Bill Tancer of HitWise
We were just treated to an interesting "tag team" talk by Bill Tancer, general manager of research at HitWise and Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati.
Tancer gave us some interesting data about the growth in market share of participatory websites against their passive, non-participatory equivalents. For example, of 913 photography sites, Web 2.0 photo sites like Flickr account for over 56% of visits. Tancer also talked about Web 2.0's demographics, specifically who the early adopters are and which sites they gather around. Typically, the new web's browsing crowd is well-off and a little older (late 20s to late 30s with demographic names like "Money & Brains" and "Bohemian Mix"). Tancer named the most popular sites among this group: Yelp, Veoh, StumbleUpon, WeeWorld and Piczo. WeeWorld was surprising.
Dave Sifry of Technorati
Next, the always enthusiastic Sifry gave a talk centered around his signature topic: how the blogosphere is growing. He's well known for his "State of the Blogosphere" posts on Technorati. Not much new here, but interesting nonetheless. For me, the most intriguing part of his talk was when he examined the habits of successful bloggers. Sifry says that the most influential bloggers tracked by Technorati post at least twice a day and have been around for at least 1 to 2 years. Also, of the most influential blogs, 88% of them wern't in the top 500 a year ago. The elite blog crowd is a fluid beast, always changing. Most blog posts happen late at night according to Sifry's data, but there are still loads of people posting during working hours, with a little more weight in the afternoon.
