Well, it’s been a few weeks, and we’ve been studying the data that came into our Blog Authoring Survey. A big thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the survey. And a big congrats to Steve Portigal who was drawn as the winner of the iPod mini (a collectors item now)!
This was a self-selected survey, meaning people opted in to participate on their own accord. Because I’m with Macromedia, the survey attracted a lot of interest from loyal Macromedia customers. In light of this, consider the following tidbits:
- 3/4 of you use an RSS aggregator. The top aggregators include FireFox, Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon.
- You subscribe to either around 10 blogs, or 100s of blogs. I find this interesting in that there appears to be two distinct kinds of blog readers. At what point does a lightweight blog reading experience fail for a heavy blog reader?
- Half of you post new content several times per week. From our list, the most popular topics include politics, art, music, and movies. I’m surprised by the last three, and wonder if it was more wishful thinking than actual practice…?
- You either install your own blog server, or you use Blogger. Cost must be the common issue here.
- Only 15% use a desktop app to post blog content, yet you use lots of other tools beforehand, such as Dreamweaver or MSWord, to prepare your content.
The most interesting question for us was the feature matrix. By design, this was a challenging question, and indeed when we visit customers with a similar challenge, the debate among the customers in the room is as interesting as the final values they agree to. Many of you commented specifically on this question, some even complained that the survey system didn’t support decimal values!
The data generated from this question wasn’t surprising. Since a vast majority of you post blog content via a web browser, you valued features most lacking in a browser-based editing experience:
- Real WYSIWYG editing
- Dependent files handling
- Draft management
What this tells us is that you don’t like editing in tiny little boxes, you don’t like explicitly uploading images or other multimedia files, and you don’t like the fact that browser sessions can lose data from dropped connections or from accidentally being closed.
Happily, these are things Macromedia knows a little something about.
If you have any more thoughts on your blog authoring experiences, use the tag “blogauthoring”, and then we can all follow along.
Stay tuned!
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