Common sense states that if you’re new to blogging, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to gain an audience if you pick a field that’s not oversaturated with high profile bloggers and thousands of new bloggers writing about the same subject.

The sports wasteland of February has been brushed away as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament gets under way. Here are some sites that will have you setting up a bracket and getting back to work without costing your employer $75 billion in productivity losses.

The Daily Blog Tips blog has just released the first of its Blogger Face-Off series. This is where 2 bloggers are asked the same questions and their answers are posted side by side. This week the Daily Blog featured 2 very popular bloggers: Jeremy Shoemaker and Darren Rowse.

Over the past few days I’ve been receiving a wave of blog spam from SEO lab – all of it to blogspot accounts – and all built around hyphenated money keywords ending in a seemingly random 2 or 3 alphanumeric characters.

For example:

college-loans-zet.blogspot.com
free-slots-lol.blogspot.com
flexeril-huf.blogspot.com

The blogosphere has been buzzing amid reports that Microsoft plans to release a successor to Windows Vista within the next two years. Some insiders predict that Vienna, the codename for the project, is poised for a 2009 release.

At January’s Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates dropped a bombshell. In an interview with this blogger, he openly discussed the future of the Windows brand and when we could expect to see the next offering in the product line:

A California blogger becomes one of the latest to be dragged into court after an inflammatory blog post. A brief tale about tracking down a spammer, which also held the accused personal contact information, won Jerry Baker a defamation lawsuit. The case also illustrates the potential pitfalls of Internet research.

Google’s not doing so well in China; according to some estimates, the market share of its main competitor, Baidu, is 35% larger. Perhaps, then, the company will listen to Isaac Mao, who has given his opinion on how “to save Google in China and save Internet in China.”

comScore Networks, a digital measuring firm has released a report on the top Web properties for December, ranked by unique visitors and who the biggest gainers were for 2006.

Worldwide Internet usage increased 10 percent from December 2005 to December 2006. In the search category the top three sites that have the largest global audience grew 9 percent. Google the number two site worldwide increased visitors to their site by 13 percent.

Some people are creatures of habit; others are just the tiniest bit afraid of new things. Those who use old versions of Google’s Blogger may soon have to embrace some changes, though – Google is going to start, in an entirely non-evil way, forcing them to switch to the new version.

Free speech meets corporate paranoia as the Electronic Frontier Foundation took up the cause of ‘Spocko’, an anonymous blogger who posted audio clips broadcast in San Francisco on ABC Radio to his site.

The @media 2007 web site has just been launched, and you can now register to attend:

Renee Blodget, Silicon Valley PR queen, notes that press rooms and other places were a lot more crowded at CES due to more bloggers.

When one company is in competition with another, it usually won’t point consumers towards the competitor’s products. Sure, it happens – some corporations believe that they shine in comparison tests – but it’s fairly rare. The practice just became even more unusual, as Google ceased to promote MapQuest and Yahoo Maps on its main results page.

360 Enterprises, Inc. – the parent of our sponsor Text Link Brokers – is getting ready to launch SponsoredReviews, a marketplace where bloggers can charge a fee for a review and advertisers can search a database of publishers.

PR Week UK has a full-page feature on page 18 of this week’s edition (Jan 12 cover date) about the Edelman/Microsoft Vista blogger relations kerfuffle entitled “Are freebies a blogosphere taboo?”

Hey have you ever heard of the Microsoft Designertopia Conference?