I’ve just read a post by Jon Lund, a Danish digital media analyst: The blogosphere’s alive and kicking, in which he claims the following:
I found wordpress.com and – especially – blogspot.com to have taken over from local Danish blog-services, accounting for far the largest number of monthly blog-posts, and having more than doubled their combined audience since January 2008, from 472,000 monthly readers to nearly 900,000 in December 2009. The blogging services of established Danish media however has not been able to keep up the pace.
It is always easy to claim “I thought so”, after the figures have been released, but really. I did. And here’s why.
On the top of my head, I’ll name the five major Danish hosted blog-providers as follows:
But as there is a plethora of other blog-providers as well, I could be wrong – I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but just googling for “Opret blog” (Danish term for “create blog”) reveals a lot of possibilities. So why is the Danish blog-providers loosing ground?
Blog-commenting made easier with Google Account and OpenID
Because wordpress.com and blogger.com (former blogspot.com) now comes in Danish and offers a lot of features and constant development. Of course the possibility to printed in a daily paper-media like on Urbanblog and the potential of being read by journalists employed by the “Danish watchdog” Ekstra Bladet does count for something. Those does weigh in. But TV2 Blog appears to be simply a blog hosted on the tv2.dk-domain, with no apparent integration to the established media-portfolio by TV2. So I’m guessing they are loosing quick.
Unless… They could have a community. While writing my treatise on social media as leadership tools, it was apparent to me that communities is everything (it really is obvious when one gives this three seconds of thought) and TV2 blog, Urbanblog etc. provides that from the beginning. A lot of people actually have the opportunity to read the new bloggers “Hello world” post. But I think there might have been a shift in how we blog.
Danish bloggers are increasingly shifting from a start blogging in an established community to a creating a community after having started blogging approach. And this is possible thanks to things like Danish blog-indexes (i.e. overskrift.dk and Danske Weblogs) and easy integration into our other social media sphere (Facebook, Twitter etc.) and last – but certainly not least – the internetwork relationships through blogs. Most of the blogs I follow today are blogs I’ve learned about through Trackbacks and blogpost-comments which includes a link to the author’s blog. And integration with and between services like OpenID and Gravatar makes everything even easier.
And that makes the Danish blog-providers increasingly superfluous, because they lack behind with features and options… For now anyway :)