AltHouse , Citizen WElls , Economist’s View . These are some of the most popular blogs in the world and their streams of daily posts get hundreds of legitimate comments. They are published on Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad, respectively. A report published today by data analysis service Postrank concludes that legacy hosted blog platforms are still far ahead of much-hyped microblogging services like Tumblr and Posterous , in terms of reader engagement. This despite the fact that you don’t hear about people using Blogger and Typepad much anymore in early-adopter circles. Read on for graphs of engagement below. The same analysis performed here can be run on any sets of top-level domains using the newly released Postrank Domain Activity API . Sponsor Which Blogging Platforms Get The Most Engagement? Postrank measures engagement by comments to posts, mentions on Twitter, inbound links, votes on Digg and many other quantifiable metrics. All the numbers below are over the last 90 days. Blogspot, the domain for Google’s Blogger blogging tool, still reigns supreme almost 11 years after it launched. What’s the takeaway here? I look at these numbers and think a couple of things. First, it appears that the world-changing democratization of publishing by the first wave of blogging tools has had some sticking power. Second, just because our early-adopters’ scene and the mainstream media are talking about Facebook and Twitter instead of “the bloggers” nowadays, doesn’t mean that people have abandoned blogging. Finally, even though curation services like Tumblr and Posterous are pretty awesome – they haven’t gotten as much mainstream mindshare yet as the old classics have. I think these engagement numbers are a good snapshot of the state of the technology over time. I find it encouraging that there is such a thriving blogging scene still today. What do you take away from these numbers? Postrank is generally very useful and accurate, but the maze of social media links can sometimes be challenging to penetrate. Running Facebook.com and Twitter.com through the API turns up an unrealistically low amount of engagement with those domains. Both are reported to be roughly 3X as big as ReadWriteWeb. I suspect the ratio is a little bigger than that. Other Interesting Observations What other domains are being talked about across social media conversations? Postrank made some interesting observations today, including: Twitter users talk about Google, Facebook users talk about Yahoo! Honda gets talked about far more than Ford or Toyota. Discuss

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No Flash on the iPhone? It’s not a problem for advertisers, apparently. Developers tasked with creating rich media ad units for Apple’s popular mobile devices have been busy porting their Flash-created ad collateral into an iPhone-friendly HTML5 format using mobile ad firm Greystripe’s “iFlash” ad technology, which provides a Flash-like ad experience. The iFlash ad format has become so popular, in fact, that Greystripe is just now announcing a 200% growth spike for these “iFlash” ads following the iAds announcement. Sponsor According to news the company linked to by way of Twitter post , but not press release , the growth for the 18-month old iFlash technology is due to the experience it offers, something that’s similar to Apple’s recently announced iAds technology. Like iAds, iFlash also provides rich media animation, touch interactivity and click-through actions, all of which are available without leaving the mobile application where the ad appears. Greystripe’s CEO Michael Chang sees iAds’ imitation as a form of flattery in this case, proof that his company is doing it right. “Apple’s selection of an ad format almost identical to our ‘iFlash Custom’ ads is a testament to the incredible potential of interactive, rich media mobile advertising and the value of customer engagement,” he is quoted as saying. The company claims it holds a 75% market share on the full screen rich media mobile market and have ads that reach 14 million unique monthly users in the U.S. Over the past two years, it has served over 2 billion full screen rich media impressions. Recent reports from comScore Inc. put the CTR for these iFlash ads at 2-5% on average, with 15-30+ seconds of user engagement. While “fat-fingering” may contribute to some accidental ad launches, it’s the engagement time that’s really telling. Spending half a minute watching or interactivity with an ad is proof that creative, engaging ads can and do appeal to mobile users. (At least for now. Web banner ads used to be popular too, believe it or not). Flash’s Backdoor to iPhone What’s interesting about this news, besides, of course, the incredible growth rates the company is seeing, is how the iFlash ad technology actually works. It takes pre-created rich media ad units that were built using Adobe Flash and transcodes them to run on the iPhone, iPod Touch and, as of this month, iPad. The resulting ads are transformed into HTML5 format, a web standard that is supported on Apple’s iPhone operating system. For ad developers used to working with Flash technology, iFlash is essentially a workaround for the Flash ban on Apple devices, explained in detail by Steve Jobs himself back in April. Apple caused quite a stir when it announced that iPhone apps created using Adobe’s now-discontinued Packager for iPhone would not be allowed into the iTunes App Store, prompting Jobs’ eventual response to all the hubbub. The Adobe software had allowed developers to create mobile applications using Flash and then port those to an iPhone-ready format. Although the technologies behind the Adobe converter and the iFlash transcoder are quite different on the back-end, the idea is the same: create with Flash, then port to iPhone. With Apple’s iAds launch just around the corner, one wonders if Apple will continue to allow a Flash transcoding product that competes directly with their own advertising initiatives to remain in business. Booting them out, though, would be tricky. After all, iFlash ads are in supported HTML5 format. Still, considering Jobs’ opinions on Flash , it must irk him to see that Flash developers have found such an easy workaround for the Flash ban, if not for apps, at least for ads.

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We’ve all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs. Sponsor Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay , an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs . In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources. “The thing about a startup is that you’re always under resourced; you never have enough people,” Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. “So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed.” Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite , was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups. How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience? We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things. We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn’t get over and we would just shout out, “Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?” and some guy would jump up and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that!” Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I’d say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool.” What is the experience like now in Ventura? There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it’s a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we’re part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we’ll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way – the kind of random things that happen when you’re all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they’ve helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they’re trying to jump-start this ecosystem. So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space? If possible, I would not do the “in your basement” or “in your garage by yourself”. Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial. In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well. I s there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment? It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you’re there, you know each other, you understand each other’s pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company. What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business? There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That’s the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you’ll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you’re colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. “Oh, you’ve got that problem? I’ve got that problem, and here’s the solution.” You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time. Discuss

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