It’s something industry observers have anticipated for a while, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau has confirmed with the release of its Q3 report of internet advertising revenues in the US, which shows that while performance was up year-on-year, the overall trend points to a shrinking market in 2009 and 2010.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch attempts to put the news in context of the global market: “The global online advertising picture might be worse. Just tallying up the worldwide online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL—as I did a few days ago—suggests that annual growth in the third quarter was higher at 18 percent, but the sequential growth was slowing down faster (see chart below) at only 0.6 percent over the second quarter of 2008. If these trends continue, the fourth quarter could see an actual decline in both U.S. and global growth.”

IAB board member John Battelle on his Searchblog writes: ”The one everyone will be watching, and most expect will be very bad news, is the Q4 spend. It feels like there is a pause in the market as advertisers rethinking how they are spending, and what ROI means in a world of engaged media. Long term, this is a good thing, I think.”

SixApart takes a step closer to the distributed social web
SixApart has launched three new features for the blogging world – a reinvention of TypeKey now called Profiles, new commenting capabilities and TypePad Connect, a new beta service that extends the updated functionality to any site and makes it easier for bloggers to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

As SixApart’s open platforms tech lead David Recordon says: “This isn’t just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site’s community with the rest of the social web. ”

Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb won’t be trying TypePad Connect while it’s still in beta, but says: “… when it comes right down to it, it’s the vision in which I believe. I think Six Apart has a chance to provide a compelling solution for a common problem, even if they’re not quite there yet. And once they begin to get closer to that vision, it could change the way we think about managing our conversations online.”

Social networks site usage in 2008
Here’s one to bookmark: Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang has created a mini-library of statistics relating to social networks usage in 2008, compiled from a variety of sources. The stats focus on visitors, members, page views and engagement. In true social media fashion, Owyang’s thrown the discussion open and calls for readers to help create a community archive by posting their own stats and sources in the comments.

He adds an industry analysts’ perspective on web measurement: “Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and intrepreation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time.

“No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.”