Here’s a post about some blog readership statistics that fit much more closely what I’ve seen in the “real world”, i.e. not my circle of friends which includes too many bloggers to be realistic. According to that study, only 6% of internet users read blogs regularly and 50% know what a blog is. Also:
That means that almost 2/3 of blog readers don’t realize they are reading a blog. It is a fairly common theory amongst folks analyzing the blogosphere that blog readership is underreported in surveys – but Charlie’s team found a way to quantify that with staggering results.
Which is good. It could mean that we’ve gone from “having a home page” to “having a blog” to blogs becoming publishing tools that are used for a variety of sites before the majority of people even realized what blogs are. Their use could be widespread enough that we won’t be explaining what basic blogs are, just publishing content to the web using tools that happen to have evolved from blogs.
2 Comments
i always thought that we used ‘blog’ as a word to identify something like someone’s web ID – at a different level for everyone, but the easiest way to get to know about someone, how to reach them and what their interests are, and so on.
i dont think we’ll use the word blog in years from now, same as we dont use the word ‘home page’ as we did years ago.
10 years (i say 10, could be much less) from now most of people will have their own url with facts about them, archives etc. as an online persona. a word is only a word, the essence of what a blog is is the important thing here – not the word itself.
Sometimes blog might be some kind of web ID but by the time it gets to reaching enough people it will be more than that. Already, look at how many people mix in their del.icio.us links and Flickr pics. Soon I’m sure Odeo will fit into the mix and who knows what else further down the line. The blog part likely won’t even be the centrall part of that.