Hobbyists, or people who express their personal musings online as a hobby, make up the “backbone” (64%) of the blogging world, according to Technorati’s 2010 State of the blogosphere, which covered 7,200 bloggers. Self-employeds, like me, make up the next largest group, at 21%. Reflecting our professional nature, we’re most likely to blog about business, earning greater visibility in our industries because we do, Technorati reports. Part-timers (who spend significant time at blogging but it’s only part of their full-time job) make up 13% and Corporates a measly 1%, reflecting the low numbers of companies who have so far embraced blogging.
A couple of trends Technorati notes:
- Bloggers are increasingly using social networks, such as Twitter, to share blog posts.
- Mobile blogging is a key trend, with 25% of all bloggers using smartphones and tablets to update their blogs.
- Women and mom bloggers are growing in influence, especially since they are most likely to blog about brands.
I haven’t heard people warning lately that “blogs are dead,” but there is definitely a shift. More people these days are sharing their thoughts and pointing to interesting links using Twitter instead of blogging about them; when they do blog, they use Twitter and LinkedIn to point people to the post. And people seem to point to blog posts they like without commenting. Many of us are blogging less often, although in my case it has more to do with workload than anything else.
How about you — if you blog, are you posting less often than you used to? Are you following as many blogs?
I’ve been noticing a shift away from commenting on blogs, my own as well as other blogs I follow. This surprises me, and I wonder if it’s because so many people are writing their own blogs, that there is little time to comment on others’. If this trend continues, there can come a time when everyone is writing for themselves alone, and there’s little interaction with others. I’ve always wondered about the effectiveness of adding content to the Internet. You can have the best blog or website in the world, but if noone buys from you, how can you stay in business?
Maybe that’s why there are so many “hobbyists” — just writing for themselves! I wonder if it’s just a time thing, though. We are so busy, the best we can do is read someone’s blog, and forwarding the link via Twitter is a way of commenting without commenting, similar to Facebook’s “like” button.