Typical Blog
According to CNN:
There are over 4 million blogs on the net, more than half run by teenagers. Research group Perseus says the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who updates it about twice a month.
These sorts of “statistics” always strike me as suspect. Both the 4 million figure, and the “teenage girl” figure. The article goes on to claim:
But unlike www.bigwhiteguy.com most of them will be little seen, if not abandoned. At least two thirds of the blogs out there today have not been updated in months.
Does this sort of figure even make any sense? There are a lot of “abandoned” web sites out there, dead links, etc.. I’m not sure we can conclude anything from that. If a blog isn’t read and isn’t written, does it really exist?
In my view, if CNN wants to capture the zeitgeist, they should focus on active blogs, both from the reader’s and writer’s points of view. Otherwise, it’s kind of like writing a story about how many newspapers there are out there that are no longer in print, and thus no one reads them. What use is that information?