Discover The Blogosphere, Part 1

Did you know?

The term “blogosphere” was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad Graham, a theater publicist, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick, a science fiction author. Since its inception, the term has been incorporated in mainstream media. It has been reported that several media outlets even use the blogosphere as a gauge of the public’s opinion.

From less than 100 blogs before 1999 to today’s millions, the community of bloggers is “no longer an upstart community, now with influence on mainstream narratives firmly entrenched, with bloggers still searching for the next steps forward.” (2010 State of the Blogosphere by Technorati).

Source: Discover Magazine

The World of the Blogosphere

It’s interesting to see that blogging is gaining more recognition and contributors year-on-year. It’s also somewhat unsurprising that almost half the bloggers in the world are based in the U.S. What I’d like to see in the coming years is a slow balancing of the distribution of bloggers worldwide. While I don’t doubt that Americans will continue to have the biggest share of the pie, I’d like more representation from other parts of the globe, particularly APAC and South America. I firmly believe people from those regions have an infinite amount of topics to blog about, just with their culture and tourist spots alone.

Source: Technorati

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere survey garnered 7,200 respondents in 2010. It goes to show that the location of the most numerous respondents indicates where the most active bloggers are based, i.e., the United States. Combined with Canada and Mexico, that makes North America’s share at 56%, while the rest of the world is only at 44%!

This year’s survey appears to have ended already (I tried one of the links provided but I’m being directed to an error page) and the results are supposed to come out on November 7.

The Writers

According to Technorati, bloggers can be classified into four types: hobbyists, part-timers, self-employeds, and corporates. Hobbyists blog for fun and almost always don’t earn income from their blogs, while the part-timers spend some of their time to blog in order to earn a little something extra on the side. The self-employeds are a cross between all three blogs – they blog full time or occasionally often about their own business. Corporates blog full time about their company, sometimes earning a salary for their trouble.

However, these are types are just the typical categorization survey’s often employ. Blogs are also defined by their content. A number of niches have developed for the blogosphere that focus on particular genres: news, entertainment, fashion, food, gossip, music, photography, and other things. Blogs like Huffington Post and Perez Hilton gained so much popularity and traffic that they are competing with mainstream media. Other blogs only appeal to certain readers but are for all readers (at least in my opinion) because they deal with pressing concerns of our world, such as Stephen Leahy.

In short, whatever interests you, whenever you want to know about something, however you want to spend your free time – a blog’s sure written something for you.

Related articles

• 2011 State of the Blogosphere Survey (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)
• Blogging for fun: Not as dead as you’d think (theneophile.wordpress.com)