A NYTimes article, Blogging Is Alive and Well, Says Report, describes how just a few years ago articles on blogging were all the rage. It seemed like everyone was discussing blogging from business news to tech journals. That interest has seemed to fade towards other things–certainly Facebook and Twitter have picked up steam. See the Google Trends graph below on Facebook’s explosive growth in online search query volume and media mentions since 2007.

Well, according to a new report by eMarketer, The Continued Rise of Blogging, more than half of web users will read blogs this year. Blog readership and blogging is still going strong. From marketing purposes to corporate communications to hobbyists wanting to share their passions, blogging is a robust occupation.

The eMarketer report has a number of encouraging stats about blogging. For example, about 12% of U.S. Internet users update a blog at least once a month. Additionally, approximately 60% of US  internet users will be reading blogs by the year 2014.

This week Google Sites and Documents were updated with a host of new exciting functionality. New tools include horizontal navigation, global footers, and quick links.

The horizontal navigation allows users to add horizontal type navigation to Google Sites. This can work for both footers and headers as a site-wide navigation element.

Quick links allows for opening Google Docs on a site.

For Google Docs, there are also a number of new features:

• New page sizes
• URLs will automatically be linked
• Spell check has been added to spreadsheets