Although Apple has now dropped its law suit against Think Secret et al., one of the key issues was whether bloggers are journalists and enjoy the same rights as more traditional media.

Pew Internet’s ambitious study which covers the demographics, motivation, activity, audience and technology of bloggers found that most bloggers write to be creative or express themselves. (Apparently journalists don’t do this).

Only a minority engaged in what the survey called “journalistic activities”:

Oddly, several important journalistic activities are missing. On the one hand there’s nothing about a thirst for the truth or a commitment to the public interest. On the other, no mention of a knack for pounding out product placements as if they were reviews, taking care not to upset companies that advertise in the same enterprise and writing whatever the editor serves up whether they know anything about it or not.

It is unfortunate that the survey is not very reliable. While the survey concludes that 12 million people in the USA maintain a blog, it only conducted telephone interviews with 233 of them and the self-declared margin of error is +/- 7%.

It also seems untroubled by the semantic can of worms opened up by words like blogger and journalist open up.

Still, if you are interested in the snapshot of bloggers that the survey offers, you can download a 33 page PDF summary of its findings. blogging, bloggers, survey, journalists, demographicsSimilar Posts:

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Although Flickr seems to be on the lips of every high-impact blogger, the survey of photo-sharing sites concluded that Flickr ranks only sixth (5.95%) by market share (hits), a long way behind sites like Photobucket (43%) and Yahoo! Photos (18.3%):

Why is this so? Much comment revolves around a perceived social hierarchy among bloggers. The Register, who claims that mainstream media aggravates the situation by only listening to blogging royalty, prints the following opinion:

Photobucket is all over Myspace and LiveJournal, and it gets the hits, but the San Francisco myopia only sees their web 2.0 darlings.

HitWise analyst Leann Prescott suggests that the results reflect the cultural habits of the hoi polloi at LiveJournal and MySpace:

Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide’s traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket’s traffic, and 50% of Imageshack’s traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites…

Demonstrating exactly the elitism (or intelligence, depending on your point of view) under examination, Marshall Kilpatrick at TechCrunch agrees that the aristocrats and bloggerati may be out of touch, but says it’s all in a good cause:

High-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption.

It seems an odd debate to me. First, “hype” is obviously about what’s coming not about what is. If everyone was using Web 2.0 services like flickr, the hype would be about Web 3.0.

Secondly, hits are a very crude measure of importance. They only tell me what people are visiting. They tell me nothing qualitative, nothing about how interesting, useful, stimulating, innovative (or not) the destination is, only how popular it is.flickr, web 2.0, blogging, internet culture, hitwise, survey, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

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