Survey shows 12 million U.S. bloggers

This interesting article in the NY Times this morning details the results of a
recent Pew Trust survey about blogging in the U.S Here's a quick list of some of
the findings:

8 % of internet users blog (12 million adults)
39 % of internet users (57 million adults) read blogs
54% of bloggers are under 30 (equal numbers of men and women)

Here's what the people interviewed are doing with their blogs:

Personal journaling: 37 %
Politics and government: 11 %
Entertainment: 7 %
Sports: 6 %
News and current events: 5 %

I think it's odd that technology isn't a category here--I would think that
percentage would be significant. I'd also like to see this survey done on an
international scale, but this is a start, I guess. :)

I think a lot of people are starting to confuse a BLOG with a personal Jornal. I
don't think its 8% I think its more around 4 or 5%. I was at a party recently
and a friend said she had a website. When asked if she blogged on it she nor her
friends had a clue what a blog was.

I don't trust surveys either especially after I was at the SuperMarket last week
and Survey USA was doing a poll about the War in Iraq for the local news and
they only wanted to interview democrats so makes you wonder who they questioned
for the blog survey since a lot of these companies that do these stats gathering
tend to seek people that would give them a more favorable result

Mike, I agree there's a lot of "gray area" when it comes to
surveys--it's hard to know whether the words we use mean the same things to both
of us. Pew is a reputable organization that's been around for a long time (not
that they couldn't have some sort of bias--I don't know their work well enough
to know), but as we saw in the Jon Stewart clip about "Internet
tubes," the language of technology is still strange to a lot of people.

I do think the results are interesting, as a kind of general snapshot that shows
at least what one group found when they tried to find out who blogs and what
they're blogging about.

There is a such disease called graphorrhea...

Waggler:I think it's odd that technology isn't a category here--I would think
that percentage would be significant. I'd also like to see this survey done on
an international scale, but this is a start, I guess. :)Hits it right on the
head!

Technology would/should be #1 or #2, since tech people were the first adpoters
of blogging.