… meets Tuscany. The light was beautiful today as I walked down Union Street on my way to lunch with my old friend John Clippinger from Harvard. We had a …
Woo Hoo, just hit 150,000 miles in my trusty 1995 Toyota 4Runner. Still a great vehicle, still fun to drive. The only significant repairs I’ve had to do on it …
Posted by David Sifry on October 1, 2008 at 11:06 pm
We’ve been hard at work on the private beta of Offbeat Guides, and I thought it would be a good time to give y’all an update on our progress!
We’ve been making huge strides both in making the site simpler and easier to use, as well as cranking away on the hard tasks of building out a deep semantic search service that dynamically builds guides for over 30,000 different city destinations around the world. We’ve taken a lot of what I’ve learned building comprehensive real-time search engines at Technorati, and also what Marina and her team have learned in building and curating a narrative experience when she was with Lonely Planet. We want to give you more than just the facts – to also get you a flavor and some the romance of the place and of your trip. We’ve expanded the partners we’re working with to include even more local photographs, festivals, tickets, and events, and we’ve put in a lot of heuristic technology to help to make sure we weed out as much irrelevant information as possible. If you want to work with us, drop us a line.
Algorithms can’t provide everything though, especially for the top travel destinations of the world – humans mean a lot too. We’ve got a team of people who have been digging deep into the top 1000 city destinations of the world – calling the shops, restaurants, hotels, fact-checking, and pulling out the cruft, while focusing on bringing you the most interesting offbeat local perspectives, and we also take advantage of all of the great Creative Commons-licensed and Public Domain information thats out there on the internet to help to create a satisfying experience for anyone who is traveling. We’re also looking to get feedback from locals and travelers so the guides stay current and completely up-to-date, too!
There’s still a lot to do, but I thought I’d put up a screencast (it runs a total of about 13 minutes) that takes you through the main features of the site – a sneak peek of what our private beta testers have been playing with.
We’re actively adding more people to the beta, on a first-come, first served basis – so if you want to get involved in testing out our beta, helping us to identify and fix bugs, and get two printed guides shipped free-of-charge to you as part of the private beta, make sure to sign up at the site. This offer won’t last forever!
Posted by David Sifry on September 26, 2008 at 12:44 pm
To wrap up a long data-filled week, we’ve rolled out part 5 of the State of the Blogosphere report, which is all about how traditional brands are perceived and how bloggers interact with brands in the blogopshere. This data is taken from the large survey done on Technorati bloggers earlier this year, as described in our methodology. Here’s a few of the interesting things we learned:
More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate.
One-third of bloggers surveyed have been approached to be brand advocates.
Of those, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind.
One in five bloggers don’t think that newspapers will survive the next ten years.
Half of bloggers surveyed believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years.
37% of bloggers surveyed have been quoted in traditional media based on a blog post.
Bloggers are most open to receiving marketing messages from other blogs. Even non-blog web content is more influential among this group than traditional media sources for brand information.
Bloggers spend twice as much time online as U.S. adults 18-49, and spend only one-third as much time watching television.
One in four bloggers spends ten hours or more blogging each week.
Over half of the Technorati top authority bloggers post five or more times per day, and they are twice as likely to tag their blog posts compared to other bloggers.
From their use of RSS feeds, video, photos, and mobile updates, top bloggers are also tremendously sophisticated in leveraging the available tools to make their blogs more robust.
The Technorati Top 100 blogs had more than twice as many postings in June 2008 as the next 500, and more than 12 times as many postings as the next 5000.
The Technorati Top 100 are prolific, with 43% posting ten times per day or more often. Only 8% post once a day or less frequently, compared to 13% of the next 500 bloggers, and 22% of the next 5000 bloggers.
Among bloggers who have advertising on their blogs, two in three have contextual ads (such as Google AdSense). One-third of bloggers have affiliate advertising on their blog. One in five negotiate directly with advertisers and one in ten sell advertising through a blog ad network.
The average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000. However, this is skewed by the top 1% of bloggers who earn $200k+.
Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.
Bloggers with advertising invest an average of $1,800 annually in their blogs. U.S. bloggers earn an average of $5,000, though bloggers in Asia earn 50% more on average and European bloggers earn an average of 75% more than U.S. bloggers.
High revenue bloggers skew the mean revenue. The median revenue for U.S. bloggers is $200 annually (and the median annual investment is only $50).
The top 10 percent of blogger respondents earned an average of $19,000 annually.
Three-quarters of these successful bloggers are male, and four in ten are self employed (twice as high as the average blogger).
Posted by David Sifry on September 24, 2008 at 12:44 am
Today Technorati released the second part of our State of the Blogosphere report, and today’s topics focus on what bloggers blog about, and why they blog. Technorati surveyed over 1000 bloggers who use the service, and came away with some very interesting statistically significant information:
Some highlights:
Both personal and professional topics are equally popular, with most bloggers covering multiple topics
Half of bloggers consider their style to be sincere, conversational, humorous, and expert in nature.
Although there is a perception of blogging as a means for writing a tell-all or gossiping, those blogging styles fell to the bottom of the list among the bloggers surveyed
Music is more popular and politics is less popular in Asia, while personal, lifestyle, and religious topics are less popular in Europe.
International bloggers tend to be less conversational and snarky.
Asian bloggers tend to be more motivational and confessional, while European bloggers are more confrontational.
Women tend to be more conversational in their blogging style, while men tend to be expert.
Those under 34 are more confessional in their blogging style, while those over 35 are more expert in their style.
When asked why they blog, the majority of personal bloggers do it for fun.
Twenty percent are currently making some money blogging, and another 42% hope to make money on their blog in the future.
There’s lots more in the report, along with some very interesting charts and graphs showing more detailed analysis of what bloggers feel, and how they are motivated. If you missed it, you can check out the first part of the report, which gives more of an overview.
Posted by David Sifry on September 22, 2008 at 11:31 am
I’m very pleased to announce that the next installment of the State of the Blogosphere is out! It has been about a year since the last report, and the Technorati team has really worked hard to make this report something comprehensive, interesting, and informative.
One of the big changes this year is that along with a comprehensive scan of Technorati‘s complete database, we also did a massive survey of bloggers who have registered with Technorati – a detailed survey with dozens of detailed questions about themselves, how they blog, and more. Altogether over 1,290 completed surveys came in from over 60 countries, with over 1,000 respondents (83%) providing their URLs and email addresses for follow-up. More information about the survey methodology is here. The report is so big, in fact, that we’re releasing it in 5 parts:
Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?
Day 2: The What And Why of Blogging
Day 3: The How of Blogging
Day 4: Blogging For Profit
Day 5: Brands Enter The Blogosphere
Enough of the preamble! Here’s some juicy nuggets:
Technorati is currently tracking 133 million blogs (we’ve done a LOT of culling spam blogs, and the number of bloggers keeps growing!)
7.4 Million blogs have posted in the last 120 days – that’s 5.5% of all blogs we track.
1.5 Million blogs have posted at least once in the last 7 days.
There are now, on average, 900,000 blog posts tracked every 24 hours. That means that Technorati’s tracking 37,500 new blog posts per hour, or 10.4 new blog posts per second!
Here’s some more highlights from the survey of Technorati bloggers:
The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off.
The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.
Median investment and revenue (which is listed in the full report) is significantly lower, around $100-$200 per year.
There’s so much rich data in there, lots offered for study. I don’t think anyone has ever done as detailed a study of bloggers with as many participants, which means that you can slice and dice the data in a number of ways and still have enough respondents to have statistical significance. For example, blog networks serve nearly women bloggers at more than double the rate they serve male bloggers (16% of women who have advertising use a network, while only 7% of men who have advertising use a network). There’s more to come, but go have a look at the initial report, hot and fresh at the Technorati site. If you want to see the older reports to compare, I’ve got them archived as well.
Kudos to the Technorati team for working so hard and getting this out. I’m really looking forward to the conversations it generates.
Posted by David Sifry on September 21, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Nice writeup today in the New York Times. Who says that nice guys finish last? Or that good guys can’t win? I’ve been hearing good things about the team ever since their del.icio.us investment and Dick Costolo at Feedburner couldn’t say enough good things about them. Fred’s also a prolific and thought-leading blogger, who has kept up consistent quality for a few years now – not an easy feat. Congrats, Fred and team! Well deserved.
Posted by David Sifry on September 21, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I admit it – I’m a bit of a camera junkie. I’ve been a photographer for 20 years, and I know enough to know that the camera you use is simply a tool – and that the true skill of photography lies between our ears. However, I just couldn’t help myself from getting a bit tight-chested when I saw that Canon had announced their newest camera in their lineup this week – The EOS 5D Mark II. I left the film world behind in 2000, which I gotta tell you, was way too early – I was shooting 640×480 onto floppies way back when, and the pictures looked like crap. But ever since I got the 3 Megapixel Nikon 990, I’ve been hooked on digital. I have 11×14 prints taken by that camera, and a few are still my favorites, like the one on the right, “Buttes as a Storm Approaches, Monument Valley, AZ“. I’ve upgraded a few times since then, both in point-n-shoots, as well as in workhorse DSLRs – first the EOS 10D, which I used in 2004 to shoot the DNC and RNC political conventions while working with CNN, and then more recently, with the EOS 5D, which I have taken with me all around the world. I love the 5D. It’s got nearly everything that I want as a photographer, in a reasonably lightweight, solid package, and it’s built to make most tasks easy and intuitive. I bought it primarily because I love taking wide-angle shos, and the 5D as the first reasonably-priced camera with a true 24mmx35mm sensor – meaning that there is no “magnification factor” when you put a lens on it. A 24mm lens looks like a 24mm lens back when I shot film. A 50mm lens is a normal lens, not a portrait lens like it was on my 10D. It had significantly improved low-ligh characteristics, like really smooth shots up to about ISO 800, which meant that I could get a lot of those birthday-shots-lit-by-a-candle when I fixed a nice fast lens like the 50mm f1.4 to the 5D and shot at 800 or 1600 ISO. My family thanked me, because I was able to get no-flash shots of the kids blowing out birthday candles and I loved it because I could walk around places like Paris and get shots I would never have been able to get before.
So when i heard that Canon was finally doing an upgrade to the 5D, I was very excited. And then I heard about the features of the camera, and some of the preproduction reactions by photographers. Some of the things that impressed me:
New, higher ISO settings – including shots that look nearly noise free at ISO 1600 and 3200. This is amazing. And the camera can go up to ISO 25,600 for when you really are in nearly no light, but I uspect I won’t go any highr than ISO 6400. But still, this increase in relatively noiseless high ISO images is nothing short of fantastic. Basically, this means that I’m going to be able to get greater depth of field or faster shutter speeds later at night. This is a very good thing.
21 Megapixels. Now Megapixels aren’t the only judge of quality, but it appears that these 21 megapixels are the real deal – it’s truly medium format quality in a 35mm body. Often adding pixels means that the overall sensitivity of the camera drastically drops in low light, but see the item above – Canon has made their sensors dramatically more sensitive, even as they made each individual pixel smaller so that they could cram in 21 Megapixels in. Amazing. Again, a big win.
3.9 fps. Now this isn’t the super-fast 5fps that sports shooters need, but adding essentially an extra frame per second will definitely feel faster, and let me get more expressions when I’m taking portraits. I’m one of those guys who likes to take lots of shots of people and try to get them relaxed to get lots of different expressions – chances are, you’ll end up getting at least one well-exposed, natural smile when you d that. The current 5D is 3fps, but the new one will get me an extra frame per second. That’s a good thing.
Live preview shooting (which means a nearly silent shutter) I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get lots more fun candid shots. I haven’t had a camera with Live Preview before, but it has been available on Canon’s (and some Nikons) for a while, so it must be pretty good. I ‘ll give it a go, anyway.
The big kicker: 1080p video along with a microphone jack and HDMI output on the camera. Wow. This is amazing. When I heard about the Nikon D90 coming out that could do video, I was envious. Now when I think about the kids of video productions I can create with my current lens lineup, fast zooms, and fast focus, I get very excited. Add to it the enhanced smoothness and noise reduction at high ISOs and shooting with natural light even in low light sounds like it’ll be fun too. Definitely looking forward to filling up lots of hard disks with video to play with. Another plus – it shoots directly to 1080p quicktime movies, so there’s no transcoding necessary if you want to edit in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Sweet.
I could go on and on. I think this camera is going to be a huge seller, and I’m preordering mine – I think that if you don’t get in now, this camera is going to be backordered for months. There are downsides oo- like the incompatable set of accessories and batteries, meaning that you’re going to have to buy new ones when you get the camera. But for a guy who takes care of his tools, I’m really looking forward to having the 5D Mark II as my new primary camera, and the 5D as it’s very worthy backup.
And now my Channukah list is complete. This camera comes out sometime in November, just in time for the holiday season. Woo hoo!
