"Blogging Trends" Posts
What’s hot in the blogging world.
Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers
Pew Internet & American Life Project today published its latest blogging report called Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers.
In sum, the report says:
The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.
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.
Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.
Web 2.0 Tools and Technologies
So what tools and technologies make Web 2.0 possible? With a little bit of help from the Wikipedia, here are the terms and their definitions.
Social software
Social software enables people to collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. It can encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but more recently it suggests genres such as blogs and wikis.
Getting from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
Web 1.0, built in the 1990s, is characterized as static web pages that were built and marketed by web professionals. Sites were found by typing in a domain name and hoping that a particular company had a site (hence the rise of domains such as pets.com).
Web 1.5, created around 2000, brought dynamic sites and ecommerce into the fold. Marketing campaigns are pushed via email and banner advertising.
Web 2.0, building in 2006, offers a place where customers are treated like adults and are valued for their opinions and views and are talked to in a human voice.
What is Web 2.0?
Last Thursday, I listened to an interesting American Marketing Association (AMA) web seminar, Invisible Marketing: 3 Things Every Organization Needs to Know in the Era of Blogs, Podcasts and RSS Feeds. This has got me thinking about the concept of Web 2.0.
What is Web 2.0? I’ll summarize what how the Wikipedia defines it:
Web 2.0 … has come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web.
Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).
They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis.
How Popular Are Blogs?
Gallup suggests that blogs are catching on with web users and their online activities.
Their latest poll, who surveyed 1,013 adults nationally, found that:
- 73% of Americans who use the Web
- 87% use email
- 72% check news and weather
- 52% shop
- 52% plan travel
- 28% use instant messaging
- 23% participate in online auctions
- 22% view videocasts
- 22% download music
- 20% consult blogs at least “occassionally” and “frequently”
