Blog Idea Factory

In a Technorati-sponsored survey of bloggers (by Decipher) conducted between July and August 2008, results revealed a 2-to-1 male/female ratio among bloggers worldwide. Technorati openly admits that the gender skew could be at least partially attributed to “the type of people that come to Technorati and register.”

It also looks like the lines between blogging and the mainstream media have disappeared. That’s another key-finding of this survey. “Blogs are now mainstream media,” said Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, “We’ve certainly seen that with the number of professional, semiprofessional and passion/enthusiast bloggers who are creating real media experiences. At the same time, you’re also seeing mainstream media come the other direction to add blog content.” Source: eMarketer.

Google’s newly launched social-informational site, Knol, is described as being very similar to Wikipedia’s community intelligence model, but with one major twist: Knol articles are given bylines. The articles, are single-topic, stand alone entries and are not updated chronologically as in the Wikipedia model.

Knol has also publishing tools similar to single blog pages. But unlike blogs, Knol encourages writers to reduce what they know about a topic to a single page that is not chronologically updated.

Google plans to implement a ranking system for articles written on similar topics, which will push relevant articles to the top and encourage competition.