Notes on the State of the Blogosphere 2008

Technorati released their State of the Blogosphere 2008 a few weeks ago and they now supplement their quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis. While their main focus is still on the numbers they’ve supplemented the figures with interviews and quotes from bloggers to provide a more in depth analysis:

Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.

In contrary to the Wired article I mentioned yesterday that claims blogs are dead, Technorati claims that all studies show that blogs are alive and kicking:

All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay.

The survey also confirms that blogging is hard work as “Bloggers invest significant time in creating and updating their blogs, as well as driving traffic and retaining their audiences.” In my thesis I described these practices as part of the software-engine regime the blogger is embedded in:

I would like to propose to redefine the current perception we have of the blogger because people might think of the blogger as a pajama clad revolutionary or the lonely writer who sits in the dark in his room. However, the blogger is an active researcher. One would have to admit that the main amount of this activity is engine based. A lot of research is done via engines, it is engine work. (Helmond)

Not only research is related to the engines also the amount of time spent updating, tweaking and modifying the blog. In my further research I would like to focus more on this “modding” user.

The report ends with “the future of the blog” which I think Brett Bumeter sums up pretty well when he says that:

This is just the beginning for blogging. People are getting better and better at this skill set […]

Blogging has moved from the domain of the coder to the easy publishing model which has increasingly become more complex and less easy. If you take a look at the current WordPress release ‘easy’ is not what comes to mind first. While it is fairly easy to learn it has become an complex system which allows for various practices of blogging. Blogs are transforming into a media platform:

The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world. (Seth Godin)

2 thoughts on “Notes on the State of the Blogosphere 2008

  1. Pingback: Anne Helmond
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