The state of blogging 2008

Blogging has been around for several years now and even with major advocates and early adopters, as for example Jason Calacanis, supposedly giving it up it still growing strong. With the rise of blogging a few years ago the Technorati “State of the Blogosphere Report” was established. In these more or less yearly reports Technorati rakes through all of the data they accumulated about the Blogosphere by offering their weblog registration and search engine service.

The importance of blogging and its integrated forms in social networks, like Facebook, and microblogging, like Twitter, for the fields of eDemocracy and eParticipation has been discussed many times and is well documented. In summary blogging and the related forms of communication do allow almost anybody to build up their own channel to take part in the political and social discourse in a way which in much easier than in the offline world. Therefore it makes sense to keep an eye on the general development of blogging.

The 2008 “State of the Blogosphere Report” is divided up in five parts of which the first three: Who are the Bloggers? , The What and Why of Blogging and the How of Blogging are the most important ones from the political point of view.

The answer to the question who bloggers are still does not surprise: Bloggers are well educated, affluent and most of them are male. It is interesting to see that more than half of all bloggers did already have a blog before or parallel to the one they are running right now. These means that blogging is a matured form of publication.

Bloggers cover a wide variety of topics. The average number of topics written about per blogger is five. Overall a certain set of topics especially from the field of politics and technology/web2.0 sticks out.

When it comes to the how of blogging the amount of time invested by the authors is significant: almost half of all bloggers spend more than 5 hours a week on blogging and 24% more than ten. From a technological standpoint blogs get more diverse and use the tools available and offered by web 2.0 services.

In summary blogging has matured and has found its place in the web 2.0 ecosystem. With these evolvements it is going to stay but it may be that the term blogging itself will come out of fashion as blogs get an integral part of other services.

Tags: blogging, blogoshere, blogs, technorati