Comments on: Pew Survey of Bloggers: Who is Blogging

By: Glenn

Glenn — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 03:38:56 +0000

Lorelle,
What I like most about blogs is the fact they can be used in so many different ways, by so many different niches. Blogs are a medium.

One of the aspects of blogs that I think will attract more attention is their ability to provide a much more authentic view of a *business* than a more traditional website. The nature of the blog medium – involving a personal voice, establishing a conversation (through comments and trackbacks) and providing historical perspective – means that it really lets a business put its cards on the table. So a small business that blogs might not get a lot of traffic, and will never be a top ranking site in Alexa or Technorati. But when a potential customer checks out their blog, they get an insight into the company that is hard to achieve otherwise. And this may mean the small business gets a new customer they woudn’t otherwise have had. Very important for the small business. Big business has armies of sales folk and ‘shoe leather’ driven relationship models. Well, now small business has blogs to compete with the sales army.

Small business blogging doesn’t show up as a major use of blogging in Pew or elsewhere (it pales into insignificance compared to the numbers found in personal blogging). But doesn’t mean it isn’t very important to small business. We are in the era of The Long Tail, and niches are where it gets interesting.

Glenn Nicholas, PublicityShip

By: Rhea

Rhea — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:21:15 +0000

I have browsed through the Pew blogger study findings before. I am most interested in people of baby boomer age (42-60) becoming bloggers. The word on the street is that more people in this demographic are getting into it. But I know that among my friends who use the Internet regularly, NONE of them know what an RSS feed is! It’s gonna be a long road, I’m afraid.

By: Michael Scott

Michael Scott — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 09:07:43 +0000

In a way, there is no need to ‘know’ who is blogging. If a blog is interesting, well informed and meets the needs of its readers, it’s doing its job. Like you say, a fantastic way to break down perceived barriers. It’s only a shame that we need an ‘anonymous’ forum to make this happen.

As for the narrow/wide focus divide, I find the age of 30 to be an interesting cut-off and not one that I particularly agree with. I think that focus is more to do with what you want to achieve with your blog. I have three blogs each serving a particular purpose. One is with my fiancée and is used mainly to stay in touch with a widely-dispersed family so the focus is narrow on us and our readership will stay at around 5. My personal blog contains pretty much a bit of everything and has no particular direction. My pub review blog receives most of my attention and is necessarily focussed on pubs and real ale. I don’t want to make money from these blogs and I’m not particularly bothered about who is reading them. I blog for the fun of it and for sharing a small part of what I know to whoever may stumble across the posts in the fullness of time.