The changes in blogging since 2007

Total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows.

That's the conclusion of at PostRank, who have been monitoring and recording all the off-site engagement since mid-2007.

Their survey found that there has been a 30% year over year growth in engagement,a sign that more people are participating in the social web and the driver behind this is the share and like this bookmarking on many article and posts.

Most interesting though is the increased lifespan of a typical story.

in 2007, we observed that over 94% of all the engagement occurred within the first day of publishing the article......down to 83% of total engagement for the first hour in 2008, and 64% in 2009. While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency, the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. What we’re observing are the effects of strengthening the weak ties.