contentious.com

(NOTE: This is part 5 of a series exploring the results of the 2004 CONTENTIOUS Reader Survey, which was completed by 157 respondents as of Aug. 18, 2004. See the complete index for more survey results. Additional results will be published in future entries.)

Question 5 of the 2004 CONTENTIOUS Reader Survey was:
Currently, which of our main topics of coverage interest you most?

Each of the 157 people who answered this question could select as many options as applied (so the percentage total below exceeds 100%). On average, each respondent selected four options. Here are the results:

1. 64% Writing and editing tips
2. 53% Content management
3. 53% Online content style and business
4. 38% Weblogs and blogging
5. 34% Media commentary (journalism, entertainment, etc.)
6. 33% Webfeeds (RSS, etc.)
7. 30% Tools and services (Furl, feed readers, etc.)
8. 30% Recommended links
9. 27% E-learning and training
10. 17% Misc. commentary
11. 13% Wikis and blikis

Here’s what those numbers mean…

In general, these results were about what I expected – the more directly content-focused topics are favorites among most of my readers, while the more technology- and tool-focused topics tend to be somewhat less popular.

However, there were some surprises.

Content management (a topic that focuses mainly on how to apply technological tools and systems) was tied for second place on this list, along with online content style and business. I suspect this indicates that many CONTENTIOUS readers who are working in online media today are using (or are expecting in the future to be using) some content management tools.

I vaguely expected e-learning and training to rank higher than it did, because I get so much correspondence from e-learning professionals and links from e-learning sites, communities, and blogs. These numbers indicate that although my blog is enjoying some popularity in the e-learning community, as yet this represents a fairly small portion of the CONTENTIOUS audience. This also tells me that if I work harder to include more e-learning content (not hard for me to do, since that’s a direction my career is taking me in), I could probably expand my total readership significantly. Just a guess, but I’ll try it.

I was mildly suprised that the topics webfeeds, recommended links (my “grab bags”), and tools and services each were popular among about one-third of my audience. Although individual articles I’ve written on those topics enjoy great popularity, I expected fewer readers to report being interested in what I have to offer on those topics in general, since I am not a technology geek but rather a content professional. I think this might indicate that this blog is indeed a good “bridging tool” between the content professionals and the geeks, because I strive to explain new technological developments that would be interesting to content professionals while using nontechnical language as much as possible. (I commented on this theme in Part 3.)

I wish my coverage of wikis and blikis were more popular among my current audience, but I view that as my own shortcoming – I don’t think I’ve explained it’s usefulness to content professionals often and well enough. I’ll work on that.

…I realized after I did the survey that I forgot to mention “knowledge management” and “metadata, XML, etc.” on the topic list. Oh well, next time…

(NEXT: Expanded editorial focus is succeeding…)