8. Which comes first...the money or the blog?
"Overall, the high revenue bloggers are more sophisticated in terms of the tools that they use, their usage of readership events, and advertising platforms. They also invest far more resources (both time and money) in their blogs."
This begs the question: Did the hits and the money come, which inspired them to put more time into their blogs? Or did the time put in eventually pay off with larger revenue? The Technorati survey doesn't necessarily point toward an answer, but it may be an interesting arena of investigation for next year's survey — some kind of correlation between the amount of time spent on a blog and how much is made off the blog, tracked over time.
9. Blogging Brands
So the final day of coverage in the State of the Blogosphere 2008 discusses the communication of brands through blogs, and it's not exactly Earth-shattering in terms of its findings — almost half of those surveyed post product reviews, talk about brands they love, and blog about their everyday experiences in stores or with customer care.
The reason it's not Earth-shattering to me is that talking about brands seems like a no-brainer for most blogs. I'm also relatively unsure what exactly they're specifying by "brands" — the obvious thought is stuff like Coke or Nintendo or Nike, but are there certain levels of brands that are more discussed than others? One might assume based on the general perception of blogs as covering under-the-radar media, but it would be interesting to know.
The other side of the "blogging on brands" coin is "brands that have blogs," which is another area of great interest, since it indicates just how much blogging is being co-opted by corporations to communicate their own brand messages. That's probably its own survey, and there are statistics scattered throughout the survey that suggest that blogging for corporate means is gaining traction, but that will be one of the more interesting areas to observe as blogs continue to become a commonplace method of communication. Haven't seen a truly cringe-worthy example of blogging a brand yet, but I'm just waiting for cokeiskewl.blogspot.com or something to nauseate me with news of all the "hottest Coke products and news!"
10. Can I have six grand for this? Please?
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