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Technorati's State of the Blogosphere report for 2010 released last week. This year the study focused on female bloggers, although the study was broad ranging and included many topics beyond a discussion of female bloggers.
Technorati issued a series of articles and interviews explaining their findings. Whether microblogging sites such as Twitter and Facebook are replacing blogging is the question I'll discuss in this article. In a Technorati State of the Blogosphere interview with BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone, there was some discussion of the question of microblogging vs. blogging.
Twitter and Facebook: a long-form replacement?
Please take time to click through to watch Vanessa Druckman's interview with Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer. We'll wait right here. About 11 minutes in to the 16 minute video, you'll hear some talk about microblogging vs. long form blogging.
Back? Okay, here is the headline that grabbed my attention regarding the survey.
After reading the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, Jeff Bercovici wrote an article for Forbes called How Facebook and Twitter are Replacing Blogging. His article distinguishes between hobbyist bloggers and corporate bloggers:
. . . blogging was originally the pursuit of hobbyists. And now a lot of those hobbyists appear to be giving it up, or at least cutting back, in favor of less demanding hobbies that offer some of the same satisfactions: microblogging and social networking.
. . . 53 percent of hobbyist bloggers say they update their blogs either somewhat less or a lot less than they have in the past. Only 21 percent say they do it more. Meanwhile, 54 percent of corporate bloggers say they’re posting either somewhat or a lot more often.
Of the hobbyist bloggers surveyed, many did respond that they were blogging less because they were microblogging with Twitter or Facebook more.
Newsweek weighed in on the same topic in Take This Blog and Shove It, wherein writers Tony Doloupil and Angela Wu said,
Amateur blogs, the original embodiment of Web democracy, are showing signs of decline. While professional bloggers are “a rising class,” according to Technorati, hobbyists are in retreat, and about 95 percent of blogs are launched and quickly abandoned. A recent Pew study found that blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as bloggers declining by half between 2006 and 2009. A shift to Twitter — or microblogging, as it’s called — partly accounts for these numbers. But while Twitter carries more than 50 million tweets per day, its army of keystrokers may not be as large as it seems. As many as 90 percent of tweets come from 10 percent of users, according to a 2009 Harvard study.
When comparing hobbyists with corporate bloggers, I'll grant Bercovici the point regarding Twitter and Facebook. Corporate bloggers spend more time blogging than any other type of blogger – but that's their job. Hobbyists may have moved their pastime to Facebook. However, there is more to the blogosphere than hobbyists and corporate bloggers. Much more. The list of women interviewed by Technorati (see below) shows the diversity of bloggers inhabiting the female blogosphere now – women writing about parenthood, politics, food, technology, business, brand relationships, and more. Women such as Charlene Li and Joanne Bamberger are not hobbyists, nor is Lisa Stone.
As Lisa Stone said in the video,
We have learned, and proven through our studies, that there are so many things that women want to discuss that can't be described in 140 characters. There is truly not a threat to blogging at that level . . . Nothing's going to replace long form storytelling for women online.
Lisa referenced the 2010 Social Media Matters study conducted by BlogHer and iVillage, co-sponsored by Nielsen and Ketchum. The core findings from that study:
- BlogHer Network users choose blogs as preferred media source for product purchasing information. Only Internet search ranks higher.
- More women on the BlogHer network turn to blogs to find out
