Blogworld 09 - Friday Keynote - The State of the Blogosphere

Richard Jalichandra of Technorati gave the opening keynote on Friday. You can see the details about the presentation here. What follows are my own notes from the talk.

• The state of the Blogosphere is STRONG! (The crowd goes wild!) Whoohoo!


• There's the rise of a class of professional bloggers. Mainstream media folks are starting to emulate the writing styles of bloggers. Citizen-journalism is growing as is blog readership.


• Technorati is rolling out a new look in the very near future.


• Richard recapitulated his talk from last year by way of introduction to the rest of his talk.


• This talk will focus on the rise of the class of professional bloggers.


• There's been a big growth in bloggers getting paid at least partially for their work. Richard showed a pie chart of his data that indicated that 72% of his respondents are just hobbyists. He doesn't have a truly gigantic sample size, so I would bet that the percentage of bloggers getting paid is probably smaller than he says. In any case, the number of people getting paid for their blogging is growing. Within the set of those getting paid are those that find business opportunities because of their blogging. That would then include the realtors we heard from yesterday who blog to make connections, but don't get directly paid for their blogging.


• Microblogging does not seem to be a threat to normal blogs. Of those who said they blogged less, only 1/3 of them said it was because they could microblog.


• A lot of unsurprising stats followed - people are taking blogs more seriously, more people are getting their news from blogs, lots of journalists and former journalists now blog and so forth.

I'm going to quit at this point. The theme here is that there is a flow of revenue and impact into the Blogosphere. Because of the negligible barrier to entry for publishing on a blog, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to expect this to slow down.

I've got a nice photo of Richard, but I'll have to wait until I've got a table to hook up my camera. I'm going to shut down now to save my laptop battery.