The Deepwater Word vs. The Microblogging Shallows

Technorati recently gave their take on the state of blogging with lots of numbers and percentages — and I would really love to know who these people are who are responding to their questions.  Does Technorati know the identities of their responders, or are these people only blindly self-reporting?  I never flatly trust any number reported in a poll or a pie chart.  I always subtract half the time people say they actually spend on “doing something” — including blogging! — and I always subtract at least 66% from any salary number people claim to earn.

If you’re a blogger, Technorati says you’re well-educated and well-off financially — but can we really trust those who self-report an addictive self-indulgence that primes their ego and primps their id — and I say that as a self-diagnosed maniac who publishes 13 Blogs and I graduated with an MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York and I’ve been hardcore blogging for six years or so?

Overall, bloggers are a highly educated and affluent group. Nearly half of all bloggers we surveyed have earned a graduate degree. As expected in the wake of a recession, we did see a slight drop in income; however, bloggers are still more affluent than the general population. As blogging is now firmly a part of the mainstream, we see that the average blogger has three or more blogs and has been blogging for two or more years. We are also noticing an ever-increasing overlap between blogging and mainstream media.

Here are some of the more interesting numeric claims — don’t forget to slash and divide and delete as necessary:

• Two-thirds of bloggers are male.
• 65% are age 18-44.
• 79% have college degrees / 43% have graduate degrees
• 1/3 have a household income of $75K+
• 1/4 have a household income of $100K+
• 81% have been blogging more than 2 years.
• Professionals have an average of 3.5 blogs.
• Professionals blog 10+ hours/week.
• 11% say blogging is their primary income source.

For those who are blogging less, the reason they give for the decline in production is that they’re spending more time “microblogging” on Twitter and Facebook.

I can’t imagine any serious blogger giving up a formal blog for Twitter or Facebook — sure the work is easier and the load is lesser — but you can’t craft the same depth in a Tweet that you can on a proper blog.

It makes more sense that former blog commenters are now “microblogging” on Twitter and Facebook because that fits their modus operandi and the milieu of their communicative directive as they become a “publisher” instead of an ill-perceived hanger-on.

The fact that WordPress.com is signing up almost a million new blogs a month gives us great hope that the deepwater word is coming back with a vengeance — to drain the microblogging shallows — and reunite us with our hardcore humanity and missing emotional values.