How many people blog – and how many read?

One has to wonder… am I making a big deal out of this whole blog/literature thing? According to some, yes, because the whole world isn’t caught up in this blog frenzy. Apparently there are loads of people who don’t even know what blogs are (My boss isn’t one of them, though. He found my Livejournal, and every so often asks me how things “are in the blogosphere”).

According to Steve Maich in “Nothing to Blog About,” the “Mainstream Media”, or “MSM” is making a bigger deal out of blogs than anyone should:

For one thing, there are wild discrepancies in the estimates of how many blogs are actually out there. Some figure the number is as high as 30 million worldwide. But once you strip away pseudo-blogs that are really ads or scam traps, and subtract dormant sites, the numbers plunge precipitously. A couple of sites dedicated to tracking blog traffic estimate only about two to four million blogs are actively maintained.

Now, two to four million is small in comparison to the number of MySpace users (61+ million). But we shouldn’t compare blogging to other Internet phenomenons so easily. There is a reason MySpace is more popular: users can post pictures and communicate without (gasp!) writing. Plus, there’s always a chance of scoring some tail. And how many bloggers actually hook up? (Besides Trent from Pink and David from Jossip).

So, who really reads these two to four million blogs? Maich mentioned a Pew Internet & American Life Project that surveyed about 1300 people. “27 percent of Internet users regularly read blogs, but that 62 percent of the online population still didn’t know what a blog is. In fact, 40 per cent of those who said they read blogs then said they didn’t really know what a blog was.” Ouch – numbers like this don’t bode well for the importance of blogs, that is, if we can measure importance by impact.

However, we recognize that the blog is a new medium. I know the span of 10 years can seem long, but c’mon… the novel has existed for about 300 years. We can’t expect every novel-reader to know what a blog is.