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Article from the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112500089.html#

Erick Schonfeld

TechCrunch.com 
Tuesday, November 24, 2009; 8:03 PM

 

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it's so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as "paragraphs."

Today, blogs are doing fine, while Twitter is struggling with flattening growth, at least to its Website Twitter.com (clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck have seen no slowdown). The weakness Twitter has been experiencing in the U.S. since last summer is now finally hitting its worldwide visitor growth as well.

In October, comScore estimates that Twitter had 58.3 million unique visitors worldwide, down from 58.4 million in September. Meanwhile, Wordpress.com gained 10 million unique visitors to end the month at 151.8 million?this is after going pretty much nowhere since March, 2009.

Of course, I am using Wordpress.com as a proxy for all blogging here (I could have just as easily used Blogger, which is actually bigger with 291.7 million visitors worldwide. And Blogger saw a similar holding pattern since March, with a huge sudden jump of 18.2 million visitors in October

So is blogging back, while microblogging is on the skids? A one-month spike in the popularity of blogs doesn't tell you much of anything, but in any case it's the wrong question. Blogging never really went away, and was in fact helped by Twitter, which is becoming the preferred feed reader for many people (thanks to services like Twitterfeed).

And don't count out microblogging just yet. Twitter is finally rolling out improvements to its site such as Lists and the new Retweet button. Once geo-location features kick in, Twitter's growth could come back with a vengeance.

I'm fascinated by this installation by experimental media artist Christopher Baker. It's many things. But in short, it's a visualisation, an archive of tweets, status updates, or if you like, the digital small talk of micromessaging technologies like Twitter.

Each roll picks up and prints messages that resemble human utterances such as eww, grr, argh, hmph. They stream endlessly, piling up on the floor, in tangled heaps below.

It's purpose is to represent the way these utterances we make - emotional or otherwise - are accumulated, monitored and stored by corporations.

Murmur Study was created in collaboration with Márton András Juhász and the Kitchen Budapest.
Interesting also is the fact that before training in media arts, Christopher Baker was a scientist working to develop brain-computer interfaces at the University of Minnesota and UCLA. He's now the senior artist-in-residence at the Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media arts lab in Hungary.

In a statement on his website, Baker says

"I am energized by the diversity of human expression that continuously activates our vast communication networks....As technologists make daily promises to improve our lives by uniting these physical and digital worlds, I attempt to make work that examines the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles"

A focus I think is incredibly important for us all .

As part of our ongoing rollout of the NEW TypePad we are pleased to announce new social blogging features and the launch of TypePad Micro: a completely free level of TypePad focused on easy sharing of text, photos, and videos.

Yesterday, Six Apart rolled out Typepad Micro, their new micro-blogging service. I've taken a look at the system and it's pretty snazzy to say the least. However, I take issue with one thing in particular:

"No other blog platform combines these great microblogging capabilities — easy posting, profiles, following, an activity dashboard, etc. — with the full capabilities of a world-class, full-featured blogging platform."

Anyone else disagree? =)

via @twitt_consult

Posterous

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services

Been reading about Posterous on RWW and other blogs a lot lately. Always wanted to switch to microblogging - Wordpress is just a bit too much. So far so good!

Steve, thanks for sharing! Based on Steve Rubel’s advice, as you use Shareaholic to connect, engage, and share – you should remember to think about the following five points:

• Be ubiquitous – be in all the places where your stakeholders are spending their time. Are they spending their time on LinkedIn or YouTube?
• Be relevant – think carefully about what kind of content your audience would care about. Are you adding value to their life?
• Tailor your message to the platform – you may need to adopt different messages for each place. One type of story, or one type of messaging may not work everywhere. You have to adapt.
• Be discoverable – everything that you create and put out should be discoverable through search engines like Google and Bing.
• Look at the trends – constantly evaluate where your customers are, what are they doing, and how you can help them.

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