After a break of several weeks, here is a new interview with a woman who also is a blogger. Nawal Zerrouni writes a culinary blog, Les Casseroles de Nawal and also teaches biology (’blogogy’?) while having a background in biochemistry. Her blog is not specialized in French cooking. You’ll find Indian, Tibetan or Algerian recipes there, depending on her mood or what’s available on the market where she does her shopping. I’ve spent a long moment with this explorer of the cooking world and here are some selected excerpts from this conversation (in French).

The “Fiscally Fit” weekly column of the Wall Street Journal is looking at the value of a blog and at what price you can sell a blog to a press group or a television station for example. In “What’s Your Blog Worth?” (access limited to paying subscribers), Terri Cullen writes that many companies find interesting and relatively cheap to buy a blog to gain access to its readers. And she even mentions my name because I’m continuing to write a blog about emerging technology trends for ZDNet.

Here is what she writes about my blogging activity.

Anita Campbell, editor of the blog Small Business Trends, based in Cleveland, Ohio, says she’s also seeing more hybrid business arrangements, where the blogger retains ownership of the blog but is paid to direct traffic to a corporate site.

A recent example of this type of partnership was French blogger Roland Piquepaille’s deal with Zdnet.com, owned by CNET Networks Inc. in San Francisco. Posts on his Roland Piquepaille Technology Trends blog now include a brief description of his commentary on the particular topic at hand, but if you want to read the entire post you must click on a link that takes you to the Emerging Technology Trends blog he pens on Zdnet.

In fact, this is not completely true. I proposed this format to ZDNet to build the audience of the new blog. And Cullen was unable to reach me by e-mail before the deadline for her column.

If you want to sell your blog — which is not my case — what price can you ask for? Here is the answer from Steve Broback, a founder of Blog Business Summit, a conference organizer in Seattle.

How much a corporate buyer would be willing to pay for a blog varies depending on the content, but generally an offer of one to two times annual revenue would be consistent with offers for other small, Web-based media properties, Mr. Broback says. If your blog generates revenue of $10 a day, or $3,650 a year, you might expect to receive an offer in the ballpark of $7,500.

For more information, the full text of the Wall Street Journal article is available from a blog called Big Slick Nuts.

Kevin Sites is a veteran television correspondent who has worked for NBC and CNN. But he’s mostly famous for the blog he started to write in 2003 from Iraq, where he posted articles, photos and videos. Now, Yahoo! has hired him to cover on wars around the world in a new blog, Hotzone, which will be launched on September 26. The New York Times says that Kevin Sites will deliver a daily article with pictures and videos during his trips. Does this mean that Yahoo! is building a news organization? The company says it just wants to develop signature programming that will complement content from its current providers.

Here are some excerpts from the article of the New York Times.

Yahoo, [in its first big move into original online video programming,] has hired Kevin Sites, a veteran television correspondent, to produce a multimedia Web site that will report on wars around the world.

The Web site, called “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone” (hotzone.yahoo.com) will focus entirely on Sites’s travels as a war correspondent and will use nearly every kind of format the Internet allows. His reports will begin Sept. 26.

What will we find on this blog?

Sites intends to visit over the course of a year every place on earth that is defined by international organizations as a war or conflict zone. The list is evolving but is likely to include about 36 countries.

As he travels to these places, Sites will write a 600-to-800-word dispatch each day and produce a slide show of five to 10 digital photographs. He will also narrate audio travelogues. There will be several forms of video — relatively unedited footage posted several times a week, and once a week, a more traditional video report, edited in the style of a network news broadcast.

Apparently, this site is only the first one of a long series to come. Without competing with its current content providers, Yahoo! wants to add specific content “that embraces the qualities of the Internet.”

Jeff Jarvis is the publisher of the well-known blog BuzzMachine, which covers news and media. He recently ignited a controversy with Dell and its customer service, and the computer giant was forced to admit its defeat. Now the New York Times reports that since last Monday, Jeff has been hired as director of the new-media program and associate professor by CUNY (City University of New York). All students will be required to take at least one new-media class exploring digital journalism — and create blogs.

Here are some excerpts from the article of the New York Times.

Jarvis, 51, has been developing the new-media curriculum for CUNY’s journalism program since last year. As part of the core curriculum, all students will be required to take at least one new-media class exploring digital journalism.

“New media will be a big part of the school,” said Stephen B. Shepard, dean of the new Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. “And Jeff is a major figure in the world of citizen journalism, blogging and online journalism.”

Jarvis said that the media could achieve greater transparency by using blogs, podcasts and online video. “I want students to explore the relationship of the media with the public,” he said.

I don’t know if the CUNY example will be followed by the Centre de Formation
et de Perfectionnement des Journalistes (CFPJ) in France. But if the CFPJ needs someone to tell journalists how to use blogs efficiently and professionally, I’m here :-)

In “New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs,” the Wall Street Journal tries to guess which company will become the Google of blogs (article freely available). Several companies are already well known, such as Technorati or Bloglines. But like it is quite difficult to compare the results from Web search engines, this is the same for blog-search sites, and for the same reasons: the number of indexed blogs is very different from a site to another, and the algorithms also are very different.

Here is an excerpt from the article of the Wall Street Journal.

For those who want just a small taste of what prominent bloggers are saying, DayPop is a good place to go. It culls its search results from fewer than 60,000 blogs chosen by editors. That means it’s likely to offer up relatively few links to well-known bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Dan Gillmor. Sites like Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket and BlogPulse scour far more blogs — between 15 million and 20 million each — so searches on those sites deliver far more results, often from obscure sources. While Technorati and BlogPulse focus exclusively on blogs, other sites — Feedster and IceRocket included — offer the option to bring in mainstream news sources.

After adding Bloglines to the above list, I started two specific searches, the first on my name, “piquepaille.” Here are the number of results given by these blog-search engines: Bloglines (66), BlogPulse (296), DayPop (21), Feedster (201), IceRocket (404) and Technorati (683).

Then I tried to know how many blogs have mentioned the new game console from Sony. Here are the number of results for “sony psp”: Bloglines (635), BlogPulse (21,217), DayPop (363), Feedster (32,085), IceRocket (35,913) and Technorati (36,096).

Anyway, like with Google, you almost will only look to the first ten or twenty results. So all these blog-search sites are probably good enough to satisfy your curiosity.

Now here the last paragraph of the Wall Street Journal about the audience of these blog-search services.

The new blog-search sites draw only a sliver of the visitors that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN do. Most of them didn’t have enough traffic in July to register on the radar of Internet-tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Technorati did, with 642,000 unique visitors. But its traffic still made up less than 1% of Google’s visitors that month.

Not only Google has more traffic, but it also gives much more results: 364,000 pour “piquepaille” and 32,600,000 pour “sony psp” (13,800,000 for a search of these two words between quotes). As the number of sites really accessible from a Google search is still limited to 999, these huge numbers are not very important.

Some of you may not know that I’m also the publisher of a blog focused on new technologies, Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends. Two weeks ago, Dan Farber, editor-in-chief for ZDNet US, asked me if I would be interested to continue to write this blog, but for ZDNet. And ten days after, it’s already live. I’m now one of the few bloggers of ZDNet, itself part of CNET Networks. This new blog is called Emerging Technology Trends.

You’ll find there in-depth daily stories about what I found interesting. ZDNet gave me complete freedom about the subjects I want to write about.

Below is the logo of my new blog.

My former tech blog will continue — I might disagree with ZDNet one day — but its format has changed since September 3. Now, it only contains an introduction and a link to the full story on ETT. As an example, look at yesterday’s story, The World’s Biggest Walrus and its expanded version on ZDNet.com.