There's much buzz about the new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project written by Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, and Susannah Fox, Associate Director, titled Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers (pdf). One of the highlights that many have glommed on to is that:
Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs – a significant increase since the fall of 2005.
This factoid led me to a question: When is a blog a blog? Or, to put it another way, when is a website just a website and not a blog?
We're building Drupal-powered websites all the time that have blogs but wouldn't necessarily be called "blogs." Are they not-blogs, then? I'm not asking this to be persnickety, but to question the assumption that just because people say they read blogs (which is what the study is based on -- what people say they do) doesn't mean that those who don't say it aren't doing it. Blogs are websites, and for many people on the internet, despite all the old media hype over "the bloggers" (read: "those (darn) bloggers"), a blog is just a word they may have heard but is not something they would recognize if they saw it.
Could it be that more than 57 million Americans read blogs? Almost certainly, though probably they don't all realize it. Consider:
Only 18% of bloggers offer an RSS feed of their blog's content.
My guess is that it's more like 98%, but that most bloggers just don't realize it.
But anyway....
Let's go around the virtual table of bloggers and see what some of them think. Seth Godin says:
What I found interesting is that more than half of all bloggers are doing it for themselves. (Always a good reason to do something). In other words, it's not for commercial gain or to find a large audience of strangers. Instead, it's a form of self-expression, a chance to be creative or share some ideas.
But Ann Althouse offers a different reponse:
I'm surprised the number is that low, especially considering the likelihood of saying this as a modest or disingenuous characterization of what you're doing if you haven't got many readers. But maybe not. What would novelists in a survey say about why they write? I think the delusion that they've got a best-seller in the making is pretty widespread. But we bloggers are a saner lot... right?
On HorsePigCow, Miss Rogue explains:
This is a niche. It's a rockin' cool niche, but it's a niche. MySpace...that's a niche, too. It's a big frickin' niche, but it's a niche of young-ish (mostly) people who want to live their lives online. Awesome article over on Murketing (via Brian Oberkirch) about there alotta big niches, too. But one thing we can agree on is that there is no monolithic mass that is mindlessly consuming crap.
Shakespeare's Sister offers a snarkier response:
The study also reportedly found that most bloggers know how to type, sometimes post square-shaped items known as “pictures,” and are the most likely group of people to know what a Cleveland Steamer is.
On Ars Technica, Nate Anderson takes away from the report:
Though most of them are under 30 (natch), a surprising 46 percent are older. Unlike video games, the blogging demographic is evenly split between men and women, but those men and women tend to live in the suburbs. Only one third of all bloggers live in urban centers, and 13 percent come from rural areas.
Bloggers are also less white than the US Internet population as a whole. While 74 percent of general 'Net users are white, only 60 percent of bloggers are, meaning that blogs are helping to provide a creative outlet for a broad spectrum of Americans.
On BlogHer, Marianne Richmond notes that Pew included its methodology.
Also, in contrast to some recently released reports on blogging such as the Jupiter report on corporate blogging, the methodology was included with the Pew press release. Toby Bloomberg has been documenting this disappointing lack of substantiation from Jupiter.
Marianne also points to B.L. Ochman, who apparently was misquoted by the Washington Post in their article on the Pew study:
Many in mainstream still media don't want to accept that bloggers are doing something more than wasting time. And the more they put down blogging, the farther away from the sea change it has spearheaded and the conversation that has bypassed them. While the Pew report did say that the 233 bloggers it surveyed mostly blog as a hobby, it also noted more interesting and germane information:
- 27 % blog to influence what others think
- 7 % blog to make money (but that's a flawed premise because they don't define what "making money" means in this context)
- 34 % blog to share practical knowledge or skills with others,
- 29% blog to motivate other people to action
- 52% blog to express themselves creatively
Add up those numbers, and you see that bloggers freely share information with the hope of motivating people to action and influencing what others think, and that, in a nutshell, is how the conversation began and why it has grown to such epic proportions.
[emphasis in original]
This, I feel, gets to the essence of what is (watch out! here comes that buzz-word!) "Web 2.0" is about -- people making connections -- and it's a trend that is happening across the board, not just in business or in politics....
...or in journalism. Notes Steve Rubel on Micro Persuasion:
Regardless of what the research says, even if citizen journalism does not drive the majority of bloggers, those who do "practice" it are certainly influencing the mainstream media in a big way. If the blogopshere doesn't add another citizen journalist, it will always help shape what the mainstream media covers.
Nevertheless, it does have ramifications for PR. This means that the smaller universe of bloggers who do break and/or comment on news will bear the brunt of pitches from the public relations community. The online media is dividing into three strata - the mainstream media, news blogs and expressionist blogs. The first two categories are where the PR community should focus.
Jason Lee Miller writes on WebProNews:
So could the slings and arrows that Nietzsche bewailed of the pre-Web society be avoided though this new collective individualism?
"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
The optimist will believe we've struck a balance between the mob and the self. The cynic will no doubt recall the blog swarm and laugh. And the marketers and public relations professionals will understand and lament them both, as their audience expands in context, in complexity, but also in reactivity.
On BlogWrite for CEOs, Debbie Weil sums up her perspective:
Reading between the lines of Pew's latest report on blogging, it's clear that corporate or business blogging still occupies its own tiny - but evolving - niche in the blogosphere. Don't be fooled, however. Despite the findings below, blogs *will* become a mainstream business communications strategy. The "instant publishing" nature of blogs - so attractive to the under-30s - is just as useful for companies that want to connect with customers.
With the number of blogs doubling every 5-6 months, we can probably expect all these findings to shift and change right before our eyes, and more will be around to blog about it.
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When we got involved with BlogHer's site development, BlogHer's web presence was basically a Typepad blog used to disseminate info about the BlogHer Conference '05. The new site, powered by Drupal (with some customizations), has become an incredibly robust community. And not only that, but now it's the center of a new ad network that is poised to grow rapidly.