Last month's State of the Blogosphere report on Technorati, to me, was a total blur. Sure, it was the authoritative look at the current demographic of bloggers, but that was a hell of a lot of work on my end ... and all I did was the article entry. Nevertheless, a few choice nuggets about bloggers did get lodged in my brain (mostly by accident) and the largest such item was buried in a graph on Day 2.
Only 10 percent of bloggers write about sports.
It's entirely possible that the last four years of my Internet life have been immersed in the sports blogohedron, hence my surprise. There's a mighty big world out there with other important, pressing topics. But that 10 percent seems awful low, doesn't it?
2,828 bloggers who responded to the survey were given 23 choices for topics, and multiple answers were allowed. Only parenting, finance, gaming and celebrity were ranked lower than sports. More people said they wrote about "sustainability." And considering most bloggers do this kind of thing for fun, that number just astounds me.
It's not like people aren't sports fans. 48 percent of Americans say they are (PDF), and with two-thirds of bloggers being male, proportionally more than half of the blogosphere should be, in theory, a sports fan. But therein is the issue here: the average blogger is different than the average American.
More so than the typical human, bloggers are passionate, outspoken, opinionated, slightly oddball, perhaps quick to judge, and sometimes irrational. Just like sports fans!
So how does one explain the canyon that separates mainstream sports fans and sports bloggers? A lack of information has never stopped me from conjecture before:
It's an incredibly time consuming process. Well, this applies to many other topics, but especially in sports. When it comes to a particular event — in this case, a game — there's a post to preview it, a post to summarize what happened (the recap), and perhaps the ramifications of that game. And that's just three posts before one scrapes the surface of off-the-field news, which is sometimes the most compelling.
The news gets old. Review a movie, or write about a bill that is passed into law. That story will have a lasting impact. Now, write about a game that happened. By the time the next game is underway, nobody really cares anymore. I can't think of any other news that gets staler faster than sports, except for weather and maybe television, which 16 percent of bloggers say they cover. (No data on weather bloggers. They must've all gone tornado chasing.)
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