Another whacky internet poll has been released by the people from Pew Internet and American Life reporting findings that between 2% and 7% of US internet users maintain a blog, based mainly on a survey between March and May last year of 1,555 internet users. Based on their own calculations of 120 million internet users, the sample group comprises of 0.001% of all US Internet users. Now even if this sampling group is taken legitimately, by their own calculations between 2.4 million and 8.4 million US Internet users maintain a blog. Then enter the Australian’s New York IT correspondent Anick Jesdanun.
Despite the ridiculously small sample, Anick has taken up with the cause of the anti-bloggers by writing an article syndicated through AP titled “Blog hype belies use”. A few choice quotes include: “DESPITE the potential of turning every internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularly…Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it’s clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life… Of those, only about 10 per cent update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often.”
So between 240,000 and 840,000 are updating their blogs lately. Is blogging the be-all and end-all of the Internet: it is certainly not, and nor has anyone pretended it to be. But a US market that involved figures similar to the population of New Zealand, where hundreds of thousands are contributing every day? Hype….I don’t think so.
