Blogging is getting social and social networking is fragmenting. Both changes could make online more appealing to advertisers because the change will likely mean niched sites attracting more visitors to specific content, which results in more qualified audiences - exactly what businesses want.
"Blogging has moved from an activity to an industry and the needs of bloggers have evolved to community-oriented capabilities," said Chris Alden, Six Apart Ltd.'s CEO and chairman. "A significant shift is happening. Social networking doesn't belong to a few giant companies any more than publishing belongs to a few giant companies."
Six Apart's new Movable Type Pro, WordPress' BuddyPress (under development), FriendFeed, Elgg, Yahoo! MyBlogLog, and AOL's SocialThing (in beta) are mashing up blogging and social networking and blurring the distinction between the two. This mashing up of functionality could make some blogs competitors of branded, online communities running on software from companies such as Ning, Live World, or introNetworks (DEMO@15).
Six Apart of San Francisco (DEMO 04) last Wednesday unveiled free, open source Movable Type 4.2 and Movable Type Pro, which mashes blogging tools with social networking features like member profiles, following other members, and rating posts. The social networking functions could help not only individual Movable Type bloggers be more viral, but also media-company blogs, such as the Huffington Post, AMC's Mad Men blog, the Washington Post's forum On Religion, and NBC's micro site Film in Focus gain greater visibility.
For those suffering from social networking fatigue, Movable Type Pro's Action Stream lets users "federate" their comments on blogs and social networking sites so they and the "friends" they choose can see in one place their comments and recommendations. Besides public blogs, Alden said the social networking capabilities should appeal to large corporations, like Intel and Proctor & Gamble, which both operate hundres of Movable Type blogs behind their firewalls.
"Action Streams is about users, not bloggers," said Anil Dash of vice president of Six Apart. "Whatever I do, I track. My friends can see where I'm commenting."
While users may see some benefits of aggregating their comments and their "friends" networks, the interconnection and aggregation of multiple personal networks could be advantagous to some Web site owners.
"Any time you aggregate Web activity, you can mine it," said Ben Werdmuller, co-founder and chief technology officer of Elgg, based in Oxford, England.
Open, interoperable social networking is catching on. Movable Type, Elgg, MySpace, and others support Open ID, which lets readers create a single log-in and use it on various sites. Six Apart estimates about a half a billion people use Open ID.
Open-source Elgg, which in beta was used by 2,000 social networks, today announced version 1.0 of is software that has social networking features similar to Six Apart's Movable Type Pro. Previously only education orientated, the five-person start-up is selling its software to all markets. Currently one out of seven universities in the U.K. this academic year will be using Elgg, Werdmuller said.
In another announcement aimed at boosting readership (and page views) of blogs running on its software, Six Apart Sunday night took on blog directories Google Blogsearch, Ask.com Blogsearch, and Technorati Blog Finder by replacing its Rojo.com blog aggregation Web site, bought in 2006, with Blogs.com, a URL expected to drive traffic and help the company showcase its customers.
The simple design of Blogs.com highlights posts from blogs on various topics from technology to politics to student life. Blogs are chosen not only their page-click popularity, but how editors' judgements about their quality and relevance.
Launched with 1,200 blogs using Six Apart's blogging software, Blog.com is an effort to support bloggers using any blogging software by driving reader traffic and recognition their way. On the new site guest "authors" like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, serial entrepreneur and technologist Marc Andreessen, Wired editor Chris Anderson, and writer Sarah Lacy tout their "top 10" favorite blogs. Blogs.com editor Wendy Taylor manages a staff of five.
