This recently conducted study into blogging samples 400 English written blogs with interesting results.
The starting point of the research was a the following four point hypothesis based on the media and observing A-list blogs:
1. Blog content tends to be external to the author ie not personal.
2. Blog authors are typically well-educated adult males
3. Blogs are interactive, attracting multiple comments
4. Blogs are heavily interlinked
The results show that each of the above points was largely untrue. Their findings include the following:
Gender
- 54 % written by males
- Gender of blog author varies according to blog content - eg Personal Journals tend to be written by females (60%) while Filters, Knowledge-logs etc were more likely to be written by males (85%).
Age
- 59% written by people over 20 years old (many adult bloggers appear to be in their early 20's)
- Age of blog author varies according to blog content - eg Personal journals are more likely to be written by teens (60%) while Filters and knowledge-logs are almost always written by Adults (95%).
Comments
- 43% allowed comments
- Mean number of comments: .3. ie most entries receive no comments.
Links
- 69.5% of blogs link to external sites (excluding badges/buttons). ie this means 30% have no external links!
- 8.2% of entries link to news items
- 6.7% of entries link to other blogs
- Therefore most entries contain no links.
Other
- 70% are personal journals
- 70% written within the USA
- 91% are single author blogs
As stated above the sample size of this study was only 400 blogs so we need to take the results with a grain of salt - however the trends in fit with other study results and anecdotal evidence. In my opinion more study needs to be done.
The above stats were gleaned from here and here. The results are also here in the form of a powerpoint.
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