Just over six months ago [in April 2009], I wrote my first blog post with the announced inten­tion to aim for “A-List status.”

Four months later I wrote an arti­cle about the “day I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven” — it was actu­ally a report of a panel dis­cus­sion head­lin­ing Steve Rubel among other social media thought lead­ers dis­cussing a Roadmap for the future.

How very excit­ing it had been to intro­duce myself to Steve, who’s been a role model.

I told Steve of the lofty goal I was work­ing towards, and he said,

“You might want to recon­sider, Shari. Blogs are los­ing their sta­tus, and you might aim, instead, to be an A-List Thought Leader,” he advised me.

Dur­ing the panel dis­cus­sion Steve elab­o­rated on this view:

I do sub­scribe to Steve’s Pos­ter­ous stream, but that’s in addi­tion to more than a dozen other blogs I keep up with pretty reg­u­larly. [Check my blogroll on the right hand sidebar.]

So … every time I read a head­line like Brian Solis’ “Rumors of the Death of the Blog are Greatly Exag­ger­ated,” I am encour­aged to keep on “keepin’ on,” i.e., BLOGGING towards the A List.

Com­men­tary on the PR 2.0 sum­mary of Technorati’s State of the Blo­gos­phere report

Tech­no­rati is a search engine for blogs, and it cat­a­logs more than 112 mil­lion blogs. Every year the site comes out with a State of the Blo­gos­phere Report and this year’s find­ings include infor­ma­tion about these top­ics: pro­fes­sional blog­ging activ­i­ties, brands in the blo­gos­phere, mon­e­ti­za­tion, twit­ter & micro-blogging and blog­gers’ impact on US and World events.

The report also includes inter­views with more than a dozen well-known, well-respected, and well-read blog­gers includ­ing Steve Rubel.

Brian Solis’ blog PR 2.0 fea­tured an indepth view of the report

This arti­cle will pick out and share pieces of the report that I found inter­est­ing and help­ful to me as a fairly new blogger. 

Brian’s post included color-coded charts record­ing responses from four cat­e­gories of blog­gers: (a) hob­bi­ests; (b) part-timers; © cor­po­rate; and (d) self-employed.

1) About 70% of all blog­gers felt that “Blogs are get­ting taken more seri­ously as sources of infor­ma­tion” while 60% agreed that “More peo­ple will be get­ting their news and enter­tain­ment from blogs than from tra­di­tional media in the next three years.”

HOWEVER

2) Fewer than 40% agreed with the fol­low­ing two statements:

a) “News­pa­pers will not be able to sur­vive in the next ten years.”

b) “Blogs are often bet­ter writ­ten than tra­di­tional media.”

Re: “Pro­lific­ness”

Brian wrote that “those blog­gers who rank among the high­est accord­ing to Tech­no­rati Author­ity post nearly 300 times more than the lower ranked bloggers.”

One Tech­no­rati sur­vey ques­tion asked “How fre­quently do you update your blog?

• 20% post once or twice a day
• 27% post 2–3 times per week
• 33% post at least once a week
• Inter­est­ingly, 3% of self-employed blog­gers post 10 times a day or more! AND 7% post 5–9 times a day.

Why do blog­gers blog?

“Self expres­sion and shar­ing exper­tise are among the pri­mary moti­va­tions for blog­gers,” Brian wrote.

To mea­sure the “suc­cess” of their blogs, sur­vey respon­dents chose from the fol­low­ing ten fac­tors, ranked from the most pop­u­larly selected to the least:

1) Per­sonal satisfaction

2) Num­ber of unique visitors

3) Num­ber of posts or com­ments on the blog

4) Num­ber of links to my blog from other blogs

5) Num­ber of RSS subscribers

6) Acco­lades from other media

7) Num­ber of peo­ple favorit­ing you

Blogger’s Tech­no­rati author­ity number

9) Num­ber and qual­ity of new busi­ness leads

10) and, finally, in last place for hobbiests/corporate blog­gers was rev­enue; HOWEVER, 39% of part-timers admit­ted that rev­enue was an impor­tant mea­sure of their success.

What activ­i­ties do blog­gers par­tic­i­pate in to attract visitors?

The four most pop­u­lar activ­i­ties included (a) List­ing the blog on Tech­no­rati; (b) Tag­ging blog posts; © Com­ment­ing on other blogs; (d) List­ing the blog on Google.

Other activ­i­ties were the fol­low­ing [from more pop­u­lar to least pop­u­lar]: (e) Get­ting listed on a blog direc­tory; (f) Pro­duce con­tent for other blogs or web­sites; (g) Cre­ate a blog on a broader blog net­work; (h) Attend con­fer­ences for blog­gers; (i) Pay for online advertising.

The future of Blogging

Here are the eleven blog ideas and tac­tics pro­posed for the com­ing year [from most pop­u­lar to least]:

1) Blog more frequently

2) Expand some of the top­ics already blogged about

3) Pub­lish a book

4) Begin using the blog to get speak­ing engagements

5) Add advertising

6) Begin guest blogging

7) Add video

Blog through mobile device

9) Start a new, inde­pen­dent blog

10) Start a new blog on a blog network

11) Blog less frequently.

Accord­ing to Brian:

“Tech­no­rati believes that the next gen­er­a­tion of blogs will be more action ori­ented, not just doc­u­ment­ing real time hap­pen­ings, but dri­ving actual events.”

If you’re a blog­ger, how would you have answered any of the Tech­no­rati questions?

If you don’t blog yet, has any of this infor­ma­tion con­vinced you to “dive in” and start express­ing your­self?

Pop­u­lar­ity: 14% [?]