Recent adjustments in Google’s PageRank algorithm have caused a stir the blogosphere because of blogs rising or dropping significantly. However, Google seems to be facing problems with the indexing of the blogosphere in general.

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Blogs constitute a world of their own which we often refer to as the blogosphere:

Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia treats the blogosphere as a concept of interconnectedness. We are making connections by linking to other blogs and over time a community may be formed around a topic. But where are these communities and where is the blogosphere? We can only “see” the blogosphere by visualizing the links that are made and by visiting blog search engines.

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How do you look at your blog? Do you see it as a personal diary or maybe as a form of journalism? Do you ever think of your blogging as database form? This is the first post in a series of three on the blog as database on three different levels:

1. The blog as database
2. The blogosphere as database
3. The web as database

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Marketing Daily has conducted a study on the blogging knowledge and habits of Americans, and found that 80% of them know what a blog is, with half reading them on a regular basis.

Though the demographics of the 1,000 Americans questioned isn’t obvious, it’s encouraging that a relatively new medium is now so well-known.

Around 60% of blog-reading men, and 50% of women, surf a wide variety of blogs rather than sticking to the same few sites, though it’s not clear how many blogs that constitutes.

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Edelman, Japan’s premier international PR consultancy, announced the results of a new blogging study that suggests Japanese are reading blogs more than Americans, Koreans, British, and French. Yup, they love consuming blogs but they are less likely to take public affairs-related action from reading them.

The poll conducted by StrategyOne over 1,000 Japanese, with accompanying studies conducted in different countries, showed that less than 1 in 5 (18%) of Japanese interviewed said that they have taken some sort of public affairs action as a result of reading a blog. read more

I find that the best “how-to” posts are backed up with proof. And there’s a great article over at the Online Journalism Review which summarizes some of the research optimizing design and copy to boost readability and comprehension. The unspoken corollary, however, is that by making a site a better read, people will want to come back.

I found some of the results intuitive, and but one result not so much. To summarize …

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