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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."
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"Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."
I wonder what's the case about -writing- blogs and how many blogs out there aren't read even once.
Anyway, blogs definitely -should- have some kind of mark to help filter them off from Google. Sometimes they badly ruin search results.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Interesting peice of information, but rather redundant. All this says is that people in the US are just that... people. Internet use is up, why is everyone always so surprized?
People have always done this, but the trend has gotten more pronounced. I sometimes imagine that we're going to end up as completely distinct logical entities that happen to share the same geological space. Imagine two countries with exactly the same borders, with different tax structures, different social benefits, different foreign policy.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
This probably explains why so many more people seem to be talking about so many more topics these days, but have less to say than ever.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
These days when searching for stuff you get a huge percentage of blog entries as opposed to legitimate* information. Not saying that blogs are bad, it's just that for a pure text based search it really raises the signal to noise ratio.
Say something like video card doom3 - gets 600k hits, whereas
video card doom3 -forums gets 333k
Blogs are useful, but I'll be glad when google separates them from the normal search results.
* as legitimate as is possible on the net anyway
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
If news sites like Slashdot are also counted as blogs, I'm not surprised the number is increasing.
Personally, I don't read personal blogs much. Most are low quality.
The only thing that could have made this story funny is if it was a blog article being backed up by a web poll. I was kind of expecting the link to the article to go to some blog.
I love useless statistics. When something is this new, a "58 percent" increase means zilch. An increase from what?
If someone told me that TV viewing was up 58 percent that would mean something, as we have a well-established base of what's normal. Blogs are too new to track in any meaningful way.
It's like saying private spaceflight is up 40,000 percent since the flight of SpaceShipOne.
In RatherGate, it was blogs like Little Green Footballs and Powerline which actually broke the story, quickly determining that the RatherGate documents where not only frauds, but poor, obvious frauds at that. And it wasn't TV news "experts" who made the determination, but real experts out on the Internet chipping in their particular bits of knowledge about computer typographer, Air Force National Guard procedures, etc. Tens years ago, CBS probably would have gotten away with it. Now they can't.
In the case of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, here was a story the MSM didn't want to touch with a ten-foot poll because it went against the narrative the had already decided on ("John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor"). (Just imagine if there had been an organization with some 80-odd National Guard vets swearing that they witnessed Bush shirking his duty; there would have been an hour-long prime time special...) Since no media outlet was covering their ads, it was the blogsphere that carried information about the group. It's ironic that the Swift Boat Vets spent about 1/100th what Moveon.org did, and was still 100 times more effective.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
This stat is likely influenced by the massive numbers that went out and read political blogs during election time. I can't remember hearing about blogs on Hardball or Crossfire in 2000...
32M is still a relatively small number compared to the overall American population (~300M).
I find most blogs so bland and boring that I don't see the reward in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in them. Sure, some are funny, or informed, or insightful, but SO many are just pointless ramblings mixed in with malformed thoughts and opinions.
Blogs are one of those things that I am absolutely shocked have gotten so much attention.
-This sig intentionally left blank
My sister is at college in another state. I read hers (and she knows I do it...and she hasn't killed me yet) so I can keep track of what's bothering her.
Seems to me that there's a greater percentage of simple journals/diaries rather than event or otherwise one-time use blogs. True, the latter often recive the greater publicity, but the truly "dynamic threads" (that's an excellent phrase, kudos to Lonesome Squash) are the ones that cover more than just "My breakfast was [sic] egges, h4m and bacon" or "This is the [Insert Desired Event Name here] 2005 blog."
Don't get me wrong - I read about six blogs a day, and I truly believe they're the future portal of the Internet. Without blogs, the WWW is mostly comprised of organization websites (companies and universities being the top two), and frankly, that's hideously boring. Blogs are the spiritual successor to Netscape's "What's Cool?" feature, and due to the huge number of blogs, you can probably find two dozen that specifically cater to your interests.
However, I believe that blogs run the risk of being a flash in the pan - of being a trend that seemed really promising, but just never achieved cultural critical mass. I posit that many of these new readers are people who latched onto the buzzword and wanted to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon. When the next shiny thing comes along in twenty minutes, they'll hop off and scurry away. Basically, I'm wondering if many of those new readers will vanish in 2005, and may take with them some of the momentum that drives the community. Remember that many predicted in 1998 that VRML would revolutionize the Internet.
As I see it, greater cultural (mainstream) adoption of blogs is hampered by two factors:
- Absence of a central, well-known blog directory. It's difficult to find new blogs that cater to your interests. It's like an Internet without search engines - in 1995, finding new websites involved stumbling upon them via links from other sites. Imagine if we didn't have telephone books, and if ordering pizza usually involved asking your friends for the number of some good pizza places. That's pretty low-yield, but I feel that's how most need-a-new-blog scavenging missions go. Quite simply, this inefficiency loses readers.
- An overriding interest in new blog technologies that seem to appeal mostly to other bloggers. Seriously, guys. RSS is a good first-draft effort, but it feels extremly dinky and lightweight. I don't understand why bloggers are so enthralled with the concept of immediately receiving the first 50 characters of an update to another blog. For most of us, this is more trouble than it's worth. We'd love to have a service that grabbed entire articles and posts for offline reading, but no such mechanism exists. Similarly, all of the momentum around trackback/pingback is kind of baffling.
These comments are meant strictly as constructive criticism. For a few years, the Internet seemed like it was mostly an electronic storefront for the corporate world, which is pathetic. Blogs are the best hope for bringing life back to the net, and have admirably succeeded. But I want to see this trend continue, not fade away into obscurity.Now, yes, I am aware of sites like Blogwise, which offers some rudimentary blog indexes. My point is that they're not central pillars of the blog community - they're not well-known, indispensible resources. They're not the Google of the blog community. That niche is currently unfilled.
I don't really mean to disparage the general interest in these new technologies. But there seems to be a disproportionate amount of attention paid to them, compared with their practical value, and that momentum could be redirected toward technologies that more of us find genuinely useful. :shrug:
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Talking is great for people you see every day, but for long-distance friends and relatives, a blog is the perfect way to go.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
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.
You mean, news repeating. Blogs are nothing more than a billion websites updating their content with links to other sites and other news stories, with occasional commentary on them. They're as much a "distributed form of newsgathering" as the local news stand. They don't generate *anything*. They just spew the same old thing over and over and re-distribute already distributed content. Bleh. Lame.
no thanks.
email is better as i have one place to view and respond to those threads instead of going from site to site to site.
most hardware forums that moved from a mailing list to web based forums saw community participation drop by at least 50% or more.
I know I no longer help with the mailing lists that think going to a web interface is better. i simply join the mailing list that others on the list that are not interested in going to 50 different websites to help people with tech support or other hardware hacks.
the point of having community participation is making it easy, and responding to an email is as easy as it gets.
Sorry, but while people rave about "the blogging phenomenon", they generally forget to mention that most blogs are either dull as hell if they're lucky, or more likely just abandoned when the author got bored.
:o)
Sure, there are the few excellent ones that stand out, but 75% are just dead livejournals or blogspots with
Of course, I have one myself, so I'm hardly entitled to comment...
After a recent slashdot article I looked on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog). By this definition slashdot itself is indeed a blog.
I find this ridiculous. By the definition on the site almost every site I look at is a blog. The base definition seems to say that any page that has some element of chronological order is a blog. This certainly doesn't fit my view of what a blog originally was.
So, no wonder blog readership is up. The definition of a blog has been expanded by 58%!!
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
So instead of politely accepting the URL and just not reading it you feel the need to inform them of your disdain for their activities. I bet you have a lot of friends.
People are becoming more boring and vapid, and for some reason simply have to let everyone else know how boring they are.