Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Blogging & mobile reports

Thanks to Vivienne Bernath, who alerted me to this newly published report from the USA:
Lenhart, A. and Fox, S. (2006) Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers. Pew Internet Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/
186/report_display.asp

"A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology." The survey looks at motivations, how much time people spend blogging etc.

A survey of UK bloggers was published on the next day: I was alerted through an article in the free Metro newspaper which I encountered on my way to work:
Davern, F. (2006) "Every Joe blogs is revealing all online." Metro, 20 July, 3. The article is online , but with a different title, namely"Join the Joe blogs revolution" (demonstrating that the sub-editors rate fitting the headline into the available space above bibliographic consistency). It was produced for MSN Spaces and therefore the sample was more restricted (to MSN users, I think). Also, the two surveys show that your results depend on your questions, as the two lists of "what you do with your blog" are different, with the MSN one more focused to social/emotional activities (blogging to inform others doesn't even feature as a possible option - nearest is blogging a hobby).
MSN Spaces (2006) Blogging Britain: inside the UK's blogging phenomenon. MSN Spaces.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
graphics/2006/07/21/blogging.pdf
(the most I could find on the MSN/Microsoft website was a press release).

Another interesting report is Mobile Life Report 2006 at http://www.mobilelife2006.co.uk/ which was sponsored by Carphone warehouse and conducted by a team based at the London School of Economics. The survey of 16.5K people was conducted online. It includes some discussion of the results and a marketing classification of mobile phone users (I appear to be a Smart Connected - photo shows me being smart and connected in the British Library when I was down for the SCONUL meeting earlier in the month) .

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