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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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Figures that most are teens too, like me. They are obsessed with each others lives. Oh well, what can I say? I guess it is interesting and others are technical and informative!
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Blogs, journals, etc. have replaced mailing lists for my friends (aged 26-35) as the way of keeping up to date with each other and arranging social events. Sure, we still email for 1-1 conversation, but for broadcast blogs just seem more efficient.
My Journal
That's because America is a cult of personality. People love following other people and drooling all over them and knowing everything they do, including when they take a shit or all of the drama about how their doctor is switching them from xanax to klonopin and how they got wasted the night before with some dude they met at a club that had some percosets to share. Honestly, who cares?
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And nothing has changed, except that we have renamed "home pages" to "blogs". There is no difference between a blog and a person's home page, except that one usually is now automated (as far as having an interface to use for adding content) and the other is manually done by editing HTML files.
This is like calling murder and rape a "misdemeanor" and claiming that "felonies are down!". No, they aren't. You're just calling them something else now.
Personally, I dont' read ANY BLOGS, unless you count Slashdot. But slashdot is hardly a "blog". When friends or acquaintances offer me their livejournal (or other blog) urls, I tell them "I"m sorry, but I don't read livejournals". It's nothing intended as offense toward them. I just don't waste my time reading things that I don't care about
The thing that offense ME about blogs is that you should take the time to have a conversation with ME and tell ME about your life and what's up. Rather than plastering every daily event and thought to your blog that all of your real life and online buddies read hungrily like little cult followers, take the time to have a conversation with me one on one and tell me things that you want to share with me. Blogs are distant, impersonal and filled with crap. Filter out the crap and TALK WITH ME.
I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.
It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.
Titus Barik
First, mods
:)
Check me out on http://www.livejournal.com
mark the man funny for his subtle self deprecating humor
Second, I think blogs are simply taking the place of diaries ("journals" to the yanks I believe), that they are public is merely an adaptation, I don't think the typical "blogger" expects (m)any people to read them, it's more an outlet for thier own conciousness.
Of course this raises the question of what IS happening to the age-old art of diary/journal keeping, do teenage girls still keep diaries for thier most inane...err..intimate thoughts, do scientists keep journals of thier thought processes on paper or are they too moving to electronic means, even "scientific blogs"?
I imagine there are many worthwhile "blogs" beeing kept at places such as livejournal which may not be of interest now but would be in 50 years, will they still be around in 50 years, how can we, or even, should we preserve these somehow?
And, being the voyeuristic, and inquisitive species that we are, humans do tend to like to read about other peoples lives, even if they aren't really all that interesting. Often times I've found myself reading about somebodies day at work, or trip to the shops, or family argument, or some other mundane detail of thier life at some blog I've stumbled across.
It's almost addictive.
PS: I don't keep a blog, I'm neither disciplined, nor interesting enough to do so.
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Interesting take on those events, and by interesting, I mean ridiculous. The ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spent relatively little money on their easily falsifiable ads, it is true, but their ringleaders were featured on Fox News for months. There weren't 80 National Guardsmen to swear that Bush did his time, by the way.
The 60 Minutes documents were retracted due to poor sourcing by Rather, looking for a sensational new angle to the clear fact that Bush hadn't even done his minimal military service, not because a bunch of typography geeks caught a kerning error.
And Little Green Footballs is a bastion for some of the most viciously hateful violent right wing sentiment out there.
Here is a related article about people loosing their jobs because of what they have posted to blogs. It raises interesting questions about freedom of speech.
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Can somebody list at least 5-10 * interesting * personalities that are news worthy? I use to "finger" a few gamers over 10 years ago but not really anymore....
I worked on Fark before I had even heard the term 'blog', and the nature of it has changed so much since then, that it's say if it's now more or less like a 'blog'. [hell, we even looked at advertising back then to offset the costs, and we got rejected because we didn't generate content, only linked to other people's content, of course, that was before readers could comment]
Here are a few independant parameters that no one can seem to agree on in their definition:
- Personal vs. Group Administered
- Personal vs. Group Contributors
- Frequency of Updates
- Ability for Reader Comments
- Type of Funding
- Amount of Editorial Oversight
- Broad / Narrow Subject Focus
- Generated vs. Linked Content
- Opinionated vs. 'Neutral'
In the early days of the term, it seemed to be more of the 'online diary' type pages, but came to include sites that were collaborative efforts. I'd have listed anything that updated frequently, with a relatively narrow focus (even if that focus was 'things that Bob finds interesting'). Of course, that definiton would have included sites like AlertBox, ScoopThis, or The Onion.These days, the media seems to use the term to apply to any site that posts opinionated information without vetting, and updates on a semi-frequent basis, and in this case, I'm guessing it was whatever they needed to prove that it was a potential 'growth industry' to support whatever agenda they might have.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I can think of all sorts of valid uses for blogs.
Were it not for blogs, there are many song lyrics that I would have been unable to discover. People without the know-how to find webspace and design and create an entire website have sometimes painstakingly determined and written out lyrics to songs and then posted them to their blogs. These lyrics would have been otherwise unavailable, as the artists did not choose to release them. For example, a favourite group of mine, Metric, created an album "Grow Up and Blow Away" that was never released but is available for download in various locations. I spent an afternoon satisfying my own curiosity and determined the majority of the lyrics to the songs. After posting these to my LiveJournal, I've gotten tons of comments from people who either were able to contribute and help me fill in the gaps that I was not able to figure out myself, or messages of thanks from individuals who were interested in getting their hands on these.
That's but one example of the use of blogs: providing information that may have limited scope of appeal, and that may not be otherwise available.
Additionally, the idea of "community blogs" as offered by LiveJournal is tremendously useful. I don't know how many times asking a question on LiveJournal's mathematics community has saved me hours of googling and interpreting obscure definitions in order to answer a question.
Thirdly, I've met many fascinating people through my blog, both online and in person. In fact, that's how I met my life partner.
Let's use the popular informal definition of blog.
/. is sorted by categories, and doesn't have a visible calendar to see the previous entries (you have to get inside the "archive").
/. users' journals, well we enter a fuzzy gray area.
A web log maintained by only one person about something he likes.
We should state the difference between blogs, forums and normal webpages... a blog has a log structure/layout, and is sorted by date. In contrast,
Now if we go to the
Regarding the signal/noise ratio, perhaps google should add a "blog" category into their search.