So which is the most powerful and influential blog network in the world? Well there are two contenders, the brit owned New York based Gawker media and Weblogs Inc, which for all intents and purposes these days is AOL. And when either of the networks tweak their designs the rest of the blogging world watches very closely. So last week's revamp of AOL's flagship blog, Engadget, has already become a big talking point among commercial bloggers.

Since purchasing Engadget and the rest of Weblogs Inc in 2006 AOL has established the gadget site as the number one consumer electronics portal in the world. It has moved a long way from being a typical blog both in terms of the content on the site and its design. Last week's tweak takes it even further away from what we used to understand as blogging.

There are lots of changes to the template but three stand out. Firstly at the top of the site there is now a floating bar that Engadget calls its hero module - this can be used by the editors to focus on any type of content they feel has a long shelf life. At the moment the bar is full of Christmas buying guides, next month it will be CES etc. Highlighting long tail content has become hugely important now for commercial blogs. Sure most still receive a large chunk of their traffic via quick news stories and are fed by RSS, Google News and organic Google search. However long tail content has enabled some websites/online companies to grow massively (Demand Media springs to mind) and it is content that inevitably has longer shelf life and more intrinsic value than most news content. The trick is to be able to balance the two and the new Engadget reflects this.

Underneath the hero module there is now a pictorial section which highlights top stories. These are housed in five large-ish images and are designed to pick on the day's premier news. Since Gawker added top story thumbnails to its pages many months ago this has become a standard feature on many blogs. It is highly effective in keeping casual readers on a site. In some ways it is surprising that Engadget has left it so long to add this.

Finally there is what are arguably the redesign's coolest feature - the hubs. These are like mini categories which focus on key individual products or events. Take a peek at the one for the recently announced Motorola Cliq phone, you get to access to all the stories that mention the phone along with videos, galleries and a timeline that shows which it was announced and when it was most writen about. Expect to see this kind of feature copied on a lot of other blogs soon.

Finally Engadget hasn't followed Gawker, and its gadget blog Gizmodo, to a home page that features just snippets of story and thumbnails Instead Engadget keeps the long established blog format which allows readers to access a lot of stories without ever having to click on. A bit like this blog, but not our recently revamped websites. This flies in the face of most current commercial web design which attempts to get readers to continue to click through - the more page impressions the site gets the higher its ad revenue. For me it looks a little dated and in spite of the really clever new features I think the redesign looks a little cluttered. From an advertisers point of view as well the main two ads - the banner and the rectangular ad on the right near the top - look a little buried to me. Still for a hugely popular site like Engadget this is probably not that much of an issue. Must get round to redesigning this site soon too...

Anyhow, the team at Engadget has come up with was really innovative, dynamic and user friendly redesign and it will be interesting to see if other AOL sites gets a similar treatment soon.

I finally got round to doing something I have been threatening to do for ages and that is produce a list of the UK's top Twitterers (or is it Tweeters?).

Except that this list takes no account of number of followers, influence or retweeting power. It is purely based on the number of tweets a person has made.

Here's the ramble - you can read the rest of the post and see the list here

Alright so we all know that Jonathan Ross is the UK's most influential Twitterer and that Mashable's Pete Cashmore has the biggest number of followers for a Brit (though we know he spends lot of time in San Francisco these days), but the question that I really wanted to know the answer to is who in the UK tweets the most?

Is it a very bored person in a dull job whose boss hasn't yet got round to mastering email let alone micro blogging or a social media advocate who has to spend days following everyone and retweeting influentials cos that's the main part of their job description?

So, some time in April, I started a on a mission to find out who the UK's top twitterers are.
I guess I was just intrigued by how often people use Twitter and why they use it. Perhaps, most importantly, what kind of people are posting 20 plus tweets a day.

The full list is on TechDigest here

There are fewer moments in life that have given me as much pleasure as writing the first story on TechDigest. Not that the post was groundbreaking journalism, a contender for the Pulitzer prize or even completely free of typos (ouhc!). It was just that after years of wrestling with HTML codes and invariably giving up, I'd found a foolproof way of realising one of my big ambitions - to launch a gadgets website.

That was almost five years ago, and although Shiny Media didn't really follow for a few years later, the blog that kicked off one of the the UK's leading commercial blogging networks was born.

Ok, so we might have had a bit of run in with Panorama the other week, but most of us here at Shiny do actually love the Beeb, we just wish that its bloggers and journalists would link out more.

So great to see that the blog of the beeb's Chief Football Writer, Phil McNulty, features a decent list of soccer blogs (including some British ones).

Cheers Phil. Now if only the BBC tech blog, which at the moment doesn't link to any UK blogggers and the entertainment bloggers followed Phil's lead.

Over the past few years I have grown ever more incredulous about the way that the BBC has consistently stolen from, patronised and generally belittled blogs, especially British ones. There seems to be a pervading belief within Shepherd's Bush that the corporation is the British media and that the rest of the people who strive away working in commercial sectors are just basically there to do their research. Bloggers, as this post highlights, are beneath contempt and clearly don't have worthwhile opinions.

The latest example of this arrogance is this week's Panorama expose of the way in which some of Primark's suppliers were employing child labour to finish their very competitively priced garments. It was gritty Panorama stuff, highlighting an injustice and sparking a debate about the ethics of the fashion industry.

Yet while the programme highlighted low pay and child labour the programme makers seemed to have no ethical qualms about screwing British journalists.

Ok, so we are actually number three. But ahead of us are two huge TV corporations - one of which we actually help fund - who spend millions of pounds on video content every year. We spend less than the cost of five minutes of EastEnders each year on YouTube vids yet are still not too far behind them.

Over the last few months we have averaged over a million views of our gadgets, fashion, games, green and footy vids and the number of subscribers is rocketing too. In fact we have twice as many subscribers as Gordon Brown's YouTube channel and an awful lot more than the massively hyped WebCameron, both of which you can find here.

As well as taking  advantage of YouTube's recently announced monetisation program we are  working with a variety of brands on our videos. For example LG has just finished a four month sponsorship of our Shiny Fashion TV videos as well as working with us on a media talent competition. We have other sponsors lined up who we will be announcing shortly.

I have always felt that there was a massive opportunity for Shiny to pair our quality written content with videos presented by the same writers. It is great to be able to read someone's words and then see them in action talking about their passion. It looks as if our readers/viewers feel the same way too.

Anyhow here's our latest YouTube star, Gary Cutlack, in action, and Zara and here Wi-Fi T-shirt. If only David Cameron was into batteries...

Oh how I love the Daily Mail. What a splendid newspaper. No really. Its online offering is now very good to the point where a US-exiled liberal friend of mine confessed to me the other day that after the Gruniard, it is his first online stop for UK news. If the Fleet St gossip is right too the Mail's site is really starting to take off and could well become one of the biggest UK online portals.

So the paper does itself no favours when it lets its columnists write utter shit like this. Yep, Keith Waterhouse, a man who is guaranteed a place in heaven for penning the wonderful Billy Liar, has a pop at Googlers (whatever they night be) and Bloggers who he argues don't have an original thought between them.

Mmm odd that when there is a great deal of talk in PR circles about how blogging is setting the news agenda and it is national newspapers who are pinching all the blogger's stories.

Another priceless classic is '

'They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.'

Which paper do you write for Keith? is it the Daily Mail which very rarely links out to stories on other sites yet quite happily claims them as its own?

Like the story it ran the other day on the Fembot for sale on eBay. A story which first appeared on our blog Bayraider and was the result of our journo spending hours trawling the site looking for goodies.

Ultimately with Keith it boils down to the fact that the number of people who are interested in his tablets delivered from on high, is dwindling.

Personally I prefer to read opinions that aren't just ill-informed rants (which ironically he says is true of bloggers) but Keith everyone has a right to an opinion, even you.

Here at Shiny we are obviously huge fans of both MySpace and YouTube. You can find our content all over both sites. Yet while it was obvious to all of us that MySpace was going to be huge the minute that bands got a sniff of it, the speed in which YouTube has established itself has taken everyone, including us, by surprise.

The big debate now in the Shiny office is quite what impact YouTube is going to have on what the office pensioners refer to as the ‘music scene.’ Or as Katie so eloquently put it the other day, ‘It is so over for bands on MySpace now - YouTube is so where it’s at.’

The other day I spent an hour or so looking for some British gadget blogs. This was kind of inspired by the odd break in posting (it went dark, as the Americans say, for two weeks) on the otherwise excellent GadgetSpy. Sure there's Red Ferret, Gizmodo (UK version) and the big publishing companies have their own titles, but there wasn't as many as I'd expected, and certainly a lot less than there was this time last year.

Anyhow save me from spending more hours on Technorati and let know about yours. We need more UK blogs to link to on our titles.

Interesting to read an article in a national newspaper about gadgets for girls that doesn’t actually mention Shiny Shiny. Rebecca Armstrong, who is one of the Indie's games journos, wrote a piece in today's paper highlighting the growing trend of girls getting into gadgets, yet managed not to plug Shiny or  the hundred or so other gadget girl sites.

Instead, in what is a major coup for the PR who sold the story, she takes figures from Stuff Magazine which says its female readership has quadrupled in the last year. Stuff is a really interesting mag at the moment as, unlike a lot of tech titles, it has bucked the downward trend and is putting on readers. It now has nearly 100,000 a month. Its publisher Haymarket has assembled a really good team and the quality of the editorial of the magazine reflects this.

Nevertheless even if we assume that 10-15,000 of Stuff’s readers are women that’s actually minuscule compared to 300,000 unique readers (of which around 80% are female) who visit Shiny Shiny on a monthly basis.

Shiny Shiny is that rare thing, a British commercial blogging success story. It was the first women's gadgets blog, is the most widely read and influential and has spawned many imitators. How many other British blogs have broken new ground and attracted a worldwide audience? Can’t think of many…

Ashley