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..

(By the way: The following chart is based on a neat Technorati ‘tool’ which can be embed in to your blog post for any search term. It also updates the data on a daily basis.)

Posts that contain Sarah Palin per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

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.

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)

1. 1. Google: 128 million unique visitors
2. 2. Microsoft: 123 million
3. 3. Yahoo: 116 million
4. 4. Time Warner: 108 million
5. 5. News Corp.: 79 million
6. 6. eBay: 66 million
7. 7. InterActiveCorp.: 65 million
8. 8. Wikimedia Foundation: 57 million
9. 9. Amazon: 55 million
10. 10. NBC Universal: 51.2 million (estimated unduplicated audience after Weather.com acquisition)

Mmmh.. very interesting. In the ‘old days’ there were only traditional conglomerates like Time Warner and Disney on this list. Now you’ll notice online retailers like Amazon, auction platform eBay and open source encyclopedia Wikipedia. By the way: Where is Disney? Also noteworthy: With the acquisition of Weather.com, NBC will push the New York Times, the largest newspaper company on the Web, off the list…

My take: 1. Newspaper must learn to embrace Google instead of fighting it. Plus: They won’t be able successfully monetize their content on the World Wide Web by themselves in the long run (the Big G is already too dominant in online advertising). 2. I am sure these comments by Eric Schmidt weren’t exactly consoling for the old media managers.

His assessment was pretty devastating back then:

“The American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

Now, 15 years later, the online magazine Slate caught up with the writer and published a very interesting piece of Crichton’s current opinion of his predictions, titled “Michel Crichton, Vindicated”.

Bottom line: He still believes that the “old media” will be fossilized. “I doubt I’m wrong; it’s just too early,” Crichton said.

Slate writes:

“Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover.”

My take: I mostly agree with Crichton. The journalistic quality of mass media is poor, the concept of their “talking points” is based of sensationalism and old-fashioned marketing philosophies. Their business model is outdated (they lost their role as content and distribution gatekeeper a long time ago – without substitutes). The real conversation about relevant topics happens on the web (in blogs, forums, activist and other non big media websites), where the MSM is trying hard to catch up with the new technology and radically different information and communication world – and become part of the conversation.

So does the “shoddy mass media deserve its deadly fate”, as Crichton wrote in his Wired essay in 1993? I think, as the “junk news” provider moves to the World Wide Web, there is a good chance that traditional newspaper can continue to be successful for what they’ve been famous for a long time ago: In-depth reports, intelligent op-eds and comprehensive analysis of complex topics.

Plus: A couple a articles which are a must-read if you’re interested to get some more insights about the status quo of the mass media:

- Slate: Chronicle of the Newspaper Death Foretold

- Economist: Who Killed The Newspaper?

- The New Yorker: Out Of Print – The Death And Life Of The Newspaper

And as a bonus – two old media watch websites:

- Newspaper Death Watch

- Magazine Deatch Pool

What do you think? Are old media really going to die? What are their chances for survival? And: what news resources do you trust in the digital age?

- 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!