The backbone of the blogosphere, and representing 60% of the respondents to this survey, Hobbyists say that they “blog for fun” and do not report any income. Half of hobbyists prefer to express their “personal musings” when blogging. 60% indicate they spend less than three hours a week blogging, yet half of hobbyists respond individually to comments from readers. Because 72% blog to speak their minds, their main success metric is personal satisfaction (61%).

In their research, Technorati has lumped in all of the bloggers that do not generate revenue from their blogging as hobbyists. However, many edubloggers, if not the majority, do not derive revenues from blogging. Yet the edublogger’s purpose is not simply for fun, but rather for learning. Technorati’s types of bloggers clearly ignore the real motivations of a subset of the blogger population. Technorati indicate that  hobbyists report blogging for fun “blog for fun”: I strongly suspect that the survey question was a not an open-ended and that an option to self-identify as an edublogger was not available (I cannot verify this as unfortunately the survey is no longer available).

Technorati nonetheless provides some valuable statistics of about bloggers. However, we will have to wait and see if in 2012 they will truly get to the heart of the matter: what are the real motivations of 60% of the blogger population?

Reference:

• 2011 State of the Blogosphere Report | Technorati | 4 November 2011

In summary, the findings show an increase in public-facing corporate blogs by Fortune 500 companies as well as an increase in corporate Twitter accounts linked to these blogs. The study concludes that there is a trend in increased adoption of social media by corporations.

But the key question that lingers with me is ‘Why?’ It has to be more than just a trend, right? There has to be some bottom line payoff to this and actually, the payoff has to be more than simply financial.

When I did the study on training and development edubloggers, I was primarily interested in their motivations and it is therefore natural that the same question arises here.  Barnes and Matteson’s study does not give any indication about the motivations of these corporations for blogging or tweeting nor if they are measuring their impact by doing so. I’d be very curious to see just how much the Fortune 500 or other organizations are measuring their impact and what tools they are using to do so.

Reference:

• The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies 2010 Study | Center for Marketing Research | Nora Ganim Barnes & Eric Mattson | 1 February 2010

If you think about the advent of social media, blogging really was the first pin to drop. The ability for anybody to have a thought, be able to type it up and then publish it online for the world to see (for free) changed everything we know about publishing, journalism and the media. Along with the publishing component, the ability to subscribe to the content via RSS, and have the ability to comment on it publicly, link back to it or even start your own blog was a watershed moment in the history of humanity and evolution of publishing. Some equate it with the advent of the printing press, while many in traditional print media wrote it off in an attempt to maintain their own credibility and professionalism.

And continues with the following observation:

It’s interesting to note that the true growth of blogging is not coming from individuals using this empowered publishing platform to share their insights with the world. The credibility and growth from blogs moving forward seems to be coming from the mainstream media’s desire to have a cheaper, faster and near-real-time platform to distribute their content.

It would be interesting to see how this compares with the rise in popularity of edublogging, specifically the more formalized version of edublogging being promoted and practiced in K-12 and college/university circles currently.

Reference:

• The Future Of Blogging Might Surprise You | Six Pixels of Seperation | Mitch Joel | 30 September 2010