According to this report, most blogs are limited in readership by design and 37 percent are used as personal journals.
Survey of the Blogosphere Finds 12 Million Voices
Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives, according to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The report also said that 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, and that 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.
The report, called "Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers," relied on two telephone surveys conducted over the last year. The first survey, taken from July 2005 to February 2006, asked in-depth questions of 233 people, who were a nationally representative sample of bloggers. The survey's margin of error was plus or minus 7 percent.
Additionally, from November 2005 to April 2006, 7,012 adults (including 4,753 Internet users) were surveyed by telephone. That survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent for the Internet users and 2 percent for the entire group.
Amanda Lenhart, the senior research specialist for the project, said that while the number of bloggers surveyed was not large, only 4 percent of all Americans have blogs.
So far it appears that most bloggers view blogging as a hobby that they share with a few people, Ms. Lenhart said. "The new voices are being read in relatively limited spheres,'' she said.
Among the report's findings was that while many well-known blogs are political in nature, 37 percent of bloggers use them as personal journals. Among other popular topics were politics and government (11 percent), entertainment (7 percent), sports (6 percent) and general news and current events (5 percent). Only 34 percent of bloggers considered blogging a form of journalism, and most were heavy Internet users.
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