There has been a lot of chatter, particularly within the mainstream media, about how blogs and blogging are apparently in decline as many users embrace Twitter and Facebook.
At the BlogWorld Expo conference, however, the constant theme has been that the blogosphere is still very much alive and well with strong growth in the number of blogs being created, the number of blog posts being written, and the number of people reading blogs.
During a keynote this morning, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra declared that:
“The category not dying or leveling off but thriving. There an amazing rise of professional class of bloggers, and blogging has become mainstream – proof of that is mainstream media itself has begun to emulate the writing styles of bloggers, and using the same technology to publish content. And more people are reading blogs than ever before.”
As well, Rick Klau, a product manager for Google’s Blogger.com, showed a chart from Compete.com that traffic for Blogger.com, Blogspot.com, WordPress and Typepad.com are all showing strong growth in 2009.
What appears to be happening is that instead of Twitter and Facebook hurting blogs, they’re complementary vehicles that many bloggers are also embracing.
Jalichandra said that 73% of bloggers are now using Twitter, compared with 14% for the general population.
Among the leading reasons that bloggers are using Twitter, he said, include promoting their blogs, marketing their businesses, sharing interesting links, seeing what other people are talking about to get story ideas, and interacting with their readers.
Tags: blogging, blogs, technorati, twitter
