Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey Continued

September 28, 2010 By

Technorati logoThis is the second of two posts prompted by Technorati’s invitation to bloggers to participate in the State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010.

In my previous post on the subject, published yesterday, I wrote about the surveys from 2004 to 2007, produced by the then CEO of Technorati, Dave Sifry.

Today I focus on the surveys from 2008 to the present.

The Post Sifry Phase: Back to “State of the Blogosphere” – 2008-2010 – including asking the Bloggers

For 2008, the title of the report was back to “State of the Blogosphere”. The report was produced in August 2009 and appeared on the Technorati site, unlike the previous reports which had been on Dave Sifry’s site. (Sifry had stepped down as CEO and left Technorati in August of the previous year). The Introduction referred somewhat confusingly to previous “annual” Technorati reports on the subject (Sifry referred in his April 2007 report to Technorati being “known widely for its quarterly State of the Blogosphere reports”).

The report declared that for 2008 a decision had been made to “go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind”. The report had drawn, evidently for the first time, on a direct survey of bloggers, “about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially”.

As to the numbers, the report includes a graphic which shows 133 million “blog records indexed by Technorati since 2002″. The survey of bloggers is reported as having drawn responses from 66 countries across 6 continents.

Following the posting of the Introduction to the 2008 report on Aug 21, 2009, the more detailed report appeared as five segments, which were to be released in “five separate daily segments” and which all appear to have been published on the one day, October 13, 2009 (with headings, Day 1 to Day 5). (I include these publication date details not to be nitpicking, but to save anyone else researching these reports some of the head-scratching I’ve been doing today).

The State of the Blogosphere 2009 report was published on the Technorati site, in sections over several days, in October of that year, i.e. only two months after the publication of the 2008 report. The focus was explicitly on “professional bloggers” and attention was given specifically to:

  • professional blogging activities
  • brands in the blogosphere
  • monetization
  • twitter & micro-blogging and
  • bloggers’ impact on US and world events

As with all the previous reports, there is valuable information in the report, especially for anyone in business or government. Take for example this summary of some socio-economic data from the “Who Are the Bloggers?” section of the report:

Overall, bloggers are a highly educated and affluent group. Nearly half of all bloggers we surveyed have earned a graduate degree, and the majority have a household income of $75,000 per year or higher. As blogging is now firmly a part of the mainstream, we see that the average blogger has three or more blogs and has been blogging for two or more years. We are also noticing an ever-increasing overlap between blogging and mainstream media.

The report saw professional bloggers growing “more prolific, and influential, every year”, with Twitter and other social media representing one of the most important trends.

A note on use of content in the reports

As mentioned above I have in past years used material at times from State of the Blogosphere reports, including graphs as well as data.

For what it’s worth – and I am no expert on copyright, let alone Creative Commons, I note that, as the 2008 and 2009 reports are on Technorati’s site, they appear to come under the Creative Commons licence (Attribution, NonCommercial 3.0) there, which is more restrictive than the simple, generic Attribution 1.0 Generic licence on Sifry’s site: it should be noted however that Sifry asked also that anyone using the charts or data “please keep the Technorati logo and links to the original reports in any use of the charts or data”. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on these issues could shed some light on any implications that might have, say for those of us who might like to use for instance, a graph from one of the more recent reports in a presentation. Anyone?

Completing the 2010 survey

I found completing the latest survey an interesting exercise. In what I guess is a not uncommon reaction with surveys, I found there were questions where I thought there was room for at least one more option, others where I thought the choices too constrained, but with less obvious scope than I could see to add in clarifying notes (I know they are a nuisance for the “quant” folks, but I always think it’s useful to have such spaces, for the benefit of the responder and potentially also for the benefit of researchers).

I was also uncomfortable with having to answer some questions in terms of one blog, even though in an earlier question I had indicated I had more than one. To illustrate how that became problematic, there was a series of questions about revenue-generation from one’s blog, with specific reference to advertising. Up till then I had been answering pretty much with this Des Walsh dot Com blog in mind and with hindsight I think some of my answers were more about another blog. I’m not sure how that problem could be overcome, but no doubt it is not beyond the collective wits of the research company to solve it.

All that being said, I did very much appreciate the opportunity to participate and I believe other bloggers would find it at least interesting to do so. I also think it’s important that the researchers get a mix of responders, from “pro” bloggers through niche bloggers (e.g. travel, health, celeb-watching) to people keeping a blog more as a personal journal.

In that vein, and unlike the previous year’s report with its focus on professional bloggers, the 2010 survey seems to be casting a wider net, going for instance by the email inviting me and others to participate:

The survey includes questions like how, when and why you blog. Is this a side business, full time job or something you do for fun?

And now, in accordance with the emailed encouragement to me to share the link to the survey, here is where you can participate.

I’d be interested of course to hear about others’ experience with the survey.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , ,

Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey

September 27, 2010 By

Bloggers, whether full time or part time, experienced or starters, are being invited to participate in Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010.

Surveying bloggers directly for the Technorati surveys was first done for the State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Although I was invited to participate in the 2009 survey, I am pretty sure this year is the first time I have responded. The survey intro suggests a commitment of 15-20 minutes, which could be right on average, although I thought it took me a tad longer.

Here is the link for the survey.

In various presentations over the years I have found these State of the Blogosphere reports valuable in preparing presentations and workshops, so I’m personally pleased to know that Technorati is continuing to arrange the surveys.

They also form a valuable historical record of the evolution and world-wide growth of blogging.

For the sake of anyone wanting to go back over previous reports, it is worth noting that there are two distinct phases in the production of the reports from 2004 till now, with the dividing point being about mid 2007.

This post runs through the first stage up to mid 2007: tomorrow we’ll look at the second stage.

Technorati Surveys: the Era of Dave Sifry’s Authorship of the Reports

State of the Blogosphere 2004 - growth of the blogosphereThe first of the State of the Blogosphere studies was provided just under six years ago, on October 10, 2004 by Technorati Founder and first CEO Dave Sifry and appeared on his Sifry’s Alerts blog. Technorati was by that time tracking some 4 million blogs and the blogosphere had been doubling in size at least every 5 months.

By the time of Sifry’s next report, in March 2005, the blogosphere had doubled again and from 12,000 new blogs being created per day at the time of the previous report, there were now 30,000-40,000 per day, with no sign of the pace of growth letting up.

There was a further report in August 2005.

In the October 2005 report, a year after the first report, the size of the blogosphere was still doubling around every 5 months and Technorati was tracking 19.6 million blogs.

Further reports from Sifry followed in Feb 2006, Apr 2006 and Aug 2006.

By August 2006 he reported that the blogosphere, with over 50 million blogs, had grown by 100 times in 3 years, still doubling every 5-7 months.

Then in his October 2006 report (actually published on Nov 6, but headed October 2006) Sifry reported a total count of 57 million blogs tracked by Technorati, with 100,000 blogs being created every day.

Interestingly for people who may, like me, be interested in the role blogging can play politically worldwide, and with the benefit of hindsight about the unfolding of events in Iran over the following few years, Farsi had become a notable blogging language.

As we reported last quarter, English and Japanese remain the two most popular languages in the blogosphere. There were, however, some interesting shifts among those languages less well represented in the blogosphere. Holding steady in the number three spot is Chinese, although it has dipped slightly to 10% of the total posting volume. A notable change, however, is that Farsi has pushed its way into the top 10 languages in use in the blogosphere, bumping Dutch, which had held the number 10 spot over the last couple of quarters, into the number 11 spot.

(By July 2007, all Iranian bloggers would be required to register their blogs with a virtual government office.)

Sifry’s October 2006 report touched also on data about blogger behavior and identified some correlations between the age of blogs, frequency of posting and their relative status in terms of the Technorati authority ranking. Unless I’m missing something, the results were as you might guess: in my paraphrase, the longer you had been around and the more frequently you had posted the higher your ranking was likely to be.

Blogging Characteristics by Technorati Authority

The 2007 State of the Live Web Report

In April 2007, Sifry produced a somewhat different report, titled “State of the Live Web”, looking at a broader range of social media, now with over 70 million blogs and 120,000 new blogs a day (100 times the number from that first report back in 2004).

What made it possible to take a broader, social media scanning, look was “the rise in the use of tags across all forms of social media and the increasing implementation of tags by the publishing platforms supporting each form of media”.

As well as the State of the Blogosphere, data and interpretation would now be provided on the “State of Tags”.

And the bottom line was “explosive growth in the tags index”.

People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages. Tags adoption has become a phenomenon across the Live Web, and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati.

That 2007 report was to be the last report in the series to be produced by Dave Sifry.  He has helpfully supplied a complete, linked list of his reports from 2004 to 2007.

In my post on this topic tomorrow we will look at the surveys from 2008 to now (Update: for the second post in this two part series, see Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey Continued .)

In the meantime, here is that link again to participate in the 2010 survey.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , ,

Business Blogging Has Bright Future: Survey

June 11, 2009 By

According to a new survey on business applications of social media, blogging is not old news, but actually looks set for a bright future.

comingchangeAlthough it suits some commentators to proclaim the demise of blogging, Josh Gordon in his report The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications, says that blogging is shaping up, along with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as an increasingly relevant social media tool, indeed perhaps the most relevant such tool for business.

While Twitter and Facebook get the headlines, the social form organizations are turning to most as they look to the future is blogging. Some consider blogging “old” social media, but it has proven itself an effective communication tool. The ability to reach a mass audience with a personal point of view and invite comments is very powerful. (emphasis added)

The report’s broad argument, based on the survey results, is that there is a shift underway in how businesses use social media, from being “a general communications tool, mostly for public relations and marketing” to being seen more as an “essential tool for customer engagement”.

The survey looks at:

  • An overview of current and intended uses of social media
  • Business uses of Twitter
  • Business use of networks “like Facebook and LinkedIn”

The report presents a range of data, generously illustrated with charts, pointing up the overall finding of a move to use social media more for connecting with customers (including customer communications) and prospecting.

One finding which I found particularly interesting was from a comparison of social media between small and large companies. The study found measurably a stronger pattern of use by smaller companies:

“The smaller the company, the more frequently social media is used to improve external communications.”

Companies with 10 or fewer employees are 30% more likely to use social media for public relations, branding and understanding customers. And they are twice as likely as large companies to use social media for lead generation.

There is at least one practical reason for the difference of emphasis. Smaller companies often or always have to do more with less, so “…smaller companies can make big inroads by focusing more on social media” (than, say, on advertising).

Larger organisations use social media more frequently for internal communications and collaboration than do smaller companies.

Interestingly, companies surveyed are more encouraging than discouraging of social media use by employees. 28% have a formal policy for blogging.

The most used social media platforms in the survey group are LinkedIn 79.3%, Facebook 77.2%, Twitter  75.3%, and blogging 68% (MySpace is used by only 17.2%).

The study is based on a survey conducted with members and visitors of the Social Media Today online community, actively involved professionally in social media.  That looks to me like a fairly specialized, “insider” group and while I found the results fascinating, I would be interested to know how the findings would relate to a wider catchment of companies “in the wild”.

You can download the report – no charge, no sign-in, from the sidebar link at Social Media Today.

I’d be interested to know whether you, dear reader, would agree from your experience, reading or research that there is a resurgence, or at least a continued use, of blogging in the business context?

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,