The State of the Blogosphere, and How it Relates to the RE.net

I was just skimming some tech news and saw the State of the Blogosphere post on TechCrunch (data via Technorati) with an interesting chart breaking down the types of bloggers maintaining blogs.

• 79% personal bloggers
• 12% corporate bloggers
• 46% professional bloggers

This data was based on 1,079 random bloggers, but I just got to thinking — if this same question was posed exclusively to bloggers from the RE.net, I think the result would be a bit different.

For starters, the professional bloggers category would likely encompass about 90% of RE.net bloggers since most agents write about the real estate industry, but usually not directly on behalf of their employer (their brokerage/franchise). Corporate bloggers, which would signify agents who write on a blog owned by their brokerage, would be smaller given the lack of agents currently blogging for their brokerages. The personal bloggers category, defined as a “blog about topics of personal interest not associated with your work,” is the most difficult to gauge within the RE.net. I’d argue that blogs like the West Seattle Blog are personal blogs in the fact that its authors are writing about a topic of interest outside of work. Even though the West Seattle Blog is now a full time position for its authors and, thus, doesn’t officially fit into the “personal bloggers” category, I still think the majority of local blogs are run as side projects (or agents are running them in addition to their agent blog). I can also see how someone could make the argument that many agent blogs are personal blogs because they are not directly tied to the agent’s day to day job of helping clients buy and sell homes, but I believe agent blogs are fundamental pieces of their business in many, but not all, cases. For the sake of predictions, let’s make the assumption pure local blogs are personal blogs and agent blogs are professional blogs.

Here are my predictions of the categorization of the RE.net:

• 90% professional bloggers
• 25% personal bloggers
• 5% corporate bloggers

What type of blogger are you? What do you think the category split is within the RE.net?