Oh Blogosphere, My How You've Grown
Posted by karell on 04-19-2006I remember when I first heard the word "blogosphere." My friend Diane was talking about all these new sites she was reading and how they were all part of an intricate network of related links and people. At the time, I thought she had made up the word. Oh, how wrong I was.
Technorati has released Part 1 of its latest "State of the blogosphere" report, complete with charts and a whole bunch of interesting numbers.
From the report, "The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago."
And more, "Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That's an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity."
What I'm wondering, and what I wish we could see data on, is how many teens are part of the blogosphere (as readers or writers or both)? Do they make up a huge percentage? Do they read and not write? Vice versa? Are they only interested in blogs written by people they know versus content providers or advertisers?
I'll keep an eye out for the upcoming parts of the report. Maybe they'll touch on some of these points, or at least provide some more insight on who the people are behind the blogs.
April 19th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Hi Karell. I think I can help out with this one since it's a chapter in the book. According to research published in April 2005 by the Perseus Development Corporation, an Internet survey group, 90% of bloggers are age 13-29. More than half of those are teens. According to 2006 research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, teens are 19 percent more likely to create a blog than older Internet users.
According to a 2005 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, "fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators." This means that they have "created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations."
Now that Technorati started measuring MySpace blogs, I would assume a much larger percentage of their stats will be teen users given MySpace's demographics.
Teen blogs tend to have very short life spans and be primarily centered around communication with their friends. There are, of course, exceptions and some of them are listed on Ypulse under Teen Blogs. Hope this helps!
April 19th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Definitely helps. Thanks!
April 19th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Karell -
I quoted you at SpeakSpeak News.