One of the "joys" of living in the social media world is those days that you wake up, and discover your e-mail in-box crammed with something - comments on one of your posts, Twitter follows or, as happened this morning, a metric ton of new followers on Typepad, where I run a small handful of blogs. The venerable hosted blogging platform has been going through a major reinvention over the last year, integrating social networking with its base platform, to make blogging a more social activity. If this seems familiar, it's because it's been baked into newer platforms like Tumblr and Posterous from the very start. Even WordPress is bringing BuddyPress, its social networking addon, closer and closer to the core of the product.
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Right down the bottom of the overnight e-mails was the explanation: I'd been added to the Typepad Bloggers Directory by one of the team, as a pick of the week:
And that leads me to two thoughts:
- My worries some months back about blog platform innovation slowing were unfounded. All of the platforms I listed above are adding features at a rapid clip.
- This is the year when social networks and blogs are going to merge very deeply indeed - and any publisher would be unwise to ignore this.
