While Swedish media just recently learned about blogging and now podcasting, US media are already exploring vlogging, or video blogging. Here’s the story of an 11-year old, supposedly the world’s youngest video blogger, who even got on ABC World News Tonight.
Category: Blogging
Dan Gillmor’s new blog
Dan Gillmor, one of the leading thinkers in blogging and journalism, has moved to a new blog called Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism – A conversation about the future of journalism “by the people, for the people.” RSS feed here.
Majority of bloggers are men, or women
A recent blog survey by Perseus revealed that the majority of bloggers are women (56%) but a new survey by Pew Internet shows that 57% of all US blog creators are men. The two studies were performed quite differently. Pew made two telephone surveys with in total 1,861 internet users in the US, while Perseus surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services. Perseus analysis “does not cover nonhosted blogs – blogs that individuals maintain on their own servers using their own tools”.
I am not an expert on statistics but it seems that Pew’s survey draws conclusions from a very small number of respondents. If they surveyed 1,861 internet users and 7 per cent of them had created a blog, that is only 130 people (74 male, 56 female).
Observer starts monitoring US blogs
Swedish media monitoring company Observer owns Bacon’s Information who monitors media sources for clients in the US. In November, Observer decided to start monitoring 10 influential Swedish blogs and now Bacon’s have announced they will start monitoring “the most reputable online news blogs” in America. According to the press release:
“Initially, these will be blogs of active journalists, but as our in-house researchers scrutinize and approve additional news-related blogs, we will add to the scope of our coverage.”
According to bloggers, Bacon’s will be monitoring just 250 blogs. Darren Barefoot has a post on why this is a crappy idea. Jeremy Pepper thinks it’s not. Personally I think that the quality approach (vs quantity) is ok for the non-tech savvy PR people, but any PR practitioner with a little more knowledge about the blogosphere would obviously add services like Feedster, PubSub and Technorati.
Blogs and wikis are complementary to media
The New York Times writes (reg. Required) about how blogs are complementary to traditional media and have become a vital source of information in the aftermath of the earthquake in southern Asia. Another example is Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet which is continously updating a web page with external links to tsunami information from non-traditional media like blogs, wikis and personal homepages.