exclusive" made my story unique and the hits tumbled in. I'm used to 200-ish visitors/hour, but thanks to this one simple post, 1,500 people visited my site within the first 45 minutes. And that's when things got interesting.

The concept of "collaborative filtering" has been around for a long time. The pioneer is Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), which built the system that does things like "if you like this book, you might also like the following titles." Essentially, this is based on a variety of data sources, such as your purchase history as well as the behavior of similar users.

Well, a startup company, Outbrain, is providing its own flavor of collaborative filtering. In fact, the company has announced a venture capital round of $5 million. The investors include Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and GlenRock Israel.

The thinking behind Outbrain is that people want to read news stories and articles that those who have similar interests also read and liked. So, through a widget, a news site or blogger can allow users to rank content (using a five-start system).

I'm blogging. You're probably blogging. It's the "in" thing to do. And now, news surfaced this week that billionaire investor Carl Icahn may begin blogging on his corporate website, The Icahn Report.

In Carl Icahn prepares for a blogging debut, News.com explains that "Icahn, who is making a second run at Motorola's board, is considering using the blog to highlight reports that either he or his associates pen on a range of corporate governance topics, from excessive pay at underperforming companies to moves that fall short of being favorable to shareholders, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal."

In the wake of this news, ReadWriteWeb ran an article called A Guide to Billionaire Bloggers, showcasing some current billionaire bloggers and several they would want to see blogging.

It's an interesting trend that wealthy, activist-type investors are turning to new media to champion their causes. Mark Cuban uses his blog to write about lots of different things, including business.

So, I welcome Icahn's entrance into the world of blogging. He'll have to work hard to keep up with the likes of me...

Zack Miller is the Managing Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund.

Over the years, I've used a variety of blogging platforms. So far, my favorite is WordPress, which is the mastermind of Automattic.

Today there's some good news for WordPress users -- the company snagged $29.5 million in a round of financing. The investors include Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners and the New York Times (NYSE: NYT).

And yes, the founding developer of WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, has a blog post about the funding and the company's history. Keep in mind that there have been more than 5.8 million downloads of the software, with over 3.8 million in 2007. With such a base, the company has been generating a good amount of revenues (and now has about 18 full-time employees).

Writes Matt: "Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more -- small, open-source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far."

If you want to see other interesting venture capital investments, visit DealProfiles.com.

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

Back in early 2005, Six Apart purchased LiveJournal, an online community of bloggers. Now LiveJournal has been sold again – this time to SUP, a Russian media company.

Compared to biggies like MySpace and Facebook, LiveJournal is a smaller player, but it still has about 14 million unique users.

So how much is this deal worth? Unfortunately, Six Apart didn't disclose the price tag on the deal. But in light of the valuations of recent deals – especially the Facebook financing – I bet it wasn't cheap.

In fact, it looks like there may be a scramble to buy up social properties. Basically, traditional media companies realize they need to get more aggressive in the space.

Interesting enough, SUP has been managing the LiveJournal platform for Russia, accounting for nearly 30% of the user base.

As for Six Apart, it will have more time to devote to its blogging systems, such as Movable Type and TypePad. After all, the company must deal with the tough fight from rival Automattic, which manages WordPress.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

Shares in internet search behemoth Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently rose to their highest level ever, giving the company a market capitalization figure (briefly) of over $200 billion. For a company that does not exist except in the virtual sense, that's impressive. The company makes no physical products (save for corporate search appliances) and rose to that level in just over three years on the public market. Is this for real?

Well, Google's recent quarterly earnings have shown that, so far, it is. The company just continues to make money hand over fist in the internet search arena, and has worked many acquisitions into itself to prepare for the day when -- gasp -- it can't grow by leaps and bounds on search results-based text advertising prowess alone. The company reported huge Q3 earnings today, with revenues of over $4.23 billion.

Analyst consensus expectations were for a $3.25 EPS figure, and Google smashed that with a $3.38 (GAAP) figure. So, stay tuned below as we'll hear what Google execs have to say about yet another record-setting quarter. Be sure and use the "Refresh" key to make sure you catch all the minute-by-minute updates below. All times are in EST.

With the explosion of blogs and wikis, it gets tough to find information. True, tagging can be helpful. But it's a bit of a chore for content creators (yes, it is more fun writing stuff).

But there's help: Jiglu. Basically, the company has a system that automates the tagging process. More importantly, it's free.

It's fairly easy to use the service, which is available for platforms like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s Blogger. Jiglu scans your content and then comes up with a dynamic index. From there, you can place a cool box on your blog or wiki that has the relevant tags.

All in all, it's a good idea. However, the business model is kind of fuzzy. As usual, the company looks for ad revenues (who doesn't?). In theory, this sounds fine. Yet, don't bloggers want to keep their revenues? Why transfer that to an indexing service?

In other words, I have a feeling Jiglu might go through some iterations on the business model.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

Reuters (NASDAQ:RTRSY) has a blog section at the bottom of most business stories at Reuters.com. It is called Business Blog Posts, and it is powered by Blogburst. Blogburst is part of blog syndication service Pluck. And, Reuters is one of Pluck's owners.

Complicated? Yes.

The business blogs that Reuters runs are mostly small, one-person operations like Phil's Stock World and Captain Currency. Some, like The Kirk Report and Bill Cara, are well regarded. But, Reuters does them a disservice. It keeps the traffic for their content when it runs on Reuters.com. So, Reuters gets the ad revenue on those pages. The bloggers get their names on Reuters, and a link back to their sites, which is probably rarely used.

It is interesting to note that none of the big business blog sites like SeekingAlpha or Ticker Sense run in the Reuters program. They understand that the deal is good for Reuters and bad for the blogs. They aren't prepared to let Reuters compete with them for eyeballs using their own blog content.

It is a shame that Reuters has handled bloggers this way. Many other media outlets like WSJ.com and TheStreet.com comment on blogs but send traffic to the bloggers. Reuters has decided not to give the little guy a leg up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St. which was approached about the Reuters program and turned the company down.

In a sign of the increasing importance of high-end financial blogs, Reuters Group Plc (NASDAQ: RTRSY) is starting a new network of the sites. Or, it could be that the Reuters business development people have down time because of its upcoming purchase by Thomson Corp. (NYSE: TOC).

The offer that Reuters is making to a number of high-end blogs is that it will link to the participating sites from Reuters.com, offer free access to selected Reuters Headlines (RSS or Headline Wizard) and Reuters Video Player to publish Reuters News, and get 30% of an advertising program that the big financial services company will manage.

In return, each blog agrees to execute contracts with comScore and NetRatings to assign its traffic to Reuters.com. NetRatings ranks Reuters.com as the No.7 financial website with unique visitors of 6.1 million in May.

Reuters may be trying to match blog initiatives at media outlets including FT.com, WSJ.com, and AOL.com.

Either Reuters has a very high regard for financial blogs or it needs to pump up its audience ratings.

Disclosure: 24/7 Wall St. was approached by Reuters about this opportunity.

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