Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere, as rehashed by (guilty as charged) my perennial favourite blogs over at Contexts. Mostly just a bunch of fun charts’n’graphs about demographics and advertising, but oddly compelling. They’ve managed a few myopic analyses about gender and money and whatnot, but there’s a whole nifty section on the interpersonal aspect of all this intarwebs stuff and how it impacts and interacts with blogger’s “real lives.”
Which sort of made me want to see some statistics on people’s comfort levels with ‘internet friendships’ and how they’ve changed over the years as ‘social’ media developed and as the lines between ‘media’ and ‘real life’ began to blur more. We’ll be honest here — I’m one of those 47% with real-life friends (and good ones, and good ones I haven’t met IRL too) who started out as internet buddies or fellow bloggers or message board buddies or more recently, contacts made in college in the early days of Facebook (“Hey! Saw you took Blahblahblah220 last semester!”) and people I’ve reached out to as work contacts.
Totally tempted also to post one of my senior seminar powerpoints/lectures on ‘blog as community’ from college, but I’ll spare y’all and don’t want to dig it off my external anyhow. But oh, there were statistical analyses on grammar, spelling, creative/’transgressive orthography’, etc of Gakwer vs. Perez commenters, which is one of the most obvious things ever but man, do I love that shit or what. Which isn’t just me waxing nostalgic for days when doing this stuff was leisurely and involved a castle-like library rather than a cubicle — but I’d still love to see these demographics of writers lined up against their readers and compare gender/income/etc etc. (Gawker Media’s stats are enough of a soc creamfest for me to begin with.)
