We posted a few months ago on the growing trend away from blogging and increasing popularity of ‘lifestreaming’ services such as Tumblr and Twitter. 2009 has certainly been the year of Twitter but perhaps it is slightly too soon to proclaim the death of blogs if comScore’s October estimates are anything to go by.

TechCrunch have wrapped things up pretty nicely with this post showing the relative strength of the WordPress platform (although pointing out the same can be said for Google’s Blogger), which despite the suggestion to the contrary shows blogging has never really gone away.

As we’ve seen an explosion in the various social media platforms over the past few years, we’re sure that there will be spikes in popularity for all types of social Web services as they each continue to innovate and push the technology forward.

Food for thought, and as many of you prepare to tuck into a turkey dinner we’d like to wish you all a very festive and happy Thanksgiving from the team at Moreover!

Here at Moreover we are pleased to announce a free Webinar showcasing how to track and monitor the latest social media buzz using Moreover’s Newsdesk.

It has been estimated that by the year 2010, 70% of all digital information being created will be user-generated, with social media applications, such as Twitter, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Flickr attracting over one billion users within five years.

With the dramatic increase in user generated content, the challenge for today’s content manager is how to track quality social media news and disseminate it across their enterprise.

The Webinar, first in a series of events and activities focused on important industry issues, will take place this Wednesday 23 September at 16.30 BST/11.30 EDT/08.30 PDT. So if you’re interested in attending please register here and we look forward to your company on Wednesday!

Web strategist and blogger Jeremiah Owyang observes how the nature of self publishing on the web is changing, with the traditional blog no longer the main vehicle for expression. Instead micromedia platforms like FriendFeed, Posterous, and Twitter make it easier to post more frequently, and are better suited to the sort of constant chatter we’re now seeing. Quick, easy and often, but  not necessarily richer content.

That’s not to say that blogs are disappearing, rather the new lifestreaming-type tools are leading to specialisation of the media: Blogs are still better for posting original, rich content, the larger thought-through pieces, while micromedia is better suited for continuous comms and is now taking that function away from the blog.

Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams?
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/26/is-blogging-evolving-away-from-blogging/

We’re pleased to announce that blogs are now available with the Moreover search engine service (see Search Engine Toolkit).  Alongside news sources you can search across the latest blog posts from the Moreover White List of approx. 250,000 blogs. Search across the title, and/or the post’s text, slice by rank or topic, apply relevancy filters, set a time range, and a whole host of other filters and options.

With the toolkit you basically get API access to our news+blogs search engine. Customers can completely white label search engine features and imbed them within their applications and UI. Effectively it outsources news aggregation and search engine development so you can focus on the actual delivery of services to your customers and users. Case in point: BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange - interweaving Moreover-fed news links across their universe of topics.

For our free RSS feed loving folk – we’ll be adding blogs alongside news there too in the near future, so stay tuned!

We’re pleased to announce and share with you the Moreover top 100 blogs, lifted from the UGC Metabase.

Blogs are ranked by number of inbound links from other blogs in the Moreover White List,  an index of ~250,000 active blogs. We’ll be updating our top 100 in time as we grow the White List and refine the ranking calculations.

Where known the blog platform is given, with WordPress re-affirming its popularity, accounting for no less than 39 blogs (see Pingdom’s analysis of Technorati’s top 100 for comparison). The top two spots meanwhile go to CNET.   

Moreover – Top 100 blogs

1      CNET News Daily Podcast     n/a
2      The Web Services Report     n/a
3      I4U News     PHP-Nuke
4      Gizmodo     n/a
5      Engadget     Blogsmith
6      Tim Anderson’s ITWriting     WordPress
7      TechNet Blogs     Community Server
8      Digital Trends     n/a
9      Kotaku     n/a
10    Neowin.net / Main     n/a
11    Search Engine Land     WordPress
12    PhysOrg.com     n/a
13    CrunchGear     WordPress
14    TechCrunch     WordPress
15    eWeek – RSS Feeds     n/a
16    Cult of Mac     WordPress
17    Gadgetell     n/a
18    The Open Road     n/a
19    Ars Technica – Infinite Loop     Movable Type
20    Mashable     WordPress
21    VentureBeat     WordPress
22    Ars Technica     Movable Type
23    TechAddress     WordPress
24    MacRumors : Mac News and Rumors     n/a
25    Startup Meme     WordPress
26    The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)     Blogsmith
27    Joystiq [Xbox]     Blogsmith
28    DailyTech News Feed     n/a
29    Gawker: Valleywag     n/a
30    digg.com: Stories / Technology / Popular     n/a
31    Gawker     n/a
32    Joystiq     Blogsmith
33    Macworld     n/a
34    TechSpot     n/a
35    Boy Genius Report     WordPress
36    The Tech Report: News     n/a
37    TG Daily – All News     FeedCreator
38    Warp2Search.net     Other
39    GigaOM     WordPress
40    BloggingStocks     Blogsmith
41    Techworld.com News     n/a
42    DSLreports – front page     n/a
43    Podcasting News     WordPress
44    Today @ PC World     n/a
45    The Microsoft Blog     n/a
46    Apple 2.0     WordPress
47    NewTeeVee     WordPress
48    TechNewsWorld     n/a
49    GottaBeMobile.com Podcast     Liberated Syndication
50    Buzz Out Loud     n/a
51    mediabistro.com: TVNewser     Movable Type
52    MarketWatch.com – Top Stories     n/a
53    MarketingVOX – The Voice of Online Marketing     n/a
54    Engadget HD     Blogsmith
55    InfoWorld News Feed     n/a
56    iLounge     Expression Engine
57    Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim     WordPress
58    MobileCrunch     WordPress
59    Bits     WordPress
60    Search Engine Journal     WordPress
61    Ask Dave Taylor!     n/a
62    Web User: Internet & Tech News     n/a
63    Download Squad     Blogsmith
64    SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green     Other
65    TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home     WordPress
66    Gadgettes     n/a
67    Profy     WordPress
68    F-Secure Antivirus Research Weblog     n/a
69    Laughing Squid     WordPress
70    Weblogs SL     Other
71    Between the Lines     WordPress
72    Breaking News: CBSNews.com     n/a
73    MacInTouch     n/a
74    Laptoping.com     WordPress
75    The J-Walk Blog     n/a
76    Pruned     Blogger
77    CyberNet     WordPress
78    CenterNetworks -     n/a
79    Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim     WordPress
80    gHacks technology news     WordPress
81    Steve Clayton: Geek In Disguise     Community Server
82    TechCrunch     WordPress
83    Lost Remote     WordPress
84    Webomatica – Technology and Entertainment Digest     WordPress
85    Statesman – Latest Business Stories Headlines     Other
86    Liberal Democrat Voice     WordPress
87    The Apple Core     WordPress
88    The Mac Observer     n/a
89    TV Squad     Blogsmith
90    mathewingram.com/work     WordPress
91    BoomTown     WordPress
92    dailywireless.org     WordPress
93    SitePoint     WordPress
94    Bink.nu     Community Server
95    GigaOM » FoundRead     WordPress
96    ResourceShelf     WordPress
97    Google Blogoscoped     n/a
98    MediaFile     WordPress
99    B R I G H T     n/a
100  The Blog Herald     WordPress

We are pleased to announce the upcoming launch of improved language detection for blogs in the UGC Metabase in two weeks. We’re also introducing new blog lists sorted by language, so you can see all the English, French, German, Chinese blogs, etc, in our index.

And we’re adding a new date field, showing the time we indexed a particular post. This is in addition to the publish date already provided, as copied from the original XML/RSS feed.

1. Improved language detection at post level 

Blog feeds normally state which language they are in. However, this isn’t always reliable – typically blog publishing platforms have a default language setting, and bloggers do not always update their blogs to give their local language. The result is a significant portion of blog feeds with the wrong language. 

We’ve been working hard in the background to produce a more reliable approach to language detection. We’ll be rolling this out next month as the basis for setting the post’s language, as provided in the <language> tag. Only when this approach is unable to confidently determine the language, will we revert to using the language tag provided in the original XML as fallback.

2. New language tagging at feed level

 Further to this, we are adding a new <feedLanguage> tag, showing the language of the blog feed. This is in addition to the existing <language> tag referred to above, which is at post level. 

Adding language categorisation at feed level makes it possible to better organise the index by language – for example we can identify exactly which blogs are in French, which are in English, etc, and provide and manage these in lists.

The new language tag will appear in the UGC XML as follows

<feedLink>http://blog.moreover.com/feed/</feedLink> 
<feedLanguage>English</feedLanguage>
<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=MU</generator>

3. Introducing a new Harvest Date field

Lastly, we’re adding a new <itemHarvestDate> field to the feed. This gives the time Moreover actually indexed the item. We already pass on the publish date of the post, as provided in the original XML/RSS feed — The new index time complements this tag and can provide, for example, additional information about the latency of indexing as it occurs across the feeds.

The new harvest date tag will appear in the UGC XML as follows:

<pubDate>2009-02-11 14:26:06.0</pubDate>
<itemHarvestDate>2009-03-13 18:38:21.0</itemHarvestDate>
<validDate>2009-03-13 18:37:18.0</validDate>

All times are shown in GMT.

We believe in being open and transparent about our crawling performance, and are confident about our technology. We invite comparison with other, similar services (for example, see Technorati and a recent comment on ReadWriteWeb), and welcome any feedback you, as customers and users, have.

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A note to our French customers and others interested – the UGC Metabase was updated overnight with approx. 15,000 French language blogs from blogging platform Canal Blog. Bon.