I’ve posted before about the emergence of social media as a new form of influence. Social media includes blogging, social network sites, wikis, web forums etc – anything that’s interactive and online. A few recent developments reinforce this trend and is indicative of new forms of digital divide.
Technorati has been tracking the state of the blogosphere since 2004.
By July 2005 there were 14.2 million blogs globally with 80,000 new blogs per day. By April 2007 there were 70 million blogs. By August 2008 there were 133 million blogs with 120,000 new ones launched each day. The number of blogs almost doubled between April 2007 and August 2008.
In May 2008 eMarkerter reported there were 94 million blog readers in the US in 2007 (about 50% of internet users). In August 2008 ComScore put the figure a little lower at 77.7 million or about 41%.
In Australia, the only figures I have available are those produced by Nielsen which indicated that 48% of internet users (7.1m) had read a blog and 16% (2.36m) had created one (source 
. I do not have other sources to check on the reasonableness of these figures – that is the only data I have. But the data in terms of blog readership by internet users are consistent with US data.
The figures do not take account of newer forms of blogging such as Twitter, FriendFeed (microblogging) and video blogging.
Is blogging mainstream?
Technorati claims that blogging is now mainstream. That seems to be so in the case of US newspaper industry – 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.
ReadWriteWeb (RWW) concluded that reading blogs is becoming mainstream, but not writing them. The demographics are interesting (and may shatter a few myths) – 74% of US bloggers are college grads; 51% reported a household income >$75,000 US.
But here is an interesting point – only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week. That indicates to me that blog readership is in the direction of a small number of bloggers (relative to total number of bloggers). I may be wrong and it would not be the first time. But it’s consistent with my research on social media participation – as little as 1% account for 90% of the activity. If my hunch stacks up, those 1.5 million bloggers are influential – the new influencers. Of course some of them are from mainstream media, but from my experience a good many of them are not.
It takes effort and skill to regularly update a good blog. Social networking and microblogging are less demanding in terms of written literacy skills. It’s easy to update your message status on Facebook or MySpace, upload a photo or whatever. I would say that regularly updating an influential blog will never be mainstream.
RWW say that blogging “may become centralized, professionalized and increasingly scarce”. Maybe, but the number bloggers continues to grow rapidly, even during a time when social networking sites and microblogging took off. So we shall see. Blogging, no matter how often they are updated, continues to grow significantly. In any case, the top bloggers have become influential in my view. I may be bias though – I spend more time reading blogs each day than reading newspapers.
btw, Facebook released stats on its growth by country in the first half of 2008. Australian Facebook user growth for 2008 (to 29 July) was 43% to a total of 3.4 million users or 18% of the population on Facebook alone). Outside of the US, Australia is the 4th highest in terms of user numbers after the UK, Canada and Turkey.
Digital divides
About one half of internet users read blogs, one half do not. Add that to the number of Australians that use the internet largely for emailing and banking etc (not user content), it adds up to a lot of people not engaging in social media. My take on this is that internet use is segmenting – there are ‘digital divides’ within those classed more generically as internet users. Analysis of internet use segmentation is likely be of interest to policy makers, businesses, educators, health service providers and other service providers – just as much as who has an internet connection and who does not.
