Whatever your opinion is about John McCain’s pick for Vice President of the United States – but Sarah Palin from Alaska certainly gets a lot of coverage from the blogosphere.

According to blog engine Technorati the term “Sarah Palin” has been mentioned over 10,000 times in blogs (of any language) on the day when the news of her nomination as VP broke. Since then the buzz only got slightly smaller. Prediction: There is more to come..
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Tags: blogosphere, election, tool, trends

There is nothing which can stop the growing popularity of blogs. U.S. consumers are not only increasingly passionate blog authors, but also rely more often on blogs in their daily news consumption. Emarketer writes in its report:

Once a haven for techies, there are now blogs for everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae. By 2012, more than 145 million people – or 67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once per month.

More interesting findings:

- The number of people creating blogs in the US will also grow, reaching 34.7 million people by 2011 – 16% of the Internet population.
- There were some 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007, a number that correlates to 12% of Internet users.

Tags: blogosphere, future, news consumption, statistics, stats, trends, USA

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Blogging about blogging is fascinating. There millions of angles you can cover. Starting from creating a blog, finding a great undiscovered niche, and writing high-quality content which is useful to everybody. Certainly there many advantages for individuals and corporations to blog, but there are also downsides and painful consequences when done wrong. There are dozens (hundreds) of web writers out there who offer tips and advice about blogging. Only a few offer real expertise and insights how to be a successful blogger, in my opinion.

Either way, the amount of metablogs and posts about blogging is overwhelming (Technorati currently lists over 340000 posts about blogging).

My picks can only scratch the surface. But here are this week’s 10 blog posts about blogging which I liked most:

- Passion, Honesty, Content and Light-Footedness – Ingredients of Successful Blogging (Problogger)

- Debunking Your Reasons for Not Blogging (RSS Applied Blog)

- Why I Love Corporate Blogs – And You Should Too (Mashable)

- Blogging Questions And Answers 10 (Daily Blog Tips)

- Make The “Cloud Of Links” By Some Awesome Writing Approaches (SEO MegaCorp News Blog)

- Prepare Yourself For The Blog Bullies (Blog Herald)

- Better Your Blogging With 12 Nifty Tools (Blissfully Domestic)

- Has/How/Why Tech Blogging Failed You (Robert Scoble)

- Blogging 101 – A Little Help? (The Exploding Newsroom)

- How To Make Your Blog More Personal (Problogger)

Tags: blogging, blogs, content, trends

Well, I always liked Top 10 list about the media industry. According to Silicon Insider, these are the 10 biggest media properties in the USA:

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Tags: google, Internet, Media, trends

There has been a lot of tension between the newspaper industry and search giant Google lately. Old media executives on both sides of the Atlantic believe that the Big G is going to destroy the business model of print media with its (free) online new aggregator Google News. CEO Eric Schmidt believes that a total misconception. In a recent interview with the New Yorker’s media reporter Ken Auletta, he said that media companies should see Google not as an enemy but as an ally that’s trying to make advertising work on the Internet. He even emphasized Google’s interest in a prosperous future of the newspapers. “It’s a huge moral imperative to help here”, he said. Google’s goal “isn’t to monetize everything. The goal is to change the world. … We don’t have an evil meter.” (more…)

Tags: google, Media, newspaper, trends

In September 1993, novelist Michael Crichton wrote a great essay in Wired magazine “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the old-fashioned news business and mass media—specifically newspapers like the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote. (more…)

Tags: future, Media, newspaper, trends

Well, there were gazillions of search news out there todays, but I thought these were some of the most interesting insights:

- With 20 billion to 35 billion worldwide searches in 2006/2007, search growth is as strong as ever. (Via ClickZ)

- Google remained in the top spot for search queries in the United States, accounted for 64.49 percent of all searches (Hitwise)

- More than $14 billion has been spent online during the holiday season-to-date – a 17 percent gain compared with the corresponding days last year. (via MarketingVox)

- Nearly 400 million Google search referrals are to its own multimedia properties. (via ClickZ)

- Local search is expected to grow from rougly $2.5 billion today to $5 billion in 2008. (via SearchEngineLand).

- In the third quarter of this year, more than one of four clicks on ads running on content networks like Google’s AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network was fraudulent. (via Mediapost)

- The caches of major search engines are still providing a safe hiding place for malicious code. (Computerworld)

- Google will very soon begin treating subdomains not as separate domains, but the same as subdirectories. (via Webmasterworld)

- Search Engines can help you to find a “dead” spouse. (via SearchEngineLand)

- And last, but not least: Larry Page, the world’s only remaining bachelor Google billionaire, is getting married today. (via ABC News)

Congratulations, Larry! Hope your first child will have cute googly eyes!

Tags: google, Internet, Search, trends

That’s interesting. According to ResourceShelf, mobile social networking has 12.3 million friends in the US and Western Europe. MySpace has largest mobile network in the United States and UK; and MSN/Windows Live Spaces is preferred in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Tags: Internet, trends

According to a report by the British regulator Ofcom, the ‘networked generation’ is driving a radical shift in media consumption. Sixteen to 24 year olds, it reports, spend nearly three hours on the net each week. They are spurning television, radio and newspapers in favour of online services, says the regulator’s study.Seventy percent (compared to 41% of the general population) have used some kind of social networking site, such as My Space, and one in five have their own website or blog. Half of the group owns a games console and/or an MP3 player. The reduced consumption of other media, such as newspapers, magazines and radio, amongst this age-group compared to the general population, has also thought to have been driven by the net.

Tags: Internet, Media, trends

JupiterResearch reports that 35 percent of large companies plan to start corporate blogs this year and that nearly 70 will have them running by the end of this year. Only 32 percent of those surveyed said they use corporate blogs to generate word of mouth.

Tags: blogging, corporate, future, trends