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Online Journalism News

Le Web 3: blogs nudge out trade journals

Posted: 11/12/06 By: Robert Andrews
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Trade journals and specialist publications are being edged out of the online media market by an increasingly successful wave of super blogs, according to the boss of weblog tracking index Technorati.

Presenting his latest statistics on the state of the blogosphere to the Le Web 3 conference in Paris, David Sifry said established sources like BBC News were still most prevalent in the top 50 most linked-to sites. But the most popular blogs were rising, he said.

"Mainstream media gets the largest proportion of links, but blogs are starting to show up in the ranks where only professional media used to get attention.

"All the media we used to call trade journals have basically disappeared or are disappearing very quickly.

"We get sites like TechCrunch doing extraordinarily well with what would traditionally have been a very ordinary newsletter. It's economically feasible to publish in niches that a traditional media empire couldn't publish in anymore."

Mr Sifry showed how world news events caused spikes in posting activity on the blogosphere, the biggest having been generated by October's Israel-Hizbollah conflict.

Technorati tracks 60 million weblogs.