I've been blogging what I learned from the SotB for a couple of years now. Technorati's report on how the blogosphere is doing is lengthy and rich. To my knowledge it's the largest piece of research on the blogging community. They started back in 2004. Besides collecting general data about blogging, this year's focus is on the female bloggers.
Blogs are in transition, they say. The line between blogs, microblogs and social networks is blurring. Mobile blogging is the key trend this year. Based on the results of the survey and interviews they see great optimism about blogging. More and more blogs are generating revenue, more frequent blogging and more blogs are planned and more and more people say the go-to resource for news will be blogs. The trust in mainstream media is dropping.
Hobbyists remain the backbone of the blogging community (65%). And again the blogging community is shown to be a "highly educated and affluent" group. The report also shows bloggers consume lots of information, mostly through reading.
About 60% of the bloggers spend up to 3 hours per week on blogging. 40% puts more time into their blog.
Compared to 2009 the hobbyists are updating their blog less. In general updating is done much less on a daily and more on a weekly basis. This is mostly (63%) due to family and work commitments (did bloggers get better and more busy jobs?!). 30% said it was due to shift some communication to microblogging and social networks.
Bloggers that blog about their work/company say they have greater visibility in their industry, also leading to prospects and sales.
Just about 80% is using Twitter (not all! - 34% of the non-users don't understand the service, they say, others use Facebook instead) to promote their blog, share links and keep up with news and events.
Facebook and Twitter are seen as the most effective platforms to market blogs.
A small increase can be seen in mobile blogposting (24% in 2010, 20% in 2009). I'm really curious if this number will go up faster with the iPad market penetration.
Really interesting is the fact that social media sites are outpacing search engine optimalization as widely-used marketing tools. Only "38% of bloggers use SEO".
Interesting quote by Barbara Jones: "I see Twitter and Facebook as two very different applications. Facebook is like a backyard barbecue, mostly friends and family. I see Twitter as a cocktail party where you have the ability to pop in and out of conversations and make relationships."
One thing I miss in this report (and I've mentioned this before) is some hard numbers about the number of (active) blogs and the number of new (active) blogs.
Let's see what 2011 has in store for blogging! For now, my question to you is, do these trends relate to your blogging practice? Are you blogging more or less? And what tools do you use to promote your blog?
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