Web Tools share analysis

Elise just updated her blog with a very comprehensive analysis of the current market share of blogging tools. The primary method she used was analyzing Google logs as a proxy for overall market share, which seems a fair bet for understanding popularity.

The interesting thing to me is the explosion in the “non-geek” blog tools: Blogger, LiveJournal, and Typepad make up the majority of Google-sensed blogs. Blogger and TP are roughly analogous (this site and two other blogs I run are TP-based, another is .TEXT, a decidedly geekier engine), whereas LJ is similarly easy to use but appeals to an entirely different audience: more of a truly social tool for small groups of friends to chat about daily errata.

These 3 services, and the recent rise of MSN Spaces, will drive blogging to the masses and dictate the fundamental change in self-expressive use of the Web that many have been predicting. The future is in the hosted blog that removes 99% of the technical complexity from the process of expressing yourself. Google, Six Apart, and now Microsoft are incredibly well positioned as enablers of that future.