Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.
Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.
The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:
1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.
From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.
Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?
Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
The blog has been quiet for some time now, we have been doing some house cleaning. In the coming months there will be some interesting changes, one of these changes is our presence on Twitter.
Twitter is a brilliant source for News and Information. In this the first of many Twitter Monthly Roundup posts I’ll share with you some of the best articles I found related to small business online. If you would like to find us on Twitter look for @ebc_chet and @ebc_ali.
When developing a website it’s a great idea to create user personas, it’s a great exercise for understanding the readers coming to your website. Have you overlooked you websites persona though? It’s equally as important, this article will explain why.
Have you defined your websites goals? If so is your call to action statement well designed? A good read talking about the importance of well designed call to action statements.
Shopping Online can be a painful process, help ease the pain and make your customers experience shopping at your online store secure, reliable and easy.
It’s all about the details, this article is a little more web developer focused however it’s still a valuable read for any company that is relaunching or getting a new website developed.
Your content is a very large part of your Companies branding online, Rick Sloboda wrote an excellent article for Smashing Magazine discussing this very topic. For all you Vancouver locals, Rick has been a long time speaker for eBusiness Connections and he has an upcoming “Writing for the Web” Seminar on June 8th. You can register for this seminar at the Small Business Education Center
Twitter can be an invaluable tool for business networking, but most new users don’t get it at first. Learn why in this look at the four stages that the average Twitter user traverses on the path from newbie to devotee.
There’s a strange phenomenon that happens almost every time someone joins Twitter. They hate it. At least at first.
But many of the people who once hated Twitter — or at least, didn’t quite get it in the beginning — are now many of its most active users and raving fans. So what’s going on here?
There seems to be four natural stages that the average Twitter user goes through from the point of first trying it until the point of fully embracing it and making it a part of daily life. Obviously, not everyone sticks with it and becomes a Twitter devotee, but there’s definitely a growing cadre of people who believe that there’s some magic happening in the Twittosphere
Because I think Twitter can be used as a valuable business tool, it’s worth talking about the four Twitter stages in order to help recognize users in these stages when you’re choosing who to follow and to keep new Twitter users from getting discouraged and missing the opportunities available on Twitter. So here they are:
However, even when they find some people to follow, new Twitterers usually look at their Twitter stream and start wondering, “Why would I care what my colleagues are eating for lunch?” or “What’s interesting about a software engineer posting that she’s walking her dog?”
That experience usually leads people to shake their heads and not come back to Twitter for a few days, or even weeks or months.
2. The first “Aha!” moment
Eventually, the user comes back periodically to check Twitter out of pure curiosity. During those casual forays, the person often has a first “Aha!” moment, where they find something really interesting or timely on Twitter that wasn’t available from news, RSS feeds, or word of mouth from their friends.
This could be a piece of news that someone reported on Twitter before it actually hit the wires, it could be a rumor about something that a company like Apple is doing, or even something like NFL teams announcing their picks for the draft on Twitter before they even went up to the podium to make the official selection.
3. Remembering to tweet
After the first “Aha” moment, the user typically starts checking Twitter more often, but still tends to post very infrequently. The next stage of Twitter initiation comes when the user reads something useful online or makes a mental observation about something and then thinks, “I should post that Twitter!”
At this point, the user is still relying mostly on the twitter.com homepage to access Twitter but is starting to go there at least a couple times a day to check on the latest buzz, and has typically found a good mix of friends, news feeds, industry celebrities, and thought leaders to follow.
4. Thinking in 140 characters
Once the person becomes a daily Twitter user, it’s over. The person is almost always hooked, and is now on the path to becoming a power user. This is when most (though not all) users switch from using twitter.com to using a desktop Twitter client like Tweetdeck or Seesmic.
At this point, the person is a Twitter power user who regularly adds new people and brands to follow and also regularly unfollows people who post too many inane messages about their meals or just doesn’t post enough useful stuff.
The power user also tends to regularly think about and look for things to post on Twitter throughout the day, to the point of self-editing thoughts for brevity in order to fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit.
Final word
The beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity of use and the direct connection it provides to people whose activities and opinions you care about.
Apple recently wrote a case study about Twitter because Twitter uses a lot of Apple products. In the article, Apple wrote, “Twitter’s meteoric rise to ubiquity is proof positive that the world, in all its complexity, is eager to embrace simplicity.”
As I’ve written before, I think Twitter can be an very useful tool for business and technology professionals. For more, see:
Now that Twitter is mainstream, its more of a necessity to have Twitter integrated to your bog theme right from start. Unfortunately themes developed prior to the Twitter revolution did not feature it nor features to add it. Here are some cool WordPress themes that will feature Twitter integrated into them by default or are inspired by the Twitter design. Also some tutorials on how to add Twitter to your blogs. Twitter all the way !
Twitter Integrated Themes
1. Pellucid Dashed - A Simple, Clean, Artistic Wordpress theme
2. Green Park 2 – Another simple and stylish Twitter ready theme
3. Magazine Cinco – Another magazine styled wordpress theme with Twitter integration
While the news industry seems to by dying in some areas, the truth is, it is actually booming online. In this video, Dana Todd of Newsforce discusses the opportunities for news providers on the Web.
First of all, the print media is noticeably struggling but this only means more and more people are going online for their news. According to her presentation on “News Search SEO” at SES New York, Dana says news sites have more than 250 million readers.
Additional data from Dana further proves that the news industry is not going anywhere anytime soon:
- The newspaper digital audience has grown 60 percent in the last three years.
- 44 percent of all Web users visited newspaper Web sites in January of 2009.
- Newspaper views are up to trillions monthly.
- Alternative news sources (search, Twitter, blogs, social media, etc.) offer more opportunities.
Social media in general, but especially Twitter, have renewed an interest in news for many people. The fact that Google is now including Twitter results into Google results is just more evidence of the value and opportunities of news online.
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