Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers

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Notes:

1. The overall blogging with broadband number and general population comparison are drawn from December 2005 and February-April 2006 Pew Internet telephone surveys.

2. Please note that the question wording for the February-April 2006 survey was slightly different from the wording used to gather sample for our Blogger Callback survey throughout 2004 and 2005. In the February- April survey, the question was as follows: “Do you ever create or work on your own online journal or weblog?” The previous question was “Do you ever create a weblog or blog that others can read on the Web?” Given the rapid growth in the blogosphere, we felt it important to report the most recent data.

3. Please see http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp

4. Data for this section of the report comes from our February-April 2006 Tracking surveys. The n for bloggers is 175, and margin of error is +/- 8%. The n for internet users is 2,822 and the margin of error is +/- 2%.

5. Pew Internet & American Life Project February-April 2006 survey.

6. Pew Internet & American Life Project January-February 2006 survey.  

7. Pew Internet & American Life Project January-February 2005 survey.

8. Pew Internet & American Life Project November-December 2005 survey.

9. “Popular” here is defined based on the Technorati designation of the top 100 blogs, which measures popularity through the number of inbound links to a blog.

10. According to Technorati, a website that has monitored a large segment of the universe of blogs since March 2003, the number of blogs doubles approximately every 5 to 6 months. http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000432.html

11. Based on January 2006 and February-April 2006 survey data.

12. This assumes the software the blogger uses provides site traffic logs or that a secondary counting application has been installed, which is often not the case.

13. For some bloggers, a different term is used to refer to a list of links to other blogs. For example, with LiveJournal, the list of links is titled “Friends” and may appear on a separate internal page, often with biographical information about the blogger. On Xanga, the same list is called “subscriptions,” and appears on the side of the main blog page.

14. A further complication to fully understanding blog traffic--the term “hit” used in the survey question is one which can have a variety of meanings depending on the Web traffic software that a blogger uses, and does not generally represent individual unique visitors to a Web server or site.
15. Shirky, Clay (2003) Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality. http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

16. Though as Amanda Lenhart has suggested in an academic paper on this topic, the mere fact of a blog being listed on a blogroll does not guarantee that the blog owner doing the listing is actually reading the blog listed. See Lenhart, Amanda. (2005) Unstable Texts: An ethnographic look at how bloggers and their audience negotiate self-presentation, authenticity and norm formation. Masters Thesis, Georgetown University. http://lenhart.flashesofpanic.com/Lenhart_thesis.pdf

17. The survey used for callback sample were: February 2004 and 2005 Tracking Surveys; November 2004 Tracking; November Activity Tracking; January 2005 Tracking; September 2005 Tracking; the Exploratorium Survey; Nov/Dec 2005 Tracking Survey; the Spyware Survey; and PSRAI’s Demographic Tracking Survey.