We’ve wrapped up tallying the results of this year’s blog reader surveys, conducted last month. When we surveyed blog readers in 2004, we got 17,000 responses. Last year we got 30,000. This year we had 56,000, 36,000 of them in the political arena alone!

A fantastic result! Thank you to the 214 bloggers who encouraged their readers to respond. Thank you to the readers who took the time to fill out the surveys. And thank you to SurveyMonkey who gave flawless service throughout.

As I’ve noted in past years, the results of these surveys are anything but scientific. For one thing, we are surveying the choir. For another, the results are skewed by the blogs that choose to participate. For example, this year, the Republican share of the blogosphere seems to have dropped; this is simply because three big Republican blogs, Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs, who participated in prior years didn’t jump in this year.

But, even without our white labcoats on, the results are important and fascinating. The blogs that participated — ranging from DailyKos to Hugh Hewitt to PerezHilton to Largeheartedboy — are leaders in their fields. So this is, in a sense, a survey of the creme de la creme, the uniquely influential info-meisters who are increasingly unreachable via traditional publishing, whether because of skepticism about media biases or loyalty to their new tribes or to the distinct unfiltered brew of personality and attitude served by bloggers.

Understanding that blogosphere is definitely not one entity, but a series of sometimes overlapping, sometimes mutually exclusive communities, this year we chose to survey spheres separately. So we offered up separate surveys to readers of political blogs, mom blogs, gossip blogs and music blogs. This is a big advance from all too common simplistic overviews and stereotypes everyone currently relies on when they talk about “blog readers.” (To give you on example of sloppy “big picture” generalizations about the blogosphere that need to be dynamited: in February Harris Interactive did a survey of 2000-odd people and concluded “Young males dominate blog readership. 21 percent of people who reported reading a blog within the past 30 days were males, ages 18-29.”

Scientific no doubt. But pure baloney. As you’ll see when you look into the results of the new surveys, that generalization is like saying “most mammals live above ground,” a conclusion that misses every distinction that actually means something.

The new surveys show that the distinct communities of bloggers and their readers (politics, moms, gossip, music) exist and are radically different from each other. In brief:

The median political blog reader is a 43 year old man with an annual family income of $80,000. He reads 6 blogs a day for 10 hours a week. 39% have post-graduate degrees. 70% have contributed to a campaign. 69% have bought music, 87% have bought books. 58% say blogs are “extremely useful” sources of information. 52% leave comments on other people’s blogs. Just 18% of political blog readers have their own blogs. (As you’ll see, that’s a lot lower than in other blogospheres.) Of these, 53% blog to keep track of their own ideas, 50% to let off steam, 36% to influence public opinion.

The median gossip reader is a 27 year old woman with annual family income $60,000. She reads 4 blogs a day, five hours a week. 17% have post-graduate degrees. 68% of gossip blog readers bought clothes online in the last six months and 63% bought music. 32% say blogs are “extremely useful” sources of information. 40% leave comments on other people’s blogs. 89% listen to one or fewer podcasts a week. 86% read blogs for humor. Of the 23% of gossip blog readers who blog themselves, 61% say they do it to keep track of their thoughts and 55% say they do it to let off steam.

The median mom blog reader is a 29 year old woman with an annual family income of $70K, reading 5 blogs a day for 4 hours a week. 26% have post-graduate degrees. 72% bought clothes online in the last six months, 83% bought books, 44% contributed to a campaign and 71% bought music. 57% leave comments in other blogs. 93% read for humor. 48% have their own blog and, of these, 73% read “to keep track of my thoughts,” 54% to let off steam.

The median music blog reader is a 26 year old man with an annual family income of 60K reading 5 blogs a day four hours a week. 17% have post graduate degrees. 58% leave comments. 86% have bought music, 70% books. 69% read blogs for humor, 55% for news they can’t find elsewhere. 41% have their own blog; of these, 58% read to keep track of their own thoughts, 39% to let off steam.

You can also see very different characteristics in everything from average family size to who RSS readership to hat sizes. (Oops, forgot to include that question.)

Here are the results from all the surveys in 2006, 2005 and 2004: http://www.blogads.com/survey/blog_reader_surveys_overview.html

(I meant to post this six hours ago, but have been stumbing around San Fransisco, the Al Gore of the Internet, looking for a wireless connection that works for more than 20 seconds.)

Update: At MyDD, Chris Bowers goes through the numbers with fine tooth comb. Here’s that link. And Bob Fertig at Democrats.com compares the numbers versus the NYT and the Wpost. And here’s Fertig’s analysis. Over at Right Wing News, John Hawkins breaks out his numbers: his numbers.

Ken Layne. The Corvids. Again. Yeah!

Business books. (Thank you Josh.)

“One day, you’ll turn off the feature that emails you every time someone buys your software. That’s a huge milestone.” Not me.

PT Krempasky stages an event. (Bonus: friends from Budapest will recognize the man holding the carrot.)

Bill McKibben laudes DailyKos and its blog allies in the NY Review of Books: “In my view, nothing more interesting has happened in American politics for many years.”

Gates: “On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.”

Gladwell via Bunch: “effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit.” You’ve gotta make the effort to read the rest.

I had a great two weeks in Budapest jamming with my programming colleagues, with a quick side-trip to Venice, taking advantage of extremely low air-fares.

While we were in Budapest, the Danube started rising; we saw it rise a couple of feet over the course of an afternoon. Since then, things have just gotten crazier. Here’s a picture of Parliament now versus what it looks like normally.

I’m hanging in our Budapest office. After a freezing winter, things warmed up just in time for our arrival. Some photos here. Here’s today’s weather.

People have asked what I think about the venture funding flooding into our fledgling industry. And would Blogads like new investors? Well, first, we’re profitable and happily expanding the business with our own cash. So no thank you. Second, we like knowing that we’ve got our customers’ best interests at heart, rather than an avaricious VC’s. Finally, academic studies suggest that while VC definitely increases your beta (wonk-speak for the ups and downs in an equity’s value), it can actually lessen a company’s chance of survival.

Why? Some hypotheses:
— considerable time/resources are sunk in meeting with VC, then jumping through their hoops. The best meetings and hoops are those held with/by customers.
— you’ve got to scramble to make lots of money fast to generate eye-popping returns on a bigger nut. It’s much harder to generate a 100X return on $10 million than on $1 million.
— many VC are sheep, so you end up selling the VC a business plan that conforms to yesterday’s zeitgeist, rather than tomorrow’s.
— because you are spending OPM, its easy to wreck your company’s bottom-line focused ethos.
— locked into “the plan” you’ve sold yourself/investors, it’s nearly impossible to attend to the subtle breezes that fortell tomorrow’s hurricanes.
— most VC focuses on home-runs, not the accretive base-hits that power long-term success. So what if half a VC’s portfolio companies flounder? The VC will double his portfolio’s size with monster returns on just a couple of investments. (Tough luck if you or your customers are in the failing half.)

Meanwhile, long-time blog advertiser Michelle Lamar, she of WhiteTrashPalace, got a nice write up in the Wpost.

Dr. Bill Frist praises praises blogging. Blogger David Weinberger talks right back, asking for net-neutrality.

For the folks at home, “net neutrality” means that all content can pass through the web under the same tariff scheme and that some content providers are not privileged. (Can’t we come up with a less neutered term than “net neutrality?” How about “web freedom” or “net liberty?”)

Anyone who attended our “emergence” panel at the IPDI last week might enjoy this video.

Success depends on: do all the traps have similar triggers? are all traps set? are all close enough to each other? And, for self-perpetuation, how quickly are they reset after being sprung? Others? (For emergence geeks: lots more tangents in “Six degrees” by Duncan Watts.)

At IPDI, Peter Daou, Mike Krempasky and John Aravosis and I brainstormed about what makes a blog hurricane happen and whether one can be seeded. Peter and I agree that higher order behaviors are emerging as the blogosphere grows in size and connectedness; John and Mike were more skeptical, though they agree that hurricanes do happen. (It’s the attribution of quasi animal spirits to the blogosphere that puts them off, I guess.) We all agreed, at least, that blog hurricane forecasting is still in the 1920s at best. (Mike forwards a journalist’s take on the panel. )

We’ll all be at SXSW for the next few days. If you want to have a drink, we’re having a party with friends from Alfred Knopf, Buzznet, GMD Studios, Paste Magazine, and PBS at 8PM at Headhunters on Sunday night. Drop me a line if you’d like to join us.

We’ve just closed out the political blogs reader survey. I’ve only been able to skim results so far, but it seems some numbers are eerily constant.

Last year 20% of blog readers said they were bloggers, this year 18% profess to being bloggers. This year, for the first time, we got a glimpse of when those people started to blog.
1998 and before: 2.3%
1999: 1.7%
2000: 2.9%
2001: 5.1%
2002: 8.2%
2003: 14%
2004: 24.6%
2005: 33.4%
2006: 7.9%

One thing is clear: since this survey was just of political blog readers (whereas last year included a broader range of blogs), the average age has risen signficantly. Last year 41.7% of respondents were 40-60 years old, this year 50.4% join me in that graying, bulging bucket. Lots more fun stuff to come.