Technorati/Edelman Survey

The Technorati/Edelman survey results are out. I've not yet fully digested the results or the commentary that is springing up out there. However, looking at the first key finding as described on Edelmen's blog, I'm starting to feel some concern:

First, why do bloggers' blog? Thirty four percent - the highest number—blog in order to be visible authorities in their field. This means that bloggers are highly engaged; seek the best sources of information; and bring a natural desire to participate and advance the discussion in their field. That makes them an important audience for corporations and public relations professionals but they have largely been ignored- 48% of bloggers are never contacted by companies or their PR representatives. According to the open-ended questions, bloggers' biggest frustration is that companies don't realize how influential blogs are, and that they don't interact with bloggers.

34% of bloggers blog in order to be visible authorities in their field. Visibility is correlated with post volume. If you hang out for a while on a ping server, you will see a lot of traffic coming from Blogger, Spaces, etc., not to mention the other high volumes of data from places like LiveJournal and Xanga. The average ages on those systems are pretty young (LiveJournal is generally around 19 years for example). So what are these people experts in? I'm actually more willing to believe that the self-selection bias inherent in the survey is to those that want to be seen as experts in their fields.

It is also interesting to see the geographic break down. China got 0.6 %. Again, the self selection bias is towards English speaking bloggers here (this is not surprising given the English language questions). China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have a huge number of bloggers (in absolute counts).

Edelman's blog states that the survey was to be

a study of influential bloggers' attitudes on communicating with corporations.

And yet the survey was promoted in the following manner:

Technorati contacted tens of thousands of active bloggers via email, blog posts and the networks of discussion and links those posts generated.

Were these tens of thousands of bloggers all 'influencial'? That is a lot of influencial bloggers.

Niall Kennedy of Technorati, posting in a comment on this blog, indicated that he would address the self-selection bias in the interpretation of these results. I've not yet seen this discussed either on his blog or on the Technorati blog.

I see that Constantin, who came here asking for clarification on some surveys published by Intelliseek and others, has also posted some inital commentary. I came this post after writing the above.

The signs are not exactly encouraging:

• the entry announcing the results has no discussion of survey’s limitations
• the survey is already called “a study of influential bloggers’ attitudes” (emphasis added) — although there’s no explanation on how the not-so-influential bloggers were preventend from taking the survey
• responses to the open-ended questions are published along with the responders’ IP addresses; I’m not sure that this is what the responders understood when they were assured that “the study is confidential and anonymous.”
• there’s no analysis of responses to the three open-ended questions included in the survey

Comments

[Robert Stockton]

I'm sorry, but I don't think that this comes close to passing the smell test. "First, why do bloggers' blog? Thirty four percent - the highest number—blog in order to be visible authorities in their field." Anyone who's spent any time looking at LiveJournal, which accounts for nearly half of the traffic in the blog-o-sphere, knows that there are a *whole lot* more people chattering about their daily lives than trying to be authoritative about anything. (Does anybody happen to have numbers on what fraction of blogs are LiveJournal? I only have post counts handy.)

As far as I can tell, the only way those numbers would be valid is if every non-LJ blog were a serious "authority blog", and it doesn't take much browsing to see that this is not true either.

It's not surprising that this survey ignored the "long tail" of folks for whom blogging is not the primary life-passion, but I can't take seriously any pollster who takes a skewed sample and then blithely talks as if he knew something about the full population.

(I'm sure that there is going to be someone out there to tell me that most LJs are not blogs because they don't have enough hyperlinks, or because they haven't enabled track-backs, or some other self-serving definition. All I can say is: get a clue -- you don't own the playground any more, and the mainstream is going to ignore your petty quiddities.)

I seriously believe that there is a great deal of interest in what *all* bloggers have to say. However, we aren't going to hear the full message if we keep wearing blinders that keep us from seeing beyond the a-list "tip of the iceberg".