PEW Internet: Where is WordPress?

24 Sep
2006

Posted by J. Angelo Racoma as Blog Statistics, Blogging Sense

I recently stumbled upon a July 2006 report by PEW Internet entitled Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers (PDF) and I was intrigued that the word WordPress did not appear on the text a single time. In the telephone survey done to determine blogger- and blog-related data, the most used blogging platform was LiveJournal, then followed by MySpace, then Blogger.

PEW Internet-bloggers.png

Where is WordPress here? I thought WP was almost synonymous with blogging already? Perhaps it’s bundled in with the 17% “something else” group, and the 38% “don’t know/rather not say” group. At any rate, I think it would also be interesting to know what BloggingPro readers use. Here’s a simple poll I made.

The poll is limited to five choices, though. If you choose “Other,” please do leave a comment on what software you’re using. I would also be interested to know what made you choose the blogging platform you’re currently using, be it included in the list or not.

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10 Responses

ken

September 24th, 2006 at 5:08 am
1

Seems obvious to me that something is wrong with the PEW survey.
Bruno Amaral

September 24th, 2006 at 6:55 am
2

From what I read in their survey, calling up the bloggers wasn’t the best approach.

They used random phone numbers to conduct a series of interviews on internet use. We don’t know the age of those in this first interview. Later, they took the data relating to bloggers and conducted a second interview. Doesn’t this taint the sample?

And yet, all they got was 233 responses. How can we extrapolate ANYTHING from this sample?

It’s hard to conduct interviews when our target is scattered. But it’s a mistake to assume they all have a land-line or a mobile phone
Martin

September 24th, 2006 at 7:16 am
3

It’s very clear that something is very wrong or flawed with this survey.

WordPress has never been as popular as before and is in fact thriving.
David

September 24th, 2006 at 8:49 am
4

Can you trust a survey that spells movable type wrong? Good find though J.
J. Angelo Racoma

September 24th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
5

I used to think PEW was an authoritative source on such matters. But if they get such simple things wrong, then their analysis might be flawed, in the first place.
david

September 24th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
6

I suspect that Pew also lumped in LOTS of “online” people who conflate the term “blog” with “website.” There are plenty of MySpace pages, for example, that don’t neatly fall into the true category of “blog.”
cardoso

September 24th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
7

Hey, I love Something Else, the 2.0.4 version rocks, too bad the MU version of Something Else is not ready for prime time.

What? A rose is a rose, the poet says…
Martin

September 24th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
8

“I suspect that Pew also lumped in LOTS of â€œonlineâ€ people who conflate the term â€œblogâ€ with â€œwebsite.â€”

David - that must be true, because 2% said FrontPage!!! Now I haven’t used FrontPage for years but it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of blogging
Sheldon Kotyk

September 25th, 2006 at 9:38 am
9

I think I just lost respect for PEW. On page 2, they say that 12 million Americans keep a blog but they only found 233 that would give their opinion?
Siddharth

October 5th, 2006 at 3:49 am
10

Phew! What a survey!

While I agree that the sample size or selection may not truly represent the blogging population on the internet, it shows that LiveJournal is still popular. I personally use most of them, I’ve like GreatestJournal for my personal blog. I feel that it’s a great place to be for your personal blog. I prefer WordPress & Vox for my Geeky blogs.