See below for response from Tom Rosenstiel, Director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism
"More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four - the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links."
This is one of the assertions in the latest report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, "New Media, Old Media."
AltHouse, Citizen WElls, Economist's View: These are some of the most popular blogs in the world and their streams of daily posts get hundreds of legitimate comments. They are published on Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad, respectively. A report published today by data analysis service Postrank concludes that legacy-hosted blog platforms are still far ahead of much-hyped microblogging services like Tumblr and Posterous in terms of reader engagement. This despite the fact that you don't hear about people using Blogger and Typepad much anymore in early-adopter circles.
Read on for graphs of engagement below. The same analysis performed here can be run on any sets of top-level domains using the newly released Postrank Domain Activity API.
Regator, the human-curated blog directory and news aggregator, just relaunched with a vastly improved and easier to use design, an improved search engine, and tight integration with Facebook Connect and Delicious. Regator's mission is to aggregate the best content from blogs across over 500 categories. To do so, Regator's editors created a vast directory of the best blogs on the Internet, with topics ranging from tech news and politics to tourism and beekeeping. The service's algorithms then create front pages for every topic that includes the most popular and interesting articles from these blogs, as well as an index of related posts and lists of trending topics.
Online bookmarking tools haven't really changed much over the last few years. Most services still present you with a basic list of tagged links. Pearltrees, however, is taking a radically different approach. The Paris-based company organizes links as a collection of "pearls" that are connected by a mind map-like tree graph. Starting today, you can also embed these collections in your own blog posts.
Do you remember Google Wave? After a lot of hype around the initial launch of Wave - which some pundits billed as an "email killer" at the time - things have been rather quiet around the service. The latest update to Wave, however, could push the service back into the public eye. Publishers can now easily embed waves on their sites and readers can see them without having to be logged in to Wave, which makes Wave a great live blogging platform.
A new study released earlier this month seems to contradict findings from Pew Internet Project's February report on the declining blog authorship and blog readership among the youngest generation of online users. Instead of seeing a downward trend in blogging, the latest research appears, at first glance, to have us questioning those prior reports.
According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company, young adults known as "Millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs, with nearly one third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves.
So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong?
Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it's a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter.
The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge.
Posterous, one of our favorite light blogging services, started out as a very minimalist blogging and media sharing platform. In its earliest days, the only way to actually post a story to Posterous was by email. Today, however, Posterous announced the next version of its blog editor, which takes Posterous away from its minimalist origins. Posterous now allows users to upload images, videos and documents directly from the web editor, for example. In addition, Posterous now also features a full rich text editor.
Link blogs, light blogs, blogs on the side; found treasures and half-formed thoughts - it turns out that many members of the ReadWriteWeb team are also publishing on Posterous, Tumblr and other casual blogging platforms.
These are the places you can learn about the people behind the news and analysis here at ReadWriteWeb. Where you can find cool little videos and images that we want to share but that don't cross the thresh-hold for full-scale RWW blogging. Publishing and reading on these platforms is a lot of fun. We've listed some of the fun blogs published by members of our team below. We'd love for our readers to share links to your sites like this if you have them.
Discontented with the notion of merely reading about the iPad launch and perusing reviews thereof? Time to stop worrying and learn to love the liveblog. Marvel at our semi-comprehensive list of people in line bruising their thumbs in the service of moment-by-moment documentation of line speeds.
