Carroll 5.1

For this post I will be creating an audience profile for strobist.blogspot.com, my favorite photography blog.

I'm cheating a little bit here, because Dave Hobby, the photographer behind the blog, actually publishes and references his demographic information often. Strobist visitors are middle to upper class males in many countries around the world who enjoy photography (either as a hobby or professionally) and have limited disposable income. The writing for the blog needs to be snarky, informative, and simple (for translation purposes and because men's heads are made of meat) and it never hurts to throw in some references to bikinis (although the site is almost entirely family friendly).

The visitors of the site are seeking photography tips and behind the scenes how-to information and informed reviews on the latest photography products. Hobby updates the blog somewhere close to three times a week. (Eerily, almost all posts were posted at 12:00 am.)

Hobby has a few competitors, Zach Arias, Joe McNalley, Chase Jarvis, Jeremy Cowart, Joey Lawrence, Scott Kelby, Dave Tejada and others. But the ways that the top photography bloggers deal with this competition is two-fold: each photographer has their particular niche--Dave Hobby is the DIY off camera MacGuyver-style photographer; and the instead of competing for the viewers attention as a scarce resource, they usually combine forces, link to each others blogs and share as much information as they can with each other. They know their audience wants as much information as they can get their hands on, and as soon as someone starts limiting the information they give out or seeing their knowledge as a scarcity, the sooner they stop following these photographer's blogs. In order to create content for the strobist site, then, I would need to work focus directly into the market Dave Hobby has created. This doesn't necessarily change what the present, just how to present it. Instead of just giving a link to a behind the scenes video from a photographer for instance, (something all photobloggers do) Hobby, closely analyzes the video and extracts all the available information from it. This extra close look at things is what Strobist readers expect, whereas visitors to other blogs would rather just watch the video and move on.

Hobby has done an incredible job of organizing the vast amounts of knowledge he has compiled in his blogs. He has an elaborate glossary as well as a search option, which makes finding information on his site very easy. He has a very consistent style that adds to the usability of the site. I wouldn't change anything, except as I mentioned before, I like it when links open in a new tab instead of the same window, and this site doesn't do that.