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.

Highlights from the report include the following:

• Total reader engagement has grown 30% year over year or 69% total for the top 1,000 feeds, which includes blogs and mainstream news sites.

For 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each of 2007, 2008 and 2009...

• Engagement on-site has grown in absolute terms but the share of total engagment that happens on-site vs. off-site has dropped 50%.


• Trackbacks have fallen from 19% of engagement to 3% of engagement.


• Engagement on social networks like but not limited to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook has grown from 1% to over 29% of total engagement. The Postrank staff admitted that this was a surprisingly low number but said that in aggregate there is still a whole lot of activity going on outside social networks.



• Segmenting from the last amount of effort required up to the most, reader engagement now looks like this: 29% is link-sharing on social networks, 29% is bookmarking or voting on sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, 38.5% is comments on or off-site and trackbacks are now 3% of engagement. "Trackbacks are taking a nose dive," Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik told us by phone, "bookmarking sites have consistently gone down over the last 3 years, but voting on sites like Digg or Reddit has grown."


• Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day's engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. "While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches - this trend is helping content travel further."

Users who run their own WordPress installations were already able to ping Twitter whenever they posted an update thanks to plugins like Twitter Tools or Twitter Updater.

For WordPress.com, this is an important update, as it brings it up to par with light blogging services like Posterous, which have made autoposting to Twitter and other microblogging services a core feature of their products.

More WordPress Updates: New Theme Viewer and PicApps Partnership

The Wordpress team has been quite busy lately, besides launching Publicize, Wordpress also unveiled a new version of its theme viewer last week and two days ago, Wordpress also announced a partnership with PicApp that allows Wordpress users to embed premium images into their blogs.

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.

As the inaugural open-source app built for the TypePad platform, Motion is written in Python using the Django framework and is intended to help site owners build their communities quickly and simply. You can see the app in action on actor Zachary Quinto's site.

The functions and form are reminiscent of Yahoo! Meme or Tumblr, and content can be cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. Site owners will have to contact Six Apart directly to integrate Motion into their sites.

In a post on the Six Apart blog, CEO Chris Alden wrote, "Our platform enables developers to use structured objects, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.

"We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube."

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.

Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging - sometimes called micro-blogging - is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.

Here's an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:

2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)

One thing that hasn't changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste - it's much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).

At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls - due to the sheer number of people using it. Here's an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the "following" panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.

3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps

With light blogging, you needn't even spend time actually blogging - because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. 'lifestreaming'), it's just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.

To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I've listened to in the past week.

4. Customize Your Theme

All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you're handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too - if you want to make it unique. Here's a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:

5. Don't Take it Seriously

It's not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn't called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go...

From Sween's Tumblr blog

We always liked Posterous, which launched last July, because of the simplicity of the service. Just one email to post@posterous.com will get you a new blog, for example. Over time, however, the company has added lots of additional features, including the ability to use your own domain name, track subscriptions through Feedburner, and embed a wider variety of media files. In addition, Posterous also launched a very nifty iPhone application (iTunes link) last month.

Given that Tumblr is probably Posterous' strongest competitor, it only makes sense for Posterous to give users an option to import their Tumblr blogs.

The new themes still follow Posterous' minimalist design philosophy, though given that users can edit the CSS themselves, they can now take control of their own designs.

Earlier in the email Technorati addresses why member authority has fallen across the site. The company explains, "As our intent is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis, we stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations."

If this tells us anything, it's that in this new environment of conversational media, many have abandoned their blogs for less labor intensive forms of expression. We just hope the company has some form of compensation for contributors. It'll be tough convincing bloggers to contribute posts and patch holes in what might already be a sinking ship. Nevertheless, if you're the type of person who likes a challenge and you've got the energy to increase your posts, you can apply for the program on Technorati's contact page.

If you think regular bloggers get trolled in their comments sections, the discussion on Blogband is likely to get heated. Comments will be moderated before being posted and any off-topic rants will appear on the Off Topic Comments page. While the page is currently empty, depending on the decisions made about fiber, ISPs and infrastructure, it's likely to light up like a Christmas tree and read like The Best of Craigslist.

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.

Apture

We started by testing out Apture's WordPress plug-in (on my personal blog) and were very happy with the results. It takes just a few minutes to install, and learning to use it is quite intuitive. We wrote an extensive review of Apture in February.

Pros:

• It's beautiful. From the admin section to the pop-up windows, design has been emphasized at Apture.


• Lots of user control. The amount of control users have over what's included in their pop-ups is amazing. You can choose between assets with a few clicks, or you can pick out start and end timestamps in an embedded YouTube video. The list of options is big and keeps getting bigger, as evidenced by the recent addition of really nice LinkedIn and Twitter profile options.


• You can now include multiple tabs in one link, making it easy to pack a lot of information inside.


• The user experience is solid, and the product is pretty well baked.

Cons:

• Apture is proprietary software offered by one company, unlike Zemanta's standards-based offering, which was built as part of a consortium of developer- and community-minded companies.


• Sometimes it hangs on the UI. We found one bug that the company has since fixed, but pop-up loading is sometimes slower than we'd like.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a feature-rich service for bloggers and has a great API that developers can use to automatically discover keywords in bodies of text in lots of different scenarios. You should check it out. It's quite easy to use. Last week the company released a feature that competes with Apture, called Balloons. Balloons is now automatically included in the blogging plug-in from Zemanta, which is very easy to get started with.

To be frank, we would recommend installing the core Zemanta plug-in for the rest of its features but using Apture for info pop-ups instead. The way the two products are administered is very different; Zemanta detects key concepts in the text of your post and suggests Balloon links you can add with a click. You're limited to adding just those handful of Balloons; you can't link up just any text you want.

Pros:

• Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It feels good to use.


• Zemanta works with the rest of the tech community and has some awesome tools for supporting non-profit organizations. Did we mention that it feels good to use Zemanta?


• The auto-detection of key concepts -- just click on the buttons and they're linked to resources -- makes Zemanta a little bit faster to use than Apture. It takes fewer clicks.

Cons:

• This tool isn't nearly as pretty. In fact, the pop-ups are almost the opposite of pretty.


• You have far less control over the sources of information you can include. Zemanta's Balloons is tied to the ambitious CommonTags standards effort and apparently does not include anything outside the world of standards. That's noble but limiting.


• Most of the links Zemanta inserts are to FreeBase, which is like a machine-readable version of Wikipedia but also a noble, well-funded mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are quite hit and miss.


• There are Amazon affiliate ads in the Zemanta product; Apture's business strategy appears to be to serve bloggers for free and ad-free and charge big publishers to white-label the service. Zemanta's Amazon ads might get on your nerves.


• This is a very early product, having just launched last week. We hope it is further developed.

That's our experience so far with these tools. If you've tried either or both, we'd love to know about your experience as well.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

Tip RWW <-- Just grab that link and give it a click any time you're on a page you want to share with us. An email window will open (just using a mailto: link) pre-populated with the link and page title, addressed to us. Hit send, maybe add a note if you like. Breaking news, good background information, critiques of the things we've written - whatever you like. We'll give you credit for anything we use in a post, unless you ask us not to. Consider yourself part of the RWW team.

We've got a healthy staff of about 10 writers and researchers (and a small army of robots, it's true), but why limit story discovery to our own staff? If you'd like to help, your help will be much appreciated.

What do you think of this idea? We'd love to hear any feedback you've got - we don't know why we didn't think of it earlier.

Thanks to Jay Meattle of Shareaholic for providing the javascript to make this elegant!

At press time we have not had a chance to try out Six Apart's new free, open source plugins but Wordpress users can read more about them and try them out here.

Features

One nice feature of WordPress' Post By Email feature is that the service automatically creates a gallery for posts with multiple pictures. Users can also easily post YouTube videos by email, as the service automatically creates an embed when it sees a YouTube URL in an email. WordPress also supports a number of additional short codes that give users more control over the formatting of their posts.

WordPress vs. Posterous

Of course, Posterous is probably the most well-known post-by-email service. Just like WordPress, Posterous allows users to quickly post text, images, and videos by email. Posterous, though, puts a stronger emphasis on sharing content from other sites, especially since the service introduced its bookmarklet in February. Unlike on WordPress, though, users on Posterous have no other option but to post by email or through the bookmarklet. The simplicity of Posterous is definitely one of the main draws of the service, but it looks like WordPress now offers a very similar degree of functionality, with, of course, the whole feature set of the WordPress blogging platform thrown in for good measure.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

WordPress interface and experience designer, Jane Wells, wrote about opening the testing process this morning and said that she's spent years responding to people who reference a nine year old article by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen argued that usability tests only needed 5 participants in order to be effective:

"As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.

After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new."

Wells writes in response that, "While I've found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn't enough to get a clear picture."

If you'd like to participate in this usability testing, professional usability test moderators are encouraged to contact Wells and eager guinea pigs are told to watch this space.

Some of the numbers in this piece, however, seem more than far-fetched. Penn, for example, argues that it "takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year." Given that Technorati's latest State of the Blogosphere, where Penn gets this number from, reports that the mean CPM (that is, the income per 1,000 ad impressions) that U.S. bloggers are getting from advertising is around $1.20.

Actually, once you read the Technorati post, you can see that Penn ignores the fact that this number is based on the average income of bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, and that the median annual income for pro bloggers was only about $22,000 (in comparison, the median income for U.S. households is about $50,000).

Penn also quotes some of our own statistics. Last October, we asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants about their income. While we indeed reported that these top tier bloggers can get $75 to $200 per post, we also mention that the average tech blogger who responded made about $25 per post.

We also wonder if the calculations that Penn uses to arrive at 452,000 pro bloggers aren't a bit off. Penn, for example, says that 1.7 million bloggers 'profit from their work.' This number, however, comes from a statistic on the Blog World Expo site, which doesn't even quote a source for this number, and which doesn't even say that 1.7 million make money from their blogs, but that 1.7 million list making money as a reason to blog.

Some Good Questions

Penn does ask a number of good questions, though, even if they are clearly colored by the current state of journalism as a profession and business:

are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America's Newest Profession.

[...]

But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most, no formal training?

These questions are indeed worth pondering (though some of them could also be asked about newspapers as well). Unlike Penn, however, we are quite optimistic that many journalists will see the light in the long run and that readers will quickly weed out the blogs that have no ethics codes and standards. As for formal training, Penn's selective use of statistics in his piece seems to make that argument for him - and Penn, of course, isn't even a journalist himself.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

Microblogging

With Motion's microblogging feature, blogs can create either a private or public microblog or both. A private microblog could be used for internal employee or team collaboration, for example, whereas a public microblog would let you share with your online community. Arising from the ashes of Pownce, the company acquired by Movable Type back in December, this feature has some resemblance to that service as it also includes richer microblogging features that the former Pownce competitor Twitter does. In fact, Motion's microblogging service is more like FriendFeed as it allows you to post links, images, audio, and video in addition to text.

Activity Streams

Also like FriendFeed, Motion includes an activity streams feature which they call "Action Streams." These streams are created by members collecting and sharing information from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart's Action Streams service that launched in January 2009. The difference between Action Streams, which are implemented using a special blog plugin, and similar social networking services like FriendFeed or Plaxo is control. Site owners can selectively choose to show or hide individual actions in this decentralized framework. Also, Action Streams are published using Atom and the Microformat hAtom standard so they are not trapped in any one service.

Authentication Tools

Another aspect to Motion is its authentication tools which let users sign in with any existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider. According to Movable Type, this opens up your community to over half a billion web users who can now comment or vote on your content without having to create a new account. However, members who wish to participate in the microblog as opposed to just the blog itself are still encouraged to register with the site. Movable Type believes this strikes a good balance between allowing for participation while also providing a compelling reason to register with an online community.

Profiles

Finally, Motion users are provided with online profiles which show their actions from around the web. Site members can follow each other and upload profile pictures just as they would on any other social network. As with the company's other blogging products like TypePad and Vox, members' profiles can also list their other accounts from around the web. These are imported by using Microformats to link to those sites.

Getting Started

If you're curious about what Motion looks like in action, you can check it out on BikeHugger (click on "Latest Activity" to see Action Streams) or visit the microblogging community on Real Estate Channel. You can also sign up for a demo for more information.

Current Movable Type Pro users can go here to download the plugin.