Most blogs encourage sharing of their content on services like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and so on, usually via prominent buttons in connection with each post.

It’s a win-win situation for the bloggers and their readers. The bloggers make it easy for their readers to share content they like, and by sharing, readers drive more traffic to the blogs.

A ton of social sharing options are out there, but which ones are bloggers relying on the most?

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How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites out there, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?

To find out, we pulled together age statistics for 19 different social network sites, and crunched the numbers.

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Some sites are utterly addictive. You return to them often, and when you do, you tend to stay there for a good while, visiting different pages, viewing interesting content. In a word, the site is engaging.

But how do you measure it? How do you put a number on how engaging a site is?

That is exactly what we are going to do in this post, and we will be looking at social network sites, arguably the most engaging sites out there.

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The launch of the social news site Digg in 2004 was the perfect example of a good idea at the right time. That was the year the term “Web 2.0″ started being thrown about to describe the rise of new web technologies that allowed for more interactive sites, and an increased focus on user collaboration. Back then, the notion of a news site that was driven almost entirely by users was completely new and innovative, and Digg quickly rose in popularity. It sparked the rise of many similar social news sites, and was also the beginning of founder Kevin Rose’s move from television personality to web entrepreneur.

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Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.

According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.

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Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?

We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

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For those of you who use our Mr. Uptime Firefox extension, we just wanted to let you know that we have updated it for Firefox 3.5.

The update was submitted to Mozilla last Friday and is pending approval, but you can already download it directly from the Mr. Uptime website. (It’s free, as it always has been.)

For those of you who don’t know what Mr. Uptime is, it’s a Firefox extension from us here at Pingdom that will tell you when a broken website is working again.

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Digg had an outage today that was most likely the result of the ongoing migration of Digg’s servers to a new data center.

That didn’t stop people from wondering what was going on when the site went offline, as you could see for example on Twitter.

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Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.

An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.

For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)

But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?

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Lego started selling their now world-famous bricks 60 years ago, and has a certain inherent geek appeal (after all, Lego bricks are kind of like 3D pixels, and you can be endlessly creative with them).

This post shows what happens when computer geeks combine their love for Lego with their love for certain popular tech companies and their logos.

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