« Porkbusters On Patrol | Main | 'Blogosphere Day' (Or, 'Ned Lamont Payday') »
July 19, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
'The Internet's New Storytellers'
The Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of a telephone survey of bloggers today. Here are some of the highlights:
-- Only 11 percent of bloggers charaterize themselves as political bloggers, a distant second to the 37 percent who focus on "my life and experiences." Entertainment and sports also ranked above general news and current events.
-- "[T]he American blogosphere is dominated by those who use their blogs as personal journals. Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism." The final tally: 34 percent call it journalism, 65 percent do not. What I want to know is what the remaining 1 percent call it. Maybe that wasn't fit for Pew print. (I call blogging Estate 4.5.)
-- More than half of bloggers are younger than 30 and live in suburban areas. At 39, that puts me in the minority, unfamiliar territory for a while male like me. But 60 percent of bloggers are white, so I'm still in the majority on that score. The blogging population is about evenly divided between men and women.
-- More than half of bloggers use pseudonyms. (I blog under my name but wrote a children's book under a pseudonym. Does that count?)
-- Only 27 percent of bloggers cite "to influence the way other people think" as a major reason" for their online writing, and 29 percent want "to motivate other people to action."
-- Four-fifths of bloggers have high-speed Internet connections at home. (I am among them.)
-- "Bloggers are major consumers of political news, and about half prefer sources without a particular political viewpoint."
Posted by Danny | 12:46 PM
