Back from the summer break, Europeans get blogging

There's been a noticeable surge in traffic across Europe to the popular blog platforms Blogger, WordPress and Typepad, coinciding with the September back-to-school period, web measurement firm comScore reported on Tuesday. WordPress, the open-source blogging initiative, saw the biggest monthly gains across Europe. Pan-European traffic to the site was up 27 per cent month-on-month to 21.6 million Europeans.

Does this mean we should expect to see millions of new Euroblogs coming online, covering every facet of daily life?

Well, not exactly.

While traffic to the blog publishing sites could mean people are launching new online diaries, it's more likely the majority are simply poking around to find alternative views and voices to the mainstream press. (ComScore only measures visits to the domain, so it's not quite clear what people are doing when they arrive.)

What it does mean though is that interest for blog commentary is surging. Worldwide, Blogger's monthly unique visitor tally for September surpassed 143 million, comScore says, putting it above all but the most read of the world's online news sources. In the UK, Blogger is growing faster than the global average. Blogger visits by Britons grew at a rate of 7.5 per cent month-on-month in September to 7.9 million unique visitors, comScore says. While in absolute terms that is well behind, say, the BBC sites (18.7 million uniquely visitors from the UK in September), the growth rate suggests bloggers will be catching up with journalists in the near future.

Gulp.

Comments

[Werner Patels]

That's good -- the more blogging, the better. Blogging is about grassroots democracy and journalism and can improve public debate of issues.

Blogging is the future.