Facebook announced last week that users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, have increased from 5 million to 15 million during 2008.
While this number constitutes less than 10 percent of total Facebook users, the growth indicates strong interest in mobile social networking.
A survey of around 200 respondents by copy editing service, GooseGrade has found that blog readers are somewhat turned off by typos, grammatical errors and poor writing.
Those surveyed - a diverse group of respondents who spent some time reading blogs but generally used “mainstream sources” for news - indicated that finding errors on blogs makes them less likely to share the content they find with others.
Specifically, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors harmed a reader’s opinion of a blog and their willingness to share the content on that blog with others. Interestingly, the survey also found that most respondents believed such errors to be common. Only 20 percent of respondents said it was “not often” or “never” that they found such errors.
Bottom line: try to write well, and strive to eliminate spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. (I will too!)
Sources: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study Finds”, ReadWriteWeb, October 30, 2008, GooseGrade Reader Perception Survey Results
One of my favorite sayings is: ‘There are lies, damned lies, statistics… and interpretations of statistics”
I added the last bit. And here’s why: two people can take the same data and claim it has entirely different meanings.
And this is what seems to have happened with Technorati’s latest report on the state of blogging. Last week Technorati released its 5th Annual State of the Blogoshpere Report. While it apparently reported that the numbers show that blogging is now mainstream, tech blog ReadWriteWeb saw the numbers as painting blogging in quite a different light.
Technorati says there are now approximately 133 million legitimate blogs, up from 70 million in 2007, and dramatically up from the 4 million in 2004. Yet ReadWriteWeb points out that only 1.5 million (1.1 percent) of those blogs had been posted to in the last 7 days.
Actually, Technorati also says that 7.4 million blog posts were made in the last 120 days. If posting a blog post within 120 days - or 3 months - is considered ‘active’ that would suggest that only 5.6 percent of all blogs are active. And that’s being generous with the word ‘active’.
Why won’t anyone just come out and say it? The vast majority of people who start blogs probably do so with the best of intentions, but just can’t commit to writing blog posts on a regular basis… and then they just give up.
Nothing shameful about that. It’s probably similar to the number of people who start a diary or try to write a novel.
Anyway, check out the ReadWriteWeb article for some more interesting interpretations of the numbers. You can find the link to Technorati’s report there as well.
Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has launched the ‘World Wide Web Foundation’ to study how the web works and to help expand Internet access to those currently going without.
With $5 million in initial funding from the Knight Foundation, the World Wide Web Foundation will focus on three key areas:
On Monday, David Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager, announced that Facebook had reached 100 million users.
This was subsequently confirmed by Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in The Facebook Blog.
Actually, that’s 99,999,999 users. I closed my Facebook account last Thursday. See today’s feature article for why…
Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Facebook Hits 100 Million Users”, Read write Web, August 25, 2008, Mark Zuckerberg, “Our First 100 Million”, The Facebook Blog, August 26, 2008
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