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March 01, 2004The Few, The Proud, The BloggersAs it turns out, we apparently remain the few among Americans and internet users. A study by the Pew Internet and American Life project finds that only 2-7% of adult internet users have blogs, and fewer still keep them updated frequently. Not surprising is the CNN article's failure to report that 44% of Internet users contribute content to the online world. For news on the large numbers of American Internet users posting content online, we turn to a story on the Express India website. American big media indeed... Another revealing trend is that 11% say they read blogs. My question then is, if it is only 11% who read blogs, what number is out there that happen by our various domains and do not realize that the site they are looking at is considered a blog? Case in point: At some point during the Clark campaign, Scott Ott of Scrappleface issued another one of his beautiful missives of sarcasm. The specific one purported to report that Terry McAuliffe had called John Kerry AWOL from the Senate due to the number of votes he missed. Almost immediately, the link to his post and/or the text of the same began making the rounds of the Clark blogs and among the Clark Yahoo groups. Many people mistakenly believed it to be a legitimate report and began circulating it. I would wager a good number of those individuals had no idea that they had just visited a blog. From the experience of this blog and its proliferation of hits via search engines seeking Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, I'd still wager that the vast majority of those users do not realize they are looking at a blog. Clearly, there a lot more Internet users out there who read blogs but do not realize they are exploring the niche medium. With the high position of many blogs on Google's search results, it would be safe to assume that a number of Internet searchers see their key search phrases in the results and click through to a site that is a blog. Granted, search engine hits are not equitable to what one might call a blog reader. However, the report's findings that only 11% of American adult internet users read blogs would seem to unfairly characterize their impact within the internet using arena. In fact, it could well be argued that given the higher rankings among search engines for certain results would allow bloggers a disproportionate level of influence. It does because the Internet searcher is looking for a highly targeted, specific subject or topic. Given the Google method of indexing and the companion higher rankings on search engines, often times the first, say, 2-3 out of five impressions that Internet searcher is exposed to comes from the keyboard and thoughts of a blogger. In any event, bloggers remain a proud and small group of Internet users and regardless of what statistics a group reports, the numbers and influence wielded by them continue to grow. Comments
I kinda like the small community thing. We are unique... in our own way. Hope you're doing well! Posted by: h at March 1, 2004 03:20 PMI totally agree with you... the # of times I've gone hunting for things on the net (ESPECIALLY audio clips or anything related to pop culture) you almost immediately come upon blogs first and foremost. And judging by the number of people who have come upon my Nicole Ritchie post and seem to take some offense to someone simply posting an opinion, they would seem to think that I have some sort of influence in the world or something. Posted by: Ryan Waddell at March 1, 2004 04:09 PMAnother wonderful post, Adam. Love the way you write. My traffic doubled when I added sitemeter to my archive pages, almost all with search engine results. That's a good 35,000 unique people who clicked on my website since last May, in contrast to the 150-300 a day I've averaged as regular daily uniques to the main page in that time. And the more content, the more google searches. Posted by: TheYeti at March 3, 2004 01:29 PMVery nice and useful site. I wish you good luck! Posted by: free pc games at October 14, 2004 06:44 PMPost a comment
 
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