Has the battle between GSM and CDMA taking on VHS vs. Betamax proportions? In the wake of Brazilian carrier Vivo's decision to overlay its CDMA network with GSM, Scotia Capital Markets analyst John Henderson is suggesting Bell Canada, one of two CDMA carriers, in Canada, may follow the same path by spending $400-million in 2007/2008. In a research note, Henderson said Bell may have little choice but to make the GSM investment if it wants to keep its best customers when wireless local number portability is introduced next year. Currently, Rogers Wireless is the only GSM carrier in Canada, which makes it an attractive choice for businessmen and people who travel internationally. Given these are the most lucrative customers, it is a market no carrier wants to miss out on. But If WLNP allows Bell customers to easily switch to Rogers, that would be bad news for a business already struggling. Another consideration is that 90% of the handsets now being made are GSM, which means the hottest new device will be developed for GSM carriers first. The future of CDMA may rest on the large shoulders of Verizon Wireless. As long as Verizon sticks with CDMA, the technology will stick around. If Verizon blinks, CDMA could easily disappear...much like Betamax.

As the blogosphere becomes increasingly crowded (75,000 new blogs a day, according to Technorati), one of the big major challenges is finding high-quality blogs - however you want to define "quality". Search is obviously one of the tools, although most of the existing vehicles are based on the most recent or most relevant rather than posts worth reading - whether you're using Technorati, Sphere or Google Blog Search. The problem and challenge is coming up with a system that features technology and/or humans to separate the wheat from the chaff.
  TheGoodBlogs is taking a crack at this quality vs. quantity challenge with a new service that uses the blogging community to promote and recommend the better blogs. This approach, in theory, will help expose high-quality blogs rather than just the "A-listers". Rather than being a search engine or a portal to help people search/find blogs, TheGoodBlogs has created a Javascript-driven box that you can put on your blog that features five other blogs. The box is continually updated. and can be customized to feature a particular category.
  Truth be told, the service far from perfect but it is very early days. One major challenge will be ensuring quality given everyone's idea of "quality" is different. What one person may consider to be good, another will see as terrible. Unless TheGoodBlogs can come up with an eBay-like rating system (driven by bloggers and blog readers), it risks becoming a huge blog directory rather than something that drives quality over quantity. Another obstacle is getting the community big enough to ensure new, fresh blogs are highlighted as opposed to the same  ones that dominate TechMeme or Megite. Still, TheGoodBlogs is a step in the right direction. The service, which will rely on small banner ads to generate revenue, is currently in private beta but invitations can be requested here.
Note: In the name of transparency, I've provided TheGoodBlogs with unpaid advisory services. Well, it's not exactly unpaid given they've bought me two coffees at Starbucks - which makes the compensation about equal to my daily AdSense payments.
Update: Scott Rosenberg has some issues with Technorati - even after the recent redesign, while TG Daily suggests the number of domain names is jumping due to the battle between Microsoft and Google to attract user to their blog services.