Same as the old blog! Well, not quite the same - things were getting kind of ratty over in the world of Sifry's Alerts, so I updated and upgraded a bunch of components - namely updating the blog to the latest version of Wordpress (3.6 as of this writing), got a new bootstrap-based responsive site template called "builder" from Themeforest, and set about making things a lot prettier and simpler. I've taken a bit of inspiration from Ev and the folks over at Medium - they've really done a great job at making a clean, well-organized, simple composition interface that is as close to WYSIWYG as I've found so far on the web.

However, I still like to have my own piece of web real estate, with a domain and infrastructure that I own and manage (well, even if the server is hosted on an EC2 instance!) It makes me feel like a digital homesteader, even if it means that sometimes it appears that I'm just looking out of an old log cabin at all you young kids on all the fancy hosted social networks/blogging services, yelling "Get off my lawn"!

I really do like you on my lawn. Welcome, pull up a lawn chair and hang out a while. Maybe we'll have a good conversation or two.

To wrap up a long data-filled week, we've rolled out part 5 of the State of the Blogosphere report, which is all about how traditional brands are perceived and how bloggers interact with brands in the blogopshere. This data is taken from the large survey done on Technorati bloggers earlier this year, as described in our methodology. Here's a few of the interesting things we learned:

More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate.
One-third of bloggers surveyed have been approached to be brand advocates.
Of those, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind.
One in five bloggers don't think that newspapers will survive the next ten years.
Half of bloggers surveyed believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years.
37% of bloggers surveyed have been quoted in traditional media based on a blog post.
Bloggers are most open to receiving marketing messages from other blogs. Even non-blog web content is more influential among this group than traditional media sources for brand information.
Bloggers spend twice as much time online as U.S. adults 18-49, and spend only one-third as much time watching television.

Read the whole section, including charts and graphs. Read the entire 5-part report.

Meet the new blog...

State of the Blogosphere 2008 Wrap-up: Brands and the Blogosphere