No Surprise, Bing Growth Is, Ahem, Growing

Nine months since relaunching its search engine (previously LiveSearch), Bing’s market share continues to inch up. It’s now at 11.5 percent, up from 8 percent prior to its remake, according to the latest comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) figures (via Business Insider). They've made a point of checking in each quarter, rather than monthly, in order to avoid anamolies, and the trend has stayed remarkably the same.

Google’s market share share has held steady. Its share is now at 65.5 percent, compared to 65 percent in May 2009. Bing’s gains, meanwhile, are coming almost entirely at the expense of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), which has seen its market share fall to 16.8 percent from 20.1 percent before Bing came to market. That has to be raising some eyebrows in Redmond since the two companies’ search engine market shares will essentially be combined when their ad partnership goes into effect. Still, nine months of straight gains have to be some cause for celebration.

Technorati Analyzing The Blogosphere

Technorati is running a comprehensive set of articles focused on the blogosphere, and the growth over recent years. An unbelievable interesting study from both a blogger and reader perspective. Citizen journalism is really maturing into a fully fledged media channel, and has to be on the radar of anyone in or around the communications business.

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey.

Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives
There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay:
· comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
o Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
o Facebook: 41.0 million MySpace 75.1 million
o Total internet audience 188.9 million
· eMarketer (May 2008)
o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
· Universal McCann (March 2008)
o 184 million WW have started a blog 26.4 US
o 346 million WW read blogs 60.3 US
o 77% of active Internet users read blogs

Read the rest of the article, and find links to the other pieces here.