The Merger of Blogs and Social Networks

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.