As I have been suspecting for a while, Technorati's numbers on how many blogs are active and real are wrong, according to this guy. That means I'm going to have to rewrite a whole page in my thesis. But it should be said that I think Burton is too pessimistic. A lot of blogs are intermittently active, and go on hiatus for a long time.
On another happy note, I just found out that my computer crash seems to have taken Everything with it. I backed up my text documents just before it happened, but that still means that every photo I've taken over the past year and a half that I didn't post to Flickr is gone. Crap. Last hope: hard disc retrieval. I'm not sure it's worth it. I'll find out soon.
1 Comments:
He discounts blogs that post less than once a week, though. Look at Pew's recent survey, and you'll see most bloggers post even less frequentlyt han that:
Most bloggers post infrequently.
While many of the most popular blogs on the internet post material frequently, even multiple times per day, the majority of bloggers do not post nearly so often. One-quarter of bloggers post one to two days a week, and about one in seven bloggers (15%) post three to five days a week. Twenty-eight percent of bloggers say they post new material to their blog every few weeks. About one in five bloggers (19%) post every few weeks or less often.
In our sample, 13% post daily or more frequently. Bloggers who have had a personal website in the past are more likely to post material daily to their blog, as are bloggers who report higher than average levels of blog traffic.
So while there are probably fewer active blogs than the Technorati estimate, most bloggers post far less often than you've estimated - which would mean more blogs than you estimate.
One of the comments on Kevin Burton's post cites a German survey with similar results:
Good posting, and interesting discussions! To add some empirical insight on the frequency of blogging, here are some numbers from a large-scale survey (N=4402 bloggers) of the german-speaking blogosphere:
How often do you usually publish postings in your blog?
Several times a day: 11,4%
About once a day: 21,7%
A couple of times/week: 39,2%
A couple of times/month: 22,6%
Once a month or less: 5,1%
The N=4402 are people who consider themselves "active bloggers"; there was a filter question somewhere before where people could state if they used to run a blog but quit - these ex-bloggers have not been included in the above-given statistics.
But no link to that, so I wouldn't know.
Anyway, Technorati is no doubt tracking some dead blogs, but Kevin Burton's defining blogs by his own habits might not be very accurate either.
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