Blog reading up 58% in U.S.

mshiltonj writes "Americans are becoming avid blog readers, with 32 million getting hooked in 2004, according to new research, showing that blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year."

Comments

Careful with those numbers :-)

[ewanrg]

Note that the readership has shot up by 58% not up to 58%. Otherwise you'll get confused later in the article where it states that 62% of Internet Users aren't sure what a blog is.

Although part of that is due to the fact that some blogs don't appear to be blogs. You can use blog software to create sites that handle news and multiple users more easily without proclaiming themselves to be blogs.

Oh, and if you want to see what my blog looks like, just check here.

My .02 worth...

Re:Personality.

[Lonesome Squash]

But because of their automation, blogs are different from typical home pages. Blogs (as their name suggests) are dynamic, ongoing threads, whereas home pages tended to be static. And it seems to me that the great majority of blogs are based on politics or (possibly highly specialized) current events. So although they will certainly reflect their author's viewpoint, they are not about their authors.

We've gone from "My page about me!" to "My page about what I think about politics!" to "My political blog!" and the change is one of kind, as well as one of degree.

I have no interest in blogs

[FunWithHeadlines]

All right, I'm not a teen interested in talking to other teens on the "Dude, what's up?" level. That's just an experience thing, and I plead guilty to outgrowing that stage.

But in general I have little use for personal blogs, blogs that are about someone. There are six billion people on this earth. Many of them have fascinating stories to tell. Once they have truly fascinating experiences, I'll be glad to read about it in a biography or autobiography. But until then, they can keep their day-to-days to themselves or others who like to pore over meaningless details. Want to know what I had for breakfast today? Dude, not even I am interested any more.

I do like blogs that are news aggregating sites. That is really useful to me, so it's not as if I ignore all blogs. But blogs as "home pages"? I ignored those too back in the day. And by the way, for a while I tried running my site in parallel as a blog along with the regular URL. It was fun to get comments on the headlines, but it wasn't really blog material. Just felt out of place. So I dropped the blog.

If blogs speak to you, that's wonderful. Have fun. I'll snooze this one out.

Why Blogging Matters

[WombatControl]

It's interesting to see the reactions from people who still associate blogging with LiveJournals and angst-ridden teenagers. While 90% of blogs are crap, to borrow from Ted Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap.

Blogs offer a huge amount of valuable information. Blogs helped fuel the fire in the Trent Lott affair. Blogs debunked the CBS Bush-ANG memos hoax. There are blogs being written by Iraqis that offer a perspective into Iraq that you would never get anywhere else. Blogs are proving their worth in the tsunami relief efforts as well.

Blogs offer a level of immediacy that the media does not. Rather than allowing a few selected gatekeepers to control the flow of news, blogs offer a wide range of views in a system that acts as a kind of meritocracy. Bloggers tend to be voracious in taking ideas apart. Something like those crudely-forged Bush documents that Dan Rather flogged for weeks were almost immediately debunked by bloggers. Stories that don't have merit are filtered out and stories that wouldn't normally be widely disseminated get far more readership through blogs.

Blogs are nothing less than a distributed form of newsgathering that is having a major effect on online journalism. They're much more than just vanity sites.

Re:Blogs...

[krgallagher]

" Figures that most are teens too, like me. "

Actually according to the article "Blog creators were likely to be young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations, the survey found." There are not that many teens out there that have "good incomes and college educations."

Interestingly the survey also found that while most blogs are started by men, women are more likely to continue their blogging long term.

Re:Reading?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

1. Splitting the infinitive is fine. It's always been fine; the rule against it is a bit of Latin grammar arbitrarily and pointlessly wedged into English (a Germanic language) and modern language authorities are starting to recognize how absurd this is.

2. GP poster didn't split the infinitive; splitting the infinitive is, by definition, inserting another word after the "to" in a verb of the form "to ___." Thus, "to boldly go" is a split infinitive, although a perfectly correct one; "they badly ruin" is not, and is correct by the standards of the most pedantic Latinophile.

Re:Interesting Blog List Please

[gmajor]

The Bloggies (2005 voting ends soon) rank blogs on a yearly basis.

I read a bunch of Sun blogs, including Jonathan Schwartz' misinformation blog. Same with Microsoft's MSDN blogs.

Primary reason I read those blogs is for the cool tidbits. A secondary reason I read their blogs is so that I can remain aware of all the FUD coming from them!