On Tuesday, January 9, technology watchers eagerly awaited Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld in San Francisco, partially fueled by rampant rumors that Apple would announce the release of an iPhone. The iPhone was indeed announced, and discussion of the merits of the product and dismay at its June release immediately ensued in the blogosphere. To many tech fans, a Steve Jobs keynote ranks higher in importance than a presidential address, which has the benefit of live television and radio broadcast coverage. The Macworld keynote was not televised or streamed live, unlike Bill Gates’ keynote at CES the same day, which could be viewed live on the Microsoft website. Thus live blogging was the best option for tech fans get as close to real time coverage of the event as possible. Hitwise daily traffic data shows that Engadget was the most popular tech site covering the event on January 9, followed by Gizmodo.
The market share of visits to Engadget increased by 127% on January 9 versus January 8, and outnumbered visits to Gizmodo by 5 to 1. Visits to Gizmodo showed an even steeper daily increase, at 167%, but clearly Engadget offered the coverage of choice. The sites used different posting strategies, with Engadget offering updates by refreshing the same post, while Gizmodo issued updates with individual posts every few minutes. The Engadget community was very vocal in commenting, with 544 comments on the post to date. One commenter demonstrated his excitement about the product by typing “pressing refresh right now feels better then sex.” Ryan Block, the Engadget blogger, peppered his report with comments on crowd reactions as well personal commentary, which often was mirrored by the blog commenters.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog, iLounge, and MacRumors also offered live coverage of the event and showed steep increases in traffic on January 9. Macworld magazine showed only a 26% increase in visits, as it adhered to traditional journalistic standards, with a report after the keynote was over. This type of reporting could be found at myriads of other publications, tech focused or not. I bring this up to point out that, in the absence of live broadcast or streaming coverage, live blogging has filled a need for tech fans, and the community aspect in the comment streams fuels engagement with the blog and blogger that is not typical for a traditional news publication. This is disruption in news consumption that will continue as more and more users discover blogs as a news source. It’s also happening with celebrity gossip blogs closing in on celebrity gossip publications’ websites, as you can see on the last chart in this post about Britney Spears. I showed last summer that gadgets, celebrity gossip and politics lead in terms of website traffic to blogs, and many of these blogs have a greater share of visits than vertical publications’ websites in their respective categories. Here’s an updated list of the top 10 blogs by market share of US Internet Visits (not RSS subscriptions) for January 9, 2007. I had neglected to include TMZ in the July post.