The Widget Poll and Blog Reading Habits

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I'm working on a piece about widgets and nonprofit blogs (some context here and here).  If you haven't had a chance to take the poll, please click through your reader and vote now!

I've also found another example from the Nonprofit Tech Blog launched yesterday.  The poll is being used to gather feedback from audience about how they read the blog (RSS vs Browser) and frequency. (Hmm .. I get this information via a combination of my stats programs and feed stats, but it would also be nice to add data from a blog a audience survey.)

I've also taken a quick look at secondary research on blog reading habits.  The best bit of information I found is from a Pew Internet and American Life Project Report titled "Bloggers: The Internet's Storytellers"  from July, 2006. 

It is difficult to measure one's blog reader audience.

While Web servers have traditionally collected information about who or what visits them, in this day and age of RSS feeds, many blog readers who might have been counted by server or site traffic logs are now obscured behind the single visit of an RSS feed reader’s URL or IP address.

There isn't much quantitative information about how people read blogs and if they leave their readers but there is some advice getting a general sense of audience composition.

A blogger can gain a sense of audience composition through “on-blog” or “off-blog” means. On-blog measurements include site traffic logs as well as commenting. Off-blog mentions occur outside of the blog and include hearing from someone—in conversation, on the phone, via email or IM—that they read your blog.  Readership may also be suggested—though not necessarily guaranteed—by the linking from one blog to another on a blogroll (or list of links to other blogs generally found in the sidebar of a blogpage).

There is also another source for data, a 192-page master's thesis on bloggers and their audiences by Amanda Lenhart.  A pdf version can be found here.   There's some discussion of the difficulty of tracking readership via RSS readers:

Online but external to the blog, RSS feeds and aggregators can both reveal and disguise a blog’s readership. Some RSS aggregators include a specific username in the URL they leave each time it visits a blog or website. These “public” feeds allow determined users to trace specific readers who have loaded an author’s blog into their aggregator. However, RSS subscriptions are often not traceable to a specific individual. Unlike traditional modes of entry to a site, where a web server records the IP addresses of visitors and the URL of the referrer that sent them there, an RSS feed if not deliberately made public simply shows the aggregator URL, and the blog author cannot tell how many readers one standard aggregator referral represents.

There must be other secondary research out there?

I'm learning a great deal about my readers blog reading habits by asking them in emails or the comments they leave on my blog.  Now, this is qualitative information, but I find it very useful.  Here's what I've learned so far:

Most of my regular readers use an RSS reader because of its efficiency.  Some of my readers do pop out of the reader to read me via a browser.  I have no idea how many, but those who travel out of their readers to visit my blog via browser do so for several reasons:

• They are visual learners and like the experience of reading from the browser once and a while
• They recall reading something a while back, but at the time wasn't important to them.  They travel to my blog to search the archives to find it.  (BTW, I added the Technorati Search widget, the most popular posts widget, and link to the monthly archives)

Do you ever "pop out" of the reader and to view my blog via your browser?  Why?

Comments

[Steve Sherlock]

yes, frequently. Readers are good to notify you of fresh or updated content. Some of the content is not displayed within the readers though so you do need to click through to get the full experience.

Some blogs get a reputation of requiring a click through and reward the reader with good content/conversation.

Counting readership is another item all on its own. There have been many discussions on links versus conversation indexes. I put my two cents into the Fire Circle story which defines the audience in three parts.

Check here for the podcast version (also has a link to the text version) http://steves2cents.blogspot.com/2006/10/fire-circle-story.html

[iwilker]

Isn't conversation a major reason to jump from reader to blog? Some feeds (feedburner, certainly) can be configured to show whether a post has drawn any comments; others can't; in any case, I'm very likely to make the jump because I want to see what others have said about the post in question.