WHO’S READING?

You know how some things are obvious AFTER they are pointed out? Yesterday, Charles Arthur explained in the Guardian about the 1% rule. He starts with:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

I’d not thought of this too much before. I presumed that the read/write web meant that people would write. Maybe not so. Makes me wonder where “save” fits into all this, as “save” is what libraries do so well. (reference via the Library Stuff blog)

WHO’S WRITING ?

Seems that everyone who knows I’m interested in blogging sent me this reference yesterday. The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a 33 page report of a survey of over 7000 Americans, all about blogging. ( Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox). They aimed to get a picture of who blogs, why and what they blog. They used the telephone (!) to conduct the survey.
Some of the findings, randomly selected for personal interest:

• The blogging population is young, evenly split between men and women and racially diverse.
• More than half the bloggers use a pseudonym
• A typical blogger spends two hours a week on their blog
• Nearly 3 in 10 bloggers say that their primary blog is a multi user blog.
• Half of bloggers believe their audience is mostly people they know.
• Percentage of all American adults who are knowledge-based professional workers (13%). Percentage of bloggers who are knowledge-based professional workers (38%)

The survey is available online if you want to take it, although of course the results won’t be “official”

(Just as I was about to push “publish” and get back to work, a colleague {you know who you are KM!} sent me a link to this report of a survey of British bloggers from today’s Guardian. Article starts with: One in four British internet users keeps a blog and more than half of that number share their online musings with the public, according to a report released today. Britain is home to nearly 7 million bloggers by David Flicking)