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

Most Important Quote in Article

[Anonymous Coward]

"Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."

Re:Most Important Quote in Article

[Anonymous Coward]

So? More than 60% of online Americans have never heard of an IP address, but I bet they still use them.

I would of thought that a vast majority of sites people visit would be blogs of some form.

Reading?

[Vo0k]

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.

I'd Believe It

[the_mad_poster]

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.

Re:Why the increase?

[tambo]

58%? That's it? I expected more like a 200% increase, this being "the year of the blog" and all. I think this quote from the article is more insightful: "Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."

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.

  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.

• 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.

  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:

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.

- David Stein