BlogWorld Expo 2008 was held last weekend, Sept. 19-21, 2008, in Las Vegas, U.S.A. More than 200 expert presenters in the field of blogging and internet businesses spoke at the 2nd annual Blogging Convention.
With so many great presentations, the hardest thing about attending the conference was being able to decide which speakers to listen to.
The conference started off with Richard Jalichandra of Technorati presenting the State of the Blogosphere. Technorati.com allows users to submit their blogs and provides people with a system of tracking their blog popularity. Technorati has a list of the top 100 blogs according to user voting and community interaction. You can read the best blogs on a variety of topics.
In the state of the blogosphere report that Richard Jalichandra presented, we learned that there were 1.5 million posts in the last week on any given day and that Technorati has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002. Between 50 to 100,000 blogs where considered influencial.
The advice Mr. Jalichandra gave bloggers was to be transparent and authentic. He said that the new influencer in the blogging world, is…you guessed it…YOU! Blogs are all about information and influence.
Technorati has a system of assigning blogs an authority ranking. This ranking is based on a number of factors, one of them being the interaction or number of comments people are making on the blog and the number of times your blog is mentioned in other blogs. They have said that there are between 50 to 100,000 blogs that are considered to be “influencial.” This authority ranking can be tracked by going to Technorati and registering your blog.
There seems to be a critical point at which a blog turns the corner of being one in millions to becoming influencial. Mr. Jalichandra stated that blogs with rankings in authority of 50 or higher have reached that critical mass point. So bloggers, aim for that 50 authority. Apparently there are only only 76,000 blogs that have reached that point.
The people at Technorati.com have conducted surveys to determine the answer to the question – How old are bloggers?
The results showed that 37% where between 25 and 34, 27% where between 35 and 44, 15 percent where between 44 and 54 and 8% were over 55 years old.
Only 14% of the bloggers surveyed were using their blogs to enhance their business. One out of 4 people spend 10 hours a week blogging. Out of the high money earners, (the top 10%) made 81 posts per month. $19,000 a year was the media income from blogging.
Blogging is here to stay and in my humble opinion will only become more influencial as time goes on. With the free software provided by WordPress and the inexpensive costs of buying a domain name and securing a hosting company to host your website, there aren’t any big hurdles to high to jump to get your blog started today.
