The 2004 Blog Survey
Sarah Perez on January 4th, 2005
- 8 million American adults say they have created blogs
- Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users
- 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online
- 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.
- 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is: OH DEAR LORD!
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im not surprised by that last statistic. really. it’s sad, but I’m not. people just don’t pay attention to stuff like they should
Why would you expect the average user to know about blogs? The average user surfs the net for information, not to play. The majority of bloggers do not provide the type of information the average web user is looking for.
I’m always surprised when someone appropriately nerdy doesn’t know what blogs are. For example, our new intern at work who is studying to be a web designer. How could he be studying web design and not know what a blog is?!?
Hey! I don’t really know what a blog is! I’ve only stumbled across it now, and from what I can figure it is a web-log - sort of like a diary someone can keep on the web to post facts and opinions and other stuff about themselves to the world. Am I right? It is a nice idea, and I would like to start my own one (how do I do it?). My only problem with it is that it clutters the internet even more with useless text - that is how I stumbled across this page - by following a link from Google to a page I thought contained first hand information. However, I do like your opinions Sarah and might even return to this site…
I found that last statistic interesting. No matter how often I’ve explained to my friends and family what a blog IS, they just don’t get it. Even as often as they read my blog, they never comment on it because they “don’t know how”. It’s fruitless to explain “click comments” over and over!@
Blogs have changed a lot over the past year, however. I hope by this time next year, more people will be familiar with the whole concept of it.
Typepad is growing. The same people who own it just bought out Live Journal. I know that it will make LJ users happy but how do Typepadders feel about it?
Did anyone else go through the Christmas dinner thing, where the family discussion split between two groups of people present - the bloggers, and the non-bloggers who wanted to know about blogging? What about the iPod users and the non-iPod users…? Or was it just at my parent’s house?