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September 23, 2008

State of the Blogosphere / 2008

Technorati have released their "State of the Blogosphere" report for 2008.  They define the blogosphere as "The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation."

It's a really interesting read, full of good facts and figures.  It'll be released in 5 consecutive daily segments so we'll look forward to those.  Today's one is full of fun facts.  They also surveyed bloggers directly as well as delving into their resources.  

I have 43 blogs in my feedreader that I read daily, it's the first thing I do in the morning, and then I'll pick up the snippets throughout the day.  They're blogs about computer science (i.e the MIT news), SEO (i.e Search engine watch), physics/science (i.e physorg), technology news (i.e techcrunch), searchengines (i.e The Google blog), and then random ones (i.e The lazy linguist, Digg,...).  I'd say that in total I must read about 50 in all, as I get news on iGoogle too, like Reuters and so on.

Is it excessive?  I don't think so, for a computing person who lives online and is a news junkie.  Also I consider it part of my job.  I need to know what's happening out there so I can adjust my approach and also be up to date on developments.  It also allows me to prepare in advance of things that are likely to happen, like the explosion of social media for example.

Figures from the Technorati report from ComScore show that: the total audience for blogs (77.7 million US) and FB (41 million) and MySpace (75.1 million) combined is at 188.9 million.  50% of internet users in the US read blogs, and 12% in the US are bloggers.  184 million have started a blog and 346 million read them.  But how many of those blogs are actually kept up to date after being started?

Apparently bloggers cover about 5 topics per blog.  I cover seo, computing, and internet news, so I guess that's very true.  Also 4 in 5 bloggers post product and brand reviews.  This shows how important bloggers are for business.  It says that 1/3 of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.  Bloggers are also making money from having ads on their blogs (50% in Europe!).  It's not something I really want to consider, because this blog is about information.  Girls tend to write personal blogs and guys tend to write professional blogs.

It's really valuable information as it's good for companies to have a blog and post information about their industry and about other news that is interesting and useful.  These figures can help convince those reticent, and those that have a half-hearted approach to it.  They need to get involved, read blogs related to their industry, participate and I hope enjoy the experience and learn a lot from others about their industry as well.  You can collect natural links from really good sources for your site by simply getting out there and getting stuck in.  

A lot of companies argue that it takes a lot of manpower to do this and it's true, it's time consuming.  I do think it's well worth it though and it might be worth outsourcing to some professionals or hiring someone experienced to do a good job. 

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Science for SEO by Marie-Claire Jenkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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