Since you’re about to get started on your blog any second now, Pingdom wants to help you lift-off. They’ve rated the top five blogging services so you’ll know which blogging service is the most reliable (least downtime) and which one to stay away from (most downtime) all so you can have and provide the best blogging experience ever.

The blogging services included in Pingdom’s surveyed were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr, and Posterous. Over the period of January to November of this year, they monitored each service to assess the total amount of downtime each service had. They used their own the monitoring service to test the services from multiple locations in North America and Europe. From each blogging service Pingdom monitored four different blogs to measure the amount of downtime experienced by each.

And the winner is…

Google’s blogging service, Blogger! Pingdom found that Blogger was down only a minute and a half each month. That’s some incredible reliability. I’m a human being yet I consistently have more downtime than Blogger. The service actually came out on top last year in the same study, so Google’s got some pretty good longitudinal reliability to boast of now, too.

Honorable mentions go to WordPress and Typepad, both of which had a larger sum of downtime during the study but were still under a total of two hours. With WordPress down only nine minutes per month and Typepad down ten minutes, that’s still really good and I bet you would hardly notice the outage.

So do you see who ranked the most unreliable blogging service? That’s right: Tumblr. Tumblr had a median downtime of almost four hours per month with the single longest outage observed during the study at three hours. Three hours in Internet time is, like, it might as well just be a whole month. Have you seen how impatient people get when they try to load a page and it takes more than three seconds?

As you could probably glean from the above table, Pingdom ranked the blogging services in the following order, from best to worst:

Now carry on, my wayward bloggers, and enjoy the exquisite services offered to you by Blogger. However, if you happen to have already signed up for a Tumblr account, it’s not too late to jump ship and move on to greener pastures. Especially if you’re counting on Tumblr to help you get re-elected.

NaturalPath claims to be the largest green and healthy living network, and tells publishers to "capture premium and values-driven advertising dollars", while telling advertisers they can engage with over 18 million conscious consumers and align their brands with "leading voices in green and wellness." Six Apart already claims to be the #1 blog property in the U.S., citing comScore data putting it at nearly 90 million sites.

"NaturalPath Media is a valuable addition to the Six Apart Media network and strengthens our ability to help marketers reach highly influential green and healthy living consumers while they are engaging with content and conversations that are important to them," says Six Apart CEO Chris Alden. "By joining the Six Apart Media program NaturalPath Media publishing partners will be able to generate more revenue and increase traffic through our innovative conversational marketing programs which are sponsored by well known brands seeking to build awareness for their sustainability and cause-driven initiatives."

Last month Six Apart launched TypePad Conversations, a feature for blogs, which injects sponsored comments into conversations on the blogs. The company works with what it considers "leading voices" in a given category to come up with questions that are syndicated to "influential" bloggers, who post their answers on their blogs. Dr. Greene.com will be the first Natural Path Media publishing partner to launch TypePad Conversations. Natural Path calls this an integral part of an upcoming ad campaign.

"We’re thrilled to be the first NaturalPath Media blogger to participate in TypePad Conversations," said Cheryl Greene of Dr. Greene.com. "This is a terrific way for us to grow revenue and drive traffic while inspiring our audience to participate in authentic conversations on topics that they are passionate about."

Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

All answers from participating blogs are aggregated in one spot at conversations.typepad.com, and what is deemed "the best" wil be featured below the blogger’s original post.

"If you have ever been to an industry conference like iMedia, E3, Ad Tech, ShowWest, you have experienced a form of sponsored conversation," explains David Tokheim, EVP Six Apart Media. "We are taking that principle online and allowing brands to join in the conversation, and as with those conferences, TypePad Conversations helps brands sponsor discussions without controlling them."

"Participating in the conversation is strictly voluntary and we don’t pay bloggers to post," adds Tokheim. "If you are a member of the Six Apart Ad Program – open to bloggers on all platforms — you will share revenue from impressions generated from the advertising that accompanies TypePad Conversations."

Tokheim compares the sponsored conversations to sponsored tweets on Twitter and Facebook’s engagement ads.

Do you like the idea of TypePad offering sponsored conversations for blogs? Share your thoughts.

"The bottom line is this: cloud services are transforming how web sites and social applications are being built, and we want to help move this trend forward by opening up TypePad’s APIs," says Six Apart Chairman and CEO Chris Alden. "We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube."

Alden says for larger publishers and Internet businesses, they view the TypePad Platform as a new way to incorporate blogs and social networking into their sites. For personal bloggers and TypePad users, they say opening up their APIs means that TypePad will be built into applications that will help them and their readers by paving the way for more apps that enhance the TypePad functionality.

The company also launched the TypePad Developer Program, which gives developers a free beta version  of the TypePad API.

Finally, Six Apart has launched (and open sourced) TypePad Motion, a microblogging app that was evolved from Pownce. Alden says its "extremely easy" to build and customize because it’s written in Python using the Django framework.

"A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others and featured users can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities," says Alden. "Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites, such as Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) and Ryan Star."

Six Apart views these announcements as a new chapter for the company and for TypePad. More information on the APIs, the developer program, and TypePad Motion can be found here.

It’s not even a plug-in, but simply an automatic feature, which requires no changes from bloggers. Although, those using Advance Templates in TypePad will have to add a line of code to their atom.xml, which can be found here.

Pubsubhubbub is described as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." This is a protocol that Google itself has adopted for shared items in Google Reader, which allows it to contribute to real-time search. Google recently provided the following presentation:

"The PubSubHubbub protocol is decentralized and free," explains Six Apart’s Nima Badiey. "No single company controls it and anybody can run a hub, ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs."

"The new TypePad PubSubHubbub hub builds on the exciting work that Brad Fitzpatrick (a Six Apart alum) and Brett Slatkin’s team at Google have done with the implementation of PubSubHubbub," Badiey says.

A lot of blogs are hosted by TypePad, so this could prove to be another big stride for the real-time web, which we hear more and more about every day. That’s why real-time search is not limited to tweets and Facebook updates. Content in general is rapidly pushed out from many different media channels all over the web. Freshness can play a big role in some kinds of queries.

Speaking of "real-time," a way to get close to real-time search using Google has been discovered by way of tweaking a URL using a time-related search option. More on this here.

Pingdom observed nine different blogging services for a period of four months in order to find out which ones suffered the least amount of downtime.  The uptime-monitoring company’s test ran through March 10th, so its findings should be quite current.

 

TypePad came out on top, spending just 14 minutes in non-working order.  Blogger and WordPress.com were next, with both services losing 20 minutes.  Then there was a significant drop-off, as Windows Live Spaces, Blogster, and Squarespace experienced 250, 279, and 313 minutes’ worth of downtime, respectively.

Vox, LiveJournal, and Blog.com wrap up the list with performances too bad to bother reporting.

So there’s some significant (and even potentially valuable) data for all the bloggers out there.  If you’re using one of the less reliable services, consider making a switch and testing what sort of effect the move has on your readership and ad revenue.

"If you’ve already tried out our recently launched commenting service via TypePad Connect, you know that we built in very basic support for OpenID sign in from the start," explains Six Apart’s David Recordon. "We did this because we know that just as the future of traditional media wasn’t a small group of large publishers controlling all of the news, the future of the social web isn’t a small group of large social networks controlling everyone’s identity. Today we’ve made it even easier for anyone to sign in, leave a comment, and have a TypePad Profile (see mine) without having to know their OpenID URL or even what OpenID is."

Basically what this means, is that anytime you read a blog post on any blog (that supports Typepad Connect-powered comments), you can leave a comment using your identity from an account you already have. This is just one way the web is becoming more unified among varying services, and you can expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future.

Recordon says that now any bloggers that are using Typepad Connect powered comments have over half a billion people who can sign in and comment instead of being anonymous. This could significantly reduce the amount of anonymity in the Blogosphere. Not entirely of course, but for all of the people who don’t want to take the time to sign up for an account just to leave a comment will be able to easily make themselves known in another way. This should be good news for people who like to utilize blog comments to increase brand exposure.

"In short, the program as described offers up a TypePad blog, a place in our Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, and a healthy dose of our expertise and insights into helping publishers and bloggers succeed online," explains Anil Dash, Chief Evangelist for Six Apart, makers of MovableType and TypePad.

To me, this symbolizes the idea that blogs are far from dead, despite recent commentary on the contrary. Blogs are more alive than ever, and Six Apart and TypePad are going out of their way to make sure that remains true. As far as the old media vs. New Media debate, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb offers the following wisdom:

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you’re wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington’s recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

Six Apart knows blogging isn’t going anywwhere. "We’re a company founded by bloggers, and we’ve supported online journalism from the beginning," says Dash. "During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we’ve put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence."

A great many indeed. And the company has already seen on overwhelming amount of positive praise based on the program. Dash shares a few responses:

- "Thanks for coming up with such a smart solution to the journalist’s dilemma! Hope we can work something out."

-  "You have no idea how many questions this answers for me that I never even quite understood how to pose."

-  "Dear Six Apart, thanks very much for your kind offer, glad you are getting such a great response. I’ve been thinking about starting my own blog, and this seems like a good and fun way to do it."

The program started as Dash intended to provide it to a few friends that have lost their jobs, but word got out and now hundreds have already signed up to participate in less than a day. It’s always nice to see Internet professionals helping each other out. 

Here’s the step-by-step process of embedding a YouTube video into a TypePad blog, even if the YouTube video is too wide.

Step 1: Create your TypePad post. When you’re ready to embed the video type in a place holder where you want the video to go. I use "xxx" but you can say "video goes here."

Step 2: Go to YouTube and find the video you want to embed. To the right of the movie you’ll find some HTML code under the word Embed. Copy this code.

Step 3: Return to your blog post. Click on the Edit HTML tab above the post box.

If you’re not an HTML jockey you may find this intimidating. Don’t worry. Find the "xxx" or "video goes here" in the code. Replace it with the embed code from the YouTube video. If you click back to Compose Post and you don’t see your video, don’t worry, it’s there. Finish up your post and hit publish, then go check out your work…you’re done!

Dealing with Wide Videos in a Narrow Column

Unless, of course, your video looks like this:

Where the video is wider than the blog column. Many people don’t care about this, but if you’re anal like I am, you want everything to fit nicely. If so, you’re going to need to take a few extra steps.

Extra Step 1: Determine how wide your column width is. There’s probably a few different ways to doing this. One would be to get a microscope and count each pixel. Probably not the best use of your time or your eyesight.

On Macs you can command-shift-4 and do a screen capture of the width of the column. On newer Macs as you click and drag the cursor over the column it will tell you how many pixels wide your selection is. If it doesn’t, you can take a screen capture of the column, open it in Preview, hit command-i and get the info for that document, including it’s width. That’s the width you’re playing with.

If you’re on a Windows machine, go to your local Apple Store and pick up a Mac.

Extra Step 2: View the source code of your movie embed. Do this by again clicking on Edit HTML in the top right corner of the post window. Scroll down and look for code like this:

<object width="425" height="344">

You’ll need to change the width and height. If you’re like me–mathematically challenged–you may hurt your head trying to do the math. Instead, do this. Create a new image in Photoshop (or other image editing program) that’s 425 x 344 and resize it to your width, say 396. That will give you the new correct height as well, in this case 321.

There are TWO places in the embed code that need to be updated. Make sure you make changes to both.

Extra Step 3: Write down the correct width and height somewhere so you don’t have to go through this again. Then you’ll have a YouTube video perfectly formatted for your blog and your visitors. Enjoy!

Comments

“WordPress is now the No. 2 most-visited blog host,” notes Dan Frommer, and its sites “drew 11.4 million unique visitors last month, representing 444% year-over-year growth, while TypePad-hosted sites drew 10.6 million uniques, up 20% year-over-year.”

That’s extraordinarily impressive and pretty decent, respectively, and the stats come courtesy of Nielsen//NetRatings, so they’re not too open to criticism.

As for the number one spot in this competition, Blogger remained the far-and-away leader of the bunch, with 34.1 million unique visitors.  Its growth, expressed as a percentage, stayed strong at 58.

It looks like we’ll be staying with this ordering for a while, then – TypePad doesn’t look ready to receive 800,000 extra unique visitors next month, and there’s no way WordPress will gain an additional 22.7 million.  Yet some other movements may take place close to this arena, as rumors swirl about Automattic’s founders and $50 million.