blogs are becoming popular
tommyAn Otter World asks “How many blogs before there are too many?“ Otter surmises that “most of the readership comes from fellow bloggers.” Is the Otter right?
A recent TBT included a story about blogs and bloggers ripped from the Washington Post. The teaser on the TBT cover was something like: Blogger: a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat. Taxi Shots Tim took offense with the headline, but the story is a lot more than just that.
The article is based on a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Pew Internet Project, and includes a bunch of information on blogs, bloggers, and blog readers. More from tbt/wp:
Bloggers have become influential fixtures in cyberspace, but the term covers about 12-million people who write blogs.
The Orlando Sentinel also wrote about the report, Even quoting O’Blogger Bob O’Malley. He notes that the number of people reading blogs in the US has reached 57,000,000 - 20% of the population.
So there you have it, Otter: 57 Million people are reading 12 Million Blogs.
Hmmm… That’s 5 readers per blog. I feel very fortunate to have 14,000 readers each month.
Other links: Poynter chimes in on the report with some stats they found noteworthy. Pew has the report on bloggers online, and the original press release directly from Pew: You can also read the Blogger Callback telephone survey - they invite participation from the general public.
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July 26th, 2006 at 7:32 am
It seems like everyone has a blog these days. Only problem is that most of them aren’t worth reading. For every popular blog, there are hundreds of others that are a waste of cyberspace (at least we’re not cutting down trees, right?)
That being said, blogging is probably a good outlet of expression for many; nothing wrong with that. And who has time to read all of these blogs? I read maybe five or six on a daily basis (this one included), and maintain two of my own. The toughest task is wading through all of the useless info and crappy writing to find something worth reading. And I doubt the 14 year old girl writing about her cat is worth reading!
-Kevin
http://www.TampaBayEats.com
July 26th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Plus, the focus of all the recent analysis seems to be soley on open purpose blogs which is tentamount to ranking newspapers and toilet paper with pretty pattern print in the same barrel of thought. By that logic most print journalism is generated by amateurs and wannabees to wit there is absolutely nothing wrong with. Does the author of the original article realize he probably hasn’t read 99% of the books or newspapers on the planet any more than he’s read or cared for most blogs? It’s *all* a churn and out of the general wasteland, in both areas, are a few stars that are either organized, popular, or unique enough, to stand out.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Sites such as Fark.com and Slashdot.com are often included in the list of websites defined as blogs and while I don’t have stats as to their readership, a link posted on their site often brings down less robust servers. I would think that would greatly skew the stats to being less than 5 readers per average blog. Additionally, I myself follow multiple blogs greater blurring that statistic the other direction. But, as Kevin L. said, it’s tough to wade through all the chaff, which was precisely my point. All those fluffy cata blogs can take time, which none of us seem to have an excess of.
I would think that eventually blogging will go the way of the BBS’s, IRC, and AOL Chatrooms, or more likely the personal website. The 14 year olds will outgrow it, and many others will simply find they don’t have the time and energy to maintain them. Hopefully the ones that remain will be of higher quality such as yours and Seminole Heights.
My original purpose for the blog remains, and it sure beats mass emailing, or lugging the laptop around to all the relatives when I want to show them the photos of my latest trip.
I was just posing the question for discussion. Amongst my two readers :-).
July 26th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Kevin, I see blogs as nothing more than conversations, albeit among a (potentially) larger group of people. Reading a blog is like having a conversation with a person or group of people. And just as some people are fascinating, so too are some blogs. Conversely, some people are boring or crazy or misinformed, or they simply have different interests than you might have. Therefore, their conversations, in person or online, are not worth your time.
July 26th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Keep in mind that the more blogs we have, the less time we have to read them all and we end up being selective about those we do take time to read. It’s a little like cable TV: a channel can claim to reach so many million households but only so many of them ever stop the remote there.
July 26th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
You can dump on most of them being unreadable, but they’re all being read.
There’s no denying the Gutenberg-like impact the Internet has had. The blog is nowhere near that consequential, but you can’t deny the egalitarian effects the blog has had. What made blogs blogs is all those handy apps that take all the intimidating code away from creating a website. Even non-hosted programs like Wordpress can be very user-friendly thanks to hosts that provide scripts to do all the work for you - I’d still be slumming it on Blogger were it not for that handy function. Now the grandmother that just learned how to use a mouse can put her thoughts out there a few minutes later.
And again, someone is reading those thoughts. As a 26-year old male with no paternal instincts of any kind, I have no use for any so-called “mommy blogs.” Most of them seem like a poorly written collection of diaper stories (Wendy Boucher’s being an obvious exception). But guess what - a lot of mommies love them. Blogs are the ultimate in niche communication; the blogosphere puts the the variety of magazine section at Barnes and Noble to shame.
SO you find your niche - good writing, bad writing, politics, cats, the girls of the WB - and ignore the rest; but never underestimate the value of any of them.