It seems lately that there are more and more surveys going on about the blogging world, from the types of people that are reading them on through to the types of people that create them. The folks over at BlogAds have conducted their own survey now of blog readership and published the results.

This survey has a fairly large sample, almost 18K readers were polled. The greatest fault with this survey, unfortunately, is that it was completely self-selecting, and, as a result, very biased in terms of providing a generalized report on the types of people that read blogs. As the survey notes:

To be clear, the survey’s responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers. On Monday morning, I e-mailed roughly 50 of them — some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads — suggesting they link to they survey. I explained that the survey would “boost both public appreciation of blogging AND your revenues.” Some of the bloggers I wrote to (and some I didn’t) linked to the survey; some of their readers clicked; some were offended by questions written mostly for Americans; some aspiring respondents were unable to complete Surveymonkey’s sometimes buggy forms. So wield a salt shaker as you munch on this data.

Source: BlogAds.com, Survey Results

Despite this lack of randomness, I think the results are still valuable though not predictive. Here’s the summary of the findings:

This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.

Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I’d hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

• 50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
• 47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
• 50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)

Blog readers are media-mavens: 21% subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15% to the Economist, 15% to Newsweek and 14% to the Atlantic Monthly.

Source: BlogAds.com, Survey Results

Fortunately, this is a sign of things to come. As any industry begins to entrench itself into our daily lives, there comes a need to understand, rationalize , and eventually commoditize the forces at work.

The larger search engines are also now starting to look more deeply into differentiating their algorithms – this time the focus is on the emerging content types of the web (images, audio, and video). News.com reports on the rising challenges for multimedia content producers as they seek representation in search engine listings. This snippet sums up the dilemma:

“Our site is primarily full of rich audio, and we want people to find it when it’s relevant,” Thomas said. “The big search engines’ technologies don’t have the ability to get inside the audio or video. With the little bit of text we have on NPR, it’s not always good enough to find our content, and reference the page.”

Consumers armed with broadband connections at home are driving new demand for multimedia content and setting off a new wave of technology development among search engine companies eager to extend their empires from the static world of text to the dynamic realm of video and audio.

Source: News.com, Search engines try to find their sound

The result of this demand has been a growth in specialty search systems, much like SpeechBot, that fill the gap. These upstart projects/companies may serve as serious competition for the leading search engines in the years to come. However, the majors are not standing still. Lycos and Altavista have already had systems in place and Google is already working with NPR and others on their multimedia indexing.

One interesting find was StreamSage, an audio and video technology provider. They have released a site, CampaignSearch.com, that allows users to search the political speeches of the upcoming US Presidential candidates. It’s a great preview of how valuable this form of search will be.

For many, blogging is a way to express themselves in a manner that they have never before been afforded – regardless of audience. For others, it is a route to fame and microfortunes. Whatever the direction, there is one undeniable truth – managing a successful, current blog is a great deal of work.

Depending on the blog’s particular mix of the blog entry archetypes, the amount of effort can be casual to outright arduous. As readers, it’s often easy for us to overlook the wayfinding, research, and dedication it may take to get information down on pixels.

Today I received an interesting comment on my previous post from someone I know to be a frequent reader of the site. One of the things that was creating a small annoyance was my cross posting of entries here and on GetReal. Surprisingly (though perhaps it shouldn’t be), the reader is actually subscribed to both sites so they were being pinged twice with the same information. I definitely can see this as annoying.

As I explained in the comments, though I don’t want to alienate any of my readers, I just don’t know how large the mix is to preclude posts to both. In addition, the material I am researching and writing is not only on topic for both sites, but it also takes a great deal of time to prepare and publish. For example, the analysis of Yahoo! Messenger required not only researching Yahoo!s claims about the new features, but also installing, testing, and summarizing the important (from my point of view) aspects. It probably took more than an hour once you account for writing up the HTML, spell and grammar checking, and publishing.

It’s never easy to please everyone. Although, I guess I should be grateful that there’s even someone on the other end paying attention. It has become commonplace for blogs to be equated to conversations, though sometimes these conversations are solely with ourselves.

Coincidentally, The New York Times is running a piece in Circuits titled ”
For Some, the Blogging Never Stops”. Here’s a choice snippet from that very piece:

The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics.

“I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting,” he said. “Sort of creating a digital alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high fidelity as possible.”

For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur – all the while knowing, he added, “that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself.”

When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.

Source: NYT Online, “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops”

In the immortal words of Bob Harris (Lost in Translation), “Thank you. This is hard.” And that’s all I have to say about that *wink*.

A few days ago, Yahoo! released an updated version of its Messenger product. Generally speaking, I do not use Yahoo! IM, or any specific IM client as I prefer to work with tools like Trillian so the announcement slid past me. Yesterday, an old friend and fellow developer IMed me to rave about the many changes to the new messenger and to bless their virtues. Naturally, I was intrigued so I installed it and set up an account to test it with.

After installing the app and using it for an hour or so, I’ve discovered many very interesting features worthy of mention. There are many new and features added to the mix, however it the most compelling cluster in the Digital Identity and Privacy domains.

(more…)

I was quite pleased to find that Peter Caputa had initiated a new little experiment titled the “Weblog Invasion Tour (WIT) and selected SocialTwister.com as one of their first targets.

The premise of WIT is to highlight, as Peter describes, Under-known blogs across the web. As he describes:

Under-known is a word [I believe] I’ve invented to describe a weblog that is excellently crafted, but isn’t known too widely. All four of these webloggers write extremely well, have lots of orignal thoughts, like to try out new things, and analyze things in interesting ways.

Source: pc4media, “The Weblog Invasion Tour (WIT) Rolls On”

Of course, this is a reflection of life under the Power Law Curve — one where newcomers are often faced with the insurmountable task of ratcheting their way through the infinitely crowded landscape. This reminds me, in many ways, of Gordon Gould’s notion of micro fame which I commented on earlier this month. I’ll also mention that, as Joi Ito recently pointed out, that the role of authority may be waning in favor of influence.

I’m certainly honored to have been selected for the initial rounds, but kudos to Peter for devising an approach that socially hacks the Power Law.

John Dowdell points to an interesting research project being conducted at HP Labs, the SpeechBot. As the site describes, “SpeechBot is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites”.

Digging a little deeper into the technical documentation for SpeechBot, I came across this summary:

SpeechBot (http://www.compaq.com/speechbot) is the first Internet search site for indexing streaming spoken audio on the web. Unlike previous attempts to index spoken audio on the Web, which have relied on either adjacent text, metadata, or hand supplied transcripts and close captions, SpeechBot uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information. The use of speech recognition permits the efficient and cost-effective indexing of thousands of hours of audio content, which were previously inaccessible. Because of this indexing, SpeechBot allows users to quickly search for relevant content in long audio documents and yields a high precision on first page-retrieved items.

SpeechBot indexes streaming media files based on their content, much as conventional search sites index ordinary Web pages by their text content. Like conventional search sites, SpeechBot does not store or serve the multimedia files themselves, but rather provides users with links. SpeechBot’s current index has over 3200 shows, 3500 hours of audio and 20 million words. The index is continually updated using SpeechBot’s highly scalable architecture.

Source: SpeechBot White Paper

(more…)

Antispam framework scores Microsoft endorsement

http://news.com.com/Antispam+framework+scores+Microsoft+endorsement/2100-1032_3-5220253.html?tag=nefd.top

http://voisen.org/archives/central/000402.php

http://news.com.com/1606-2-5208490.html?tag=ne.guts.vid

It never ceases to amaze me the multitude of angles taken when approaching the singles scene, and online dating to be more specific. Judith Meskill’s Social Networking Services Meta List has more 40 alone in there, everything from age to pets are potential filters.

It what must be one of the newer entrants to the space, LoveInWar intends to spin its own matchmaking web focused on political affiliation and partisianship. Different, to say the least. I think their description says it best:

Who says sex and politics don’t mix? We all got concerns, views and what not. For many here, politics is what defines us. But sometimes, even politically minded people need a break. Sometimes you wanna meet others. Take a long walk on the beach or something. That’s where Love In War comes in. Think of us as a rest stop on your little revolution. Even Ché took some time to party. Go to Cuba, you’d understand why.

Source: Love In War web site