I don’t think I’ve ever taken Technorati’s annual blogger survey before, but the company’s annual reports have usually been a useful source of information, so when I got an email inviting me to respond I took a few minutes to do so.
I began to think something was off when I saw this question:
WordPress’s hosted service at WordPress.com, which has gazillions of users, is free. I host my own blog using the WordPress.org open-source version. I do pay an ISP for server space, so maybe that’s considered “a paid third-party hosting service,” but boy is this confusing! Meanwhile, it’s 2010 — how many people handcode their own HTML? Isn’t it, like, statistically insignificant?
On to the next head-scratcher:
Um, my Twitter account is linked to my blog. Like a horde of other bloggers I use a widget to display my tweets on my blog. But like so many other bloggers I don’t feed my posts automatically into Twitter, because Twitter works better when you actually speak as a person. So there’s no accurate way to answer this question.
Then there was this:
The question’s wording presupposes that the respondent is blogging anonymously, which is just plain weird, since most bloggers identify themselves.
This question began to suggest where Technorati’s head was at.
It turned out that the survey was heavily focused on the role of “brands” in blogging, which is usually a signal that somebody somewhere has dollar signs in their eyes.
“Has a brand ever approached you…?” How exactly would a brand do that? Have brands grown mouths and legs?
I’m usually courteous but I guess I snapped.
report an error
Not to mention that individuals can be brands too, something that the survey distinctly doesn’t allow for. I gave up halfway through.
I built my blog using Drupal, so that’s a nonsensical question. Also I’m not sure what constitutes a ‘brand;’ I get several queries a week from gambling sites that want to buy text ads on my (game but not gambling) blog, which I utterly ignore. I assume that this is typical, and most ‘inquiries’ from potential advertisers to most blogs are equally skanky. Brands indeed.
Not sure if this his helpful, but to comment on some of your points: about 13% of respondents tell us they are building their blogs in HTML – so we’ll probably keep asking until we see that fall off. We survey a huge number of bloggers – from those who are just starting out, to hobbyists, to those who are very fluent across technology and media.
We also have a very significant number of bloggers (30%) who say it’s somewhat or very important to conceal their identities. I think it will be interesting for us to cross reference the topical or geographic distribution of this. Political bloggers in other countries, sure – but there are plenty of places in the US where people are harassed and worse because of their opinions or lifestyle, as we’ve seen from a very sad news week.
In terms of brands – that’s a huge development in the blogosphere. Every brand out there has a blogger outreach initiative which was not the case even a few years ago. And as far as bloggers and mainstream media go: there’s a lot of anecdotal information out there, but we want to quantify any trends we can to see the real impact of topics, if bloggers are being approached differently or the same by brands, etc.
That said, I know we have enormous room for improvement. If you do want to reach out, I’d like to talk with you and get your feedback for future surveys.
First, Jen, hat’s off to you for responding seriously to my irked post.
I’m pretty amazed that 13% of respondents say they’re building their blogs in HTML. That seems just shocking. Either I’m crazy and a lot more people are hand-coding their sites today than we imagine. Or — is this possible? — people don’t understand the question, and they think they’re “building their blogs in HTML” when they use HTML mode in stead of rich text mode in the entry box on their blogging tools. What do you think?
I’m more willing to go with the 30% want to conceal their identities — sounds high to me but is certainly plausible. The issue I raised there was with the phrasing of the question. It read “How important is it to you to conceal your real identity on your blog,” and there’s no way to answer, “I don’t conceal my real identity on my blog!” Maybe you should ask respondents whether they do this at all, and then, if they do, how important it is to them…
On the brands thing, obviously I’m fighting an uphill battle here. But, you know, blogging has always been about the human voice, and the whole marketing-speak discourse about “brands” just seems antithetical to that.
I have been doing this every year, and this year I was equally baffled by a lot of questions. I always found Blogads surveys much more intelligent and their subsequent analysis more informative.