As Nick Denton so eloquently put it, “every human, and household pet, will eventually have a blog”. That is cerntainly true, but that blog may not come in the form of Wordpress or Blogger or any other ‘traditional’ blogging platform. If blogging is a form of self-expression then twitter and facebook are the subset of blogging known as micro-blogging.
Grouped together they are becoming the most formidable component of the internet. Thanks to Trendspotting we saw that a recent Nielsen report finds that Blogging incl. Soc. Media sites such as Facebook are the fastest growing activity on the web, with a 5.4% increase in active reach while other activities such as ‘Search’ or ‘E-mail’ only grew at 2% and 2.7% respectively. This segment is now the 4th most popular of all online activities, even ahead of e-mail.
To be fair, Facebook clearly is the main reason for this surge in growth, while the traditonal blogosphere has in some ways reached its saturation point, depending on what measures one looks at. According to the Technorati ‘State of the Blogosphere 2008‘ report, the number of active blogs seems to have plateaued at around 15 million and the number of posts per day has stabilized at around 1.4 million.
On the other hand we should’t consider these numbers as important as say the total traffic growth going to those 15 million blogs. We haven’t been able to find good numbers for that so if you have any data on that, please do e-mail us.
Peering slightly into the future, a few tools & trends could mean that the traditional blogosphere stabilizes in number of active blogs but see’s an increasing share of web traffic. Firstly, the ‘comment’, which was the cornerstone of community building and therefore blog traffic in the days before twitter and facebook, is now coming back to the blog through tools such as Echo. Now once again, the best place to see all the conversation around the content is on the blog itself. Other tools such as Disqus and TweetMeme help mesh the comments between both blogs and twitter/facebook together.
Secondly, the trend in people sharing links on twitter and facebook at an unprecendented scale, can only mean that more traffic is sent to content sites such as blogs, rather than to other social networks, forums or search engines.
If there were any doubts about the relevance of good old-fashioned blogging in the age of hyper-communication, then we at least believe that blogging has a very bright future for those individuals who can do it passionately, producing great content at regular intervals.
