Technorati (a service which indexes weblog postings) has produced its latest and most elaborate report to date on bloggers. Notable by its absence is what was a prominent (and dubious) feature of earlier reports - a graph showing a steady rise in the number of blogs and bloggers. Instead they are satisfied to remark that there are “widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Well, mainstream in terms of numbers of people who have ever read a blog perhaps but blog writing is still very much the act of a small minority, at least in the US and UK, according to representative surveys - Pew found in May 08 just 5% of US online users posted to blogs on a given day and 12% had ever done so.

Technorati have commissioned a survey (see their methodology description) of random Technorati customers (already, one should note, a skewed sample since only a fairly engaged weblog user would be interested in the services Technorati uses). They had 1,290 responses from 66 countries but give no data on how many people were contacted, so lacking a response rate it’s hard to know how this might further skew their information.

This caveat aside, their survey does contain one piece of information that is new - at least to me - a picture of the mean and median income bloggers get from advertising. Well, they find that 46% of bloggers don’t have ads on their blogs. Of those remaining, it’s striking (if not surprising) that income is highly skewed. Among European bloggers for example, the mean income is $9,040 a year, while the median is just $200. Personally I am skeptical that the actual median income from blog ads is even that high but would be interested to learn if anyone had come up with more reliable figures.

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

One of the questions that fascinates me is the relationship between Internet technologies and social norms - particularly those around privacy. Some suggest that as “Digital Natives” get older, their exposure to various tools for online self-disclosure may change their view of privacy norms. In today’s New York Times*, however, we see that this process is not always just an unintended consequence of technological change - it seems that the founder of Facebook wants his software to change people’s privacy norms:

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

Of course this makes sense commercially - the more happy we are to share information about ourselves with others, the more data about ourselves we provide for potential advertisers and the more we provide the content that brings people back to Facebook. But there are some un-addressed problems here.

Even if we get comfortable with this new attitude to self-disclosure is this a good thing for society? And what about the transitional difficulties when self-disclosing young people run into authorities who don’t understand or sympathise with this new attitude?

(Also see my earlier post “The Death of Privacy” or indeed any of the posts here categorised Privacy)

* I’ve highlighted just a small part of this article by Clive Thompson - it’s well worth reading the rest too if you want a quick and interesting overview of the issues around microblogging…

This new report surveyed seventeen writers already working in digital media in the UK. It gives an interesting snapshot of the variety of options available for those wanting to be “new media writers” but notwithstanding the optimistic note it sounds, two messages stood out for me - it’s stimulating, but don’t give up your day job because there’s not a stable business model out there, and the money (such that there is) is still in ’selling the shovels’ (training/teaching and consultancy) rather than the actual doing.

The cover alone (below) is reason enough to feature the report!

While reading a New York Times article about voice recognition and speech synthesis I learned about a new audio and video search engine, Everyzing. While the search engine itself was interesting, I was struck by the fact that the first thing you find in searching for Everyzing and in visiting their website is not the search engine page itself, but a page about the company’s business. And it is not centred on the user - it’s centred on the content providers. Specifically, the company is touting its skills in search engine optimization of audio and video content. So even before it hits the mass market it is already planning to make money by helping deep-pocketed media companies to get their media found by searchers ahead of others who don’t have those resources.

I tend to think of search engine companies and search engine optimization companies as being enemies but this reminds me that the relationship is a lot more complex.

A friend of mine, Robin Hamman who looks after the BBC’s blog trials recently brought to my attention this study of the expressed political views of BBC Facebook users which was put out by conservativehome - an independent right wing UK website - back in October and was picked up by the Daily Mail.

The study (whose figures I have updated here using the same Facebook ad tool that conservativehome used) showed that of the 11,040 BBC staff registered on the site, 1420 staff put themselves in the “liberal” or “very liberal” category, compared with just 120 who labelled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative”. 420 regard themselves as “moderate” (the rest did not specify their political views). This compares to roughly 160k liberals and 56k conservative Facebookers in London and 847k liberals vs 233k conservatives in Facebook across the UK. (For the curious - there are < 20 self-confessed liberals working for Fox News in the US on Facebook compared with 40 conservatives and an equal number of moderates).

Of course this is somewhat embarrassing for the BBC as it provides further ammunition for those who would accuse it of liberal bias. The sample is a self-selecting sample from a self-selecting sample however, therefore no more than suggestive - and of course it includes large numbers of staff not involved in politically-sensitive work.

I find it interesting to note that the information provided probably included a large number of people who specified that their profiles (including their political allegiances) should be private. The privacy does not, however, protect users from being aggregated in order to be sold to - it is Facebook's ad sales tool that enables anyone to 'mine' Facebook to find out the expressed interests, ages and - yes - political affiliations of its users, grouped by organization. As this example shows, even aggregate data can be harmful to an organization when made widely available.

I also note that it is possible to attempt to advertise to Facebook users as young as 13 - and the ad sales tool says nothing about relevant regulations.

Facebook recently introduced “Pages” as an alternative to “profiles” for brands, companies and other collective entities to use. This fills a gap but alas their implementation is problematic. Just as you can only be a “friend” of a person (via their profile) on Facebook, the only relationship you can have with a “page” is to be a “fan” of it. I might want to register that I use, am part of or am interested in a company or organization with a page but that doesn’t make me a “fan”.

I suspect that Facebook did this so that brands like Nike would not have to deal with millions of people saying they were “enemies of” the page. Hopefully the API will enable third parties to make this kind of thing possible.

It is also worth noting that while they have announced to everyone that companies will be making “pages”, they don’t mention in that context that any individual or organization, non-profit as well as profit-making can make pages (you have to look in their “help” under “business solutions” - tellingly - to find the link).

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I know it raises familiar awkward questions about Google’s market power but in this instance I have to agree. Google’s ban on advertising for essay writing services joins its existing bans on ads for “weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and miracle cures.”

This video is very popular among technophiles, as its ranking on Technorati demonstrates. It suggests that thanks to Web 2.0 technologies (which it neatly explains) “we’ll have to rethink copyright, identity, ethics… ourselves”.

While I am by any measure a heavy user of Web 2.0 technologies, the sunny optimism of some social web enthusiasts this video and the absence of a wider social perspective on the phenomenon really irks me.

Update: Michael Wesch responded to this post (see comments below) and it appears I have misrepresented him - I should not have read sunny optimism into the video. After all in the time available it is asking a lot to both present the potentials of Web 2.0 as he has done impressively and to critique them. But to continue…

The fact remains that according to a recent survey only a little more than a quarter of US online users have ever tagged anything and only 7% of them do so daily. And who are the people who tag (and by extension use a variety of Web 2.0 services?). As Pew notes, “classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.” Eszter Hargittai’s earlier research bears out this relative lack of interest in Web 2.0 usage - even among American college students. Hell, this video itself, although it is the toast of the blogosphere at the moment, has been viewed less than 20,000 times. Doesn’t that say something about the limited scale of interest in Web 2.0?

So what? Well the creator of this video and other Web 2.0 enthusiasts believe that tagging is “easy” and “anyone can do it”. Tacitly then they also believe that the contents of user-content databases and the “folksonomies” that are created therein represent (if not now then soon) the preferences and interests of everyone - or at least everyone who matters - instead of the somewhat self-reinforcing interest clusters of a technologically savvy elite.

It concerns me that thanks to this presumption and thanks to the ease with which this data can be mined by journalists, marketers, politicians, PRs and other trend-spotters, the interests and preferences of this narrow group will tend to be over-stressed at the expense of those without the time and inclination to surf and tag.

Of course tagging is in its infancy and doubtless it will grow in popularity. But does this mean it will become mainstream? I have my doubts. And even if it does I suspect most content creation and tagging will continue to be done by a passionate (or geeky) few, like myself.

This, I suggest, is what we need to bear in mind before we “rethink governance” based on an enthusiasm for this new set of technologies.

David Brake

PS it is an ironic commentary on the “ease of use” of Web 2.0 technology that I had a great deal of difficulty embedding this video. Comments are now working so please feel free to add your own in the usual way (and comment on any past posts here if you had trouble doing so before!).