Blogging & LiveJournal demographics. Neel Bubba contributes a quite interesting analysis of blogging/journaling use, mainly based on the rich LiveJournal dataset. Here's a graph of the LiveJournal age distribution over time.
The average LiveJournaler's age shows an intriguing evolution over time:
There is an inflection point near the end of 2001. Neel came up with two possible explanations: 9/11 prompted older folks to jump onboard and express themselves; or the dotcom fallout resulted in more older people with time and inclination to blog.
But this does not explain why the curve initially goes downward. Here's a hypothesis. LiveJournal was originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick, who was then a sophomore at University of Washington. When he made his system available to other people, the first ones to pick it up were his friends, who must predominantly have been around his age. As the word spread virally about this cool new tool, younger brothers and sisters latched onto LiveJournal, told their friends, and usage spread furiously to teenagers, gradually drowning out the college folks and driving the average age down.
Neel speculates,
Lets say there are lots of NetGeners interested in blogging/journaling (as the graph above shows)...this could be an indicator or perhaps a key aspect of the future growth and impact of blogging/journals.
which I think makes great sense. [Seb's Open Research]
This is great work. Unfortunately there are no good demographics on blogging to compare with journaling. Perhaps Blogger/Radio/Movable Type should provide their aggregated anonymous statistics openly.
In the summer of 2001, a tipping point was definately reached for Live Journal. Seb may be right on the overall demographic shift. A part of that story is how Net Gens can adopt a technology so rapidly because they are so connected that meme diffuse rapidly.
