ReadWriteWeb

A new longitudinal study at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth focusing on the online activities of the Inc. 500 has found a huge drop in the number of companies maintaining corporate blogs over the past year. The UMass researchers, under the direction of Nora Barnes, has been following this group for several years. Only 37% of those interviewed had a corporate blog last year, down from half of those interviewed in 2010.

Ever since Google+ arrived on the social scene, Blogger has gone through a few transformations. Surprisingly, the latest update to Blogger has nothing to do with Google+.

Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.

There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.

As we begin a new year, I thought I would take a moment to review where Web publishing has come and where it seems to be going. We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the "golden age of blogging" into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era.

That isn't to say that blogs are over: we at RWW certainly don't think so. But the very nature of the blog is changing. The days are coming to an end when, as Scott Fulton has said most recently: "You can have freedom from bias or you can have freedom from oversight. You cannot have both." Jon Mitchell wrote earlier in December about new ways of writing, publishing and advertising online.

The Web publishing world was saddened to wake up this morning to the news from three nights earlier, repeated from a presumably reputable source, of the passing of the Golden Age of Tech Blogging. The Age apparently succumbed to complications following a series of seismic shifts in the industry, brought on by corporate media interests who, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to believe they can make money publishing blogs.

Casualties include various editors for some of the industry's most renowned publications for several weeks running, who have evidently been hired by identically-sounding media firms to produce similar-looking publications, with equally ambiguous editorial responsibilities.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

We're not out of the woods yet, but Web publishing is starting to hit its stride. Product offerings are getting smarter, prices are getting better and, most importantly, the content is getting more interesting. We might not even be half way to the future of publishing yet, but the industry is picking up steam.

There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

I just fell in love with Calepin. It's a blogging tool that gives you an instant, minimal website using two of geeks' favorite little helpers: Dropbox and Markdown. It is nerdy, but only a little bit, and I'll talk you through the whole thing. By the end of this short tutorial, I bet you'll want one.

First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.

I'll start with my disclaimer up front: These are my opinions you're about to read, not necessarily those of ReadWriteWeb. Now, maybe you've noticed this yourself already, but I actually don't read much "tech news" on the Web on a regular basis, besides what we publish here and what some friends and colleagues of mine produce elsewhere daily. There is news about technology and there is "tech news," and most of the time, they come from separate planets.

Many a colleague and some regular readers have read from me, or heard me say, the following: If a pro sports site like ESPN.com were to turn its attention to producing a technology news publication, it could improve the genre immensely. This week, the sports-minded folks at SB Nation are proving me right by providing a new and better platform for Joshua Topolsky and company to produce The Verge, the successor to Topolsky's version of Engadget.

Commenting system Livefyre has announced version 2.0 of its platform, introducing new features to bring conversations from the social Web into on-site comments. SocialSync grabs related Twitter and Facebook comments automatically, so there's always a conversation on the page, even if no one has commented yet directly. It also adds @ mentions from within the comment box, allowing users to tag and notify their friends on those services, drawing them into the conversation.

"Everything we're doing is about increasing engagement on publisher content," says Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. By drawing in conversations from where they're happening on the social Web, Livefyre sites will become the hubs of conversation about their own content again. People who prefer to chat on social networks can still be involved, but sites will still benefit from those conversations on their own pages. Twitter and Facebook are built in at launch, and Google Plus is coming soon.

WordPress has made a pair of announcements today focusing on reading rather than writing. Free WordPress.com sites now have a "small, cute, little" follow button in the bottom right corner for readers who are not logged into WordPress. This allows non-WordPress users to follow the blog by email. (Yes, disgruntled blogger, you can turn it off.)

In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.