After recent comScore data showed Twitter stats leveling off as WordPress traffic continued to grow, some bloggers framed the results as an either/or proposition; if one platforms wins, the other loses.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has weighed in on the subject, stating that the interaction between microblogging and what he's calling "megablogging" is hardly a zero-sum game. "It's not really a 'versus,' it's an 'and'," he wrote.
Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank today. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.
The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.
WordPress.com just announced that its users can now use the service's Publicize feature to automatically send out a tweet whenever they post a new story. Wordpress's Publicize feature, which was only unveiled one week ago, already supported sending updates to Yahoo profiles via the Yahoo Updates service. WordPress uses Twitter's OAuth mechanism to connect to Twitter. The Twitter updates can be customized and will use Wordpress' wp.me URL shortener.
In 2003, blogging software powerhouse Six Apart launched TypePad, a Movable Type-based hosted-blog service aimed at less tech-savvy users.
Today, the company has announced TypePad Developer Program, a resource that will give developers access to the TypePad API and back end while running their sites on their own web servers. Six Apart is simultaneously launching TypePad Motion, a microblogging service built from the Pownce code base. Six Apart acquired Pownce from founders Kevin Rose (also founder of Digg), Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka in December 2008.
Last week we took a poll asking for your favorite 'light' blogging service. These are blogging services that make it very easy for you to share content and media. While old-school blogging service Blogger.com got the most votes in our poll, newer slicker services such as Tumblr, Soup.io and the recently trendy Posterous are popular with early adopters.
Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.
Posterous, the popular minimalist blogging service, just released a major update to its service, which includes customizable themes, a feature a lot of users had been waiting for. Users can now choose between five different themes, all of which are highly customizable. According to the company, additional themes will be added over time. Users can now also easily import their Tumblr blogs and even use their Tumblr themes as Posterous now also supports the Tumblr theme format. Posterous also announced that its traffic grew tenfold over the last 12 months to 4.4 million unique visits last month.
Once considered the leading search engine for blog-related queries, Technorati has fallen by the wayside in recent years. With no known strategy around new forms of media, the company quickly began to lose ground as Twitter and other conversational tools grew in popularity. In early July when the company launched Twittorati, it already seemed too late. However, in a surprising move, Technorati is switching gears again with an invitation for writers to join the Technorati blogging network.
The Federal Communications Commission launched a Twitter account and Blogband - a blog that will chronicle the progress and development of the National Broadband Plan. Said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, "We want it to be a two-way conversation. The feedback, ideas and discussions generated on this blog will be critical in developing the best possible National Broadband Plan". Genachowski has until February 2010 to submit a plan for broadband deployment to Congress. Telecoms, net neutrality lobbyists, tech companies and regular citizens are tripping over themselves to weigh in.
Pop-up info windows: someone had to do it right, right? After years of pushy, worthless little window overlays that pop up when you hover over a link, there are now a number of companies trying to offer bloggers and their readers a whole lot of value in what could be a handy format.
Below we briefly review two of these services, Apture and Zemanta's Balloons. Is this kind of product really worth using? Once you add a pop-up of someone's LinkedIn profile next to their name as you type it, you may never want to go back to not having a tool like this at your disposal.
At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.
