What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques...

With all of the focus on the economic downturn and the troubles in the retail sector, it’s easy to forget the continued growth of social networking in the UK. Christmas is traditionally the busiest time of year for social networks, and this festive season the sector achieved three significant new milestones...

Blogs have long had an avid following, but corporations are finding that blogs can be a secret sauce to building solid relationships with their customers. For one thing, blogs are popular with consumers. According to an August 2008 study by BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch, there has been 300% growth in monthly blog readership over the past four years. In fact, nearly one-half of the online population reported reading blogs...

Marketers are directing their 2009 budgets toward content, custom media and social media initiatives, according to a new study from online marketing resource and vendor-matching tool Junta42. More than half--56%--of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year, Junta42 found after surveying its community of corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals...

Chris Brogan sounded off this morning about “Robot Behavior” in Social Media, and specifically “auto-dms.” Here are some results of a pretty unscientific survey on them from early October. The questions concern “automatic direct messages.” These are short private messages on Twitter that you can automatically send (using 3rd-party services) when someone “follows” you (subscribes to your content stream) there...