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?
Steve Laniel Jan 28
Some weblog — I’m trying to remember which — pointed out the parallel statement from the print world: last year several hundred million words were written on paper, most of them memos at corporations and the like, that people promptly forgot about and never followed up on.
It’s silly to even bother with these sorts of comparisons. I wonder if the point of the study is to inflate the ego of traditional media that do a poorer and poorer job of reporting the news as time goes by.