LiveJournal opens door to advertisers

Hosted blogging site LiveJournal said last week it is rolling out new sponsored communities and sponsored features like text messaging integration. The platform offers another opportunity for advertisers to tap into social media sites.

What interesting is that about a quarter of active users and the majority of new users choose the “Plus” level account, which provides many of the same features paid users get for free, but show ads.

Only one percent of users have chosen to pay for the service and keep the ads off.

Slightly more than half Britons online know “blogging”

Blogging might be all the rage nowadays. The blogosphere may have more than 56 million blogs — current data from Technorati. But still, only 53 percent of Britons online know what is “blogging”.

According to a recent study by Nielsen//NetRatings Thirty four percent have heard of the term but don’t know what it is. Even more surprising is the fact that 13 percent never heard of it. Quite surprising nowadays that people could be online but never heard of it.

Perhaps this is also a good news. Those who use search engines should find or read blogs at least once in a while, because blogs are now so commonly ranked as part of the search engine result pages. It also has proven that blog posts are just web pages.

Making sense of Technorati’s Link Counts

Brian Pinkerton explains what each count-related number in a results page means. For example, the number of links pointing at this URL is counted based on the data in the last 180 days.

The total number of links are available too, but it may cause confusion if left unexplained. Also the rank doesn’t mean exactly the order of the blog in a row, because there could be more than one blogs which have the same rank. This happens because Technorati display the ranks based on the number of links.