Russell Beattie is getting together a Six Apart price pool.

I knew the The New York Times bought About.com, but for $820,000 per weblog? Wow.

More discussion on About.com and NYTimes at Jay Rosen’s PressThink, at John Battelle’s Searchblog, at Dan Gillmor’s Grassroots Journalism, and an interview with Martin Nisenholtz, SVP-Digital Operations, NYTimes, at PaidContent.

Speaking of weblog hosting companies, a relative surprised me with his Xanga blog. I took a look around – it seems a very simple and easy to use blog hosting community. Like LiveJournal, it allows you to post privately, to selected lists of people. Impressive.

Jesse James Garrett posts an introduction to Ajax the application model that Google has used to develop their most recent hits – Google Suggest, Google Maps, and Gmail.

Truth be told, these technologies have been around for a while. The best article on all this is over at Apple’s site and was written way back in May 2004.

Flash developers are probably yawning over this too since, to a Flash web app developer, this isn’t a revolutionary idea – it’s simply the way things are done. And Flash developers can make requests across domains. Something that JavaScript can’t.

Still… this looks to open the door for all sorts of interesting UIs and if you already know JavaScript – you’re ahead of the game.

I’m very excited to announce that you can now do keyword searches on the latest blog postings in the Philadelphia region.

This is different from Technorati in an important respect: the blogs that Philly Future aggregates are verified to be quality blogs by the editorial team of the site.

Right now the search functionality is rather simplistic, only singular keywords or singular phrases, results are limited to the latest twenty, and it searches on stop words (bad, bad, bad). But check out just how powerful this is:

Search Philadelphia’s blogs for:

septa

wifi

eagles

john street