Robin Goad, writing for Hitwise Intelligence, reports that UK Blog traffic has reached an all time high over the last three years. In the meantime, web news media have also done well, gathering more actual users, but starting from a higher baseline. I am a bit sceptical about Goad’s claims that ‘blogs are catching up’, because you can’t simply compare percentages, as you can see below in Hitwise’s own graph.

Interestingly, the Guardian newspaper and the BBC have two of the most popular blogs - both of them have impressed me by being entertaining and keeping clear of the editorial line of the main site, something which I think is essential for such blogs, but which many don’t quite manage.

Om reported on May 21that Twitter had finally got hold of its $15 million second round, with a valuation said to be $80 million. Past backer USV is said to have contributed, as well as an unnamed main investor rumoured to be Spark Capital of Boston.

But no one seems to be any clearer about its business model. One commentator, Joseph Weisenthal at the Washington Post, suggests that the money is just buying time - plus a few servers to help with their notorious reliability problems. But this may not be enough. A recent post on the company’s blog states that the root of the problem is unknown - something made clearer by Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch.

So what is Google doing all this time? If there is some really serious work to be done on scaling and on the business model, you can be pretty sure that they will be doing it with the Jaiku microblogging service they acquired last year. The money will help Twitter for now, but unless they can start generating real revenue soon, they will be trying for a third round within the foreseeable future, and wasting a lot of time in the bargain. Could this end up as another Netscape vs. Explorer?

Big Payday for Web 2.0 is an interesting blog from Wired

about this week’s Web 2.0 deals - as CBS bought CNET for $1.8 billion and Ask.com (owned by IAC) bought Lexico, parent company of Dictionary.com, for a reported $100 million, to name a couple of the deals. The blog suggests weak IPOs at the beginning of the year for Classmates.com, for example, may have pushed companies towards sales exits rather than IPOs.

The surprise is that both buyers and sellers are in place. The need for strong online news and search remains strong, of course, and it’s not just about Yahoo and Google.

But is CBS buying at the right time or price, or is it a sign of an old media company getting nervous? My personal opinion is that it’s better for old media companies to grow their own brand online, but CBS may feel they are a bit late in the game. A few commentators think this is a smart move, but most - particularly Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 WallStreet - seem to think it is one company that is going nowhere buying another company that is going nowhere.

Until recently the jury was out on Twitter - the microblogging service - for business users. Twitter is something between blogging, social networking and IM - you set up a free account and upload short messages (140 character limit) to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’, and your contacts read it via SMS, IM, browser etc. Twitter can also update your social networking site and contacts. The question for businesses has been, great PR or complete nuisance?

For a while sceptics pointed to the banality of much of the content that you can read there. Then celebrities (or rather their agents and PR people) caught on the fact that this is a great way to keep them in the public eye, and now politicians are using it in a big way to keep their supporters posted.

Twitter seems to have matured now, as people have realised that it is a time-efficient way to build and update common interest groups with simple news, where blogs can be relatively time-consuming. It takes far less time to create a ‘tweet’ than a blog. Further, because Twitter also publishes an API, add-ons are easy to create - e.g. ‘twitteroo’ and ‘twitterific’, which give you an IM-like desktop GUIs on Windows and Mac, and ‘tweet scan‘, a real-time search engine.

But is it a good marketing tool for high-tech businesses? Well, the tide of opinion seems to be shifting here, too. Here is some good analysis from Kiruba Shankar of Business Standard:

‘Twitter can be a nice way to inform your audience of new posts. Not just posts but news we find interesting, or entertaining things we’ve found on the web.

Twitter can be an excellent way to receive feedback. Let’s say, you are about to re-launch your corporate website, you can ask the folks to take a look and quickly give their feedback.

It’s a way to identify the influencers. These are micro-celebs and micro-conglomerates who are popular and have lots of followers. Their opinion, sometimes, can be more powerful than any press release can do. It helps you connect with them and if done properly, can have a significant positive impact on your brand. It can be an extension of your social marketing plan.’

So a summary of what it might (or might not) work well for:

• researching and adding to your ‘community’
• event announcements
• news on products or updates
• celebrity appearances (maybe at your events?)
• training events and follow-ups
• new blog entries
• new publications on your site
• asking for feedback on
• mini-news releases tagged onto breaking news events
• finding out where your staff have got to on Friday afternoon…

You have to work out for yourself how close this gets to spamming, and whether RSS feeds are what you should mainly focus on, but Twitter is definitely worth thinking hard about now.

I don’t know how many comments I’ve read on this in the last few days. Obviously, a theme in the news, but I think for a reason - people are realising that this is moving faster than we thought.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports the German National Blogger Conference re:publica panel seeing the transition from paper to web in terms of five to ten years. Not so much breaking news stories so much as the discussions, essays and features. Personally, for these, I am already torn between web and print journalism. Report and reaction can be quickly browsed and compared online, but for me there is also the comfort factor, and the surprise factor, in newspapers - i.e. a in-depth reporting of something I had not thought about before. In online journalism I tend to follow what I am looking for instead. But I expect that, too, will change!

I suspect that the blogger panel is not far wrong. Here in Switzerland we had a daily free tabloid, 20 minutes - which many locals call ‘20 seconds’ - that you pick up while you wait for your train station. It’s pretty sensationalist fare, with front pages regularly led by surveys comparing the sexual habits of various European countries, or by Hollywood gossip or its local equivalents. But now it has no fewer than four rivals, going downmarket, highbrow, business or radical, as you wish. These rivals are produced by the major newspaper publishers here, and are probably soon to be the future replacement for the weekday newspaper - instant news and comment with pictures, localised advertising and lightweight features. It is easy to imagine a date not far away when most people will look online for all the in-depth coverage. After all, the blogosphere is is still only a handful of years old.

Meanwhile, this week the New York Times ran what some saw as an unbalanced story by Matt Richtel about blogging’s health hazards (staying up all night to keep pace with the blogosphere). The fact that it was rather sensationalist shows again that a lot of print journalism that hasn’t quite grasped the wake up call from blog journalists. The blogosphere may be, in a sense, virtual, but for newspapers it is also the new reality.

Another case of shooting yourself in the foot by antagonizing bloggers has made big news over the past few days. Craigslist is a classifieds service, originally for the Bay area and now other parts of West Coast US, listing jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events. It has generally been seen as a cool company with a somewhat hippy-like culture. Tim White, a fan, was happily hosting a blog about what was new the site www.craigslistblog.org. Then Craigslist decided they wanted to start their own blog. So they thought they would push him off his one, sending him a threatening email, making big news.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said that White’s URL ‘craigslistblog.org’ was ‘infringing’ and that its name was ‘needlessly confusing to members of the media and the general public, and must be changed.’ He also wanted White to stop using the domain and give it to Craigslist. Rather than complying, White posted the e-mail on his blog. Buckmaster sent a second e-mail threatening the blogger with law firm, Perkins Cole, which ‘also does intellectual property work for Google.’

When bloggers are threatened, news travels fast. In no time, this turned into a lot of negative publicity for Craigslist, giving plenty of opportunity to repeat negative news stories about the company, for example where it was advertising prostitution services.

In the end, Buckmaster was forced to give a humiliating - but still rather half-hearted - reply: ‘We have no interest in shutting down blogs about craigslist, critical or otherwise, and have never tried to do so. But in the strange world of trademarks and copyright, it’s poor practice to allow a confusingly similar domain or business name to go unchallenged. Given all the inquiries we’d gotten from reporters thinking this blogger was associated with craigslist, taken together with the deceptive textads and disrespect for our trademark and terms of use, we felt we had to act. But there was no need for me to act like a jerk, provoked or not.’

It’s still not clear where this is going, but ‘nowhere at all’ would be the best guess. So Tim White now has a huge - though mostly temporary - readership. Potentially a real opportunity for him - though if he uses the current site commercially, Craigslist actually would have a trademark infringement case.

For Craigslist, I should think something of a PR disaster. Not only really embarrassing for the CEO - and probably permanently so. But as much for his naivety than for his bullying attitude. A few fundamental PR errors:

1. If you are starting a blog, you are trying to create a positive impression. Don’t attack other bloggers - it will backfire.
2. If you screw up, don’t wait for the whole world to tell you about it. Put it right straight away. The second, threatening email was a big mistake. Even the later response was far too half-hearted.
3. If someone friendly to you is giving you free publicity, don’t antagonize them - make friends and see what you can do to help!

Jennifer Saba’s article in Editor and Publisher from a couple of days ago, NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years presents interesting figures:

The newspaper industry (in the US) has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years. According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950…There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well.

source: Newspaper Association of America 2008

This just confirms again not only the advertising power of the web, but its importance as a news medium. There was a similar decline in 2001, the first in many years, but I think this time the slide is likely to continue, partly because so much of the news on the primary elections has been generated online. We can expect print news to become less and less influential.

So what impact will this trend have on the news itself? I would say at the moment things are fairly evenly balanced between the press and the web. For one thing, newspapers have the resources - and the legal responsibility - to be accurate (and now have hte blogosphere to hold them to account if they mess up). They are also under pressure to offer comprehensive coverage. Bloggers, on the other hand, are free from the pressure to represent a news organization’s agenda, and can call it just as they see it.

When the mass readership and the median sources of news both come more online, big news corporations will turn more resources to the web than they do now, get much smarter at using blogs and SEO, and diversify their activities, getting more into entertainment and social network services. They will need to do this to survive. But newspaper proprietors are generally not just in it for the money, but for political influence, so presumably that is going to be played out on line, and not just in the online versions of the papers but in the blogosphere and social web. That will be a challenge for the independent and critical ethos of the web.

I am optimistic that that the web will remain an excellent news medium, but I think we are in for some interesting times.