ReadWriteWeb

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."

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.

Posterous, the integrated small blogging platform, announced the debut of one-stop custom domain registration today.

A new "domain purchasing feature" provides a one-click on-site way to avoid what Posterous' Vincent Chu called "the geeky details" of securing and applying a personal domain to your account.

Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, have introduced VaultPress, a plugin to plug the backup gap.

Users of WordPress' hosted service have their blogs backed up automatically (so to speak). So if something goes pear-shaped, the content is caught before it hits the ground. However, if you use a self-hosted version of the software you must back up your content yourself, and heaven help you if you forget.

Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google's Blogger platform will be able to take full control over the layout of their sites thanks to Google's new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger's users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor.

Earlier this month we noticed PRManna climbing up the Hacker News front page and reached out to the creator for an interview. Ryan Waggoner started PRManna in his spare time and was open in saying that the project was inspired by Peter Shankman's Help a Reporter Out. The difference between PRManna and HARO is that Waggoner's product was specifically meant for startup companies to answer blogger and journalist tech queries. Whereas, HARO is a general news service. The question is, are the sites far enough apart to be considered different products?

If an agency has ever pitched you on outreach to women's blogs and they don't mention the BlogHer network, there's something wrong with them. BlogHer and its 2,500 contributing blog affiliates are celebrating the network's 5 year anniversary with the combined traffic of 21 million unique visitors per month and some huge lessons learned along the way. ReadWriteWeb spoke to co-founder Elisa Camahort Page to find out what it's like to run a women's network in a man's world.

Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use #samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you're tweeting about.