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From Matthew Stibbe, I found out about this article in Salon about bloggers. The source document is a callback survey by Pew Internet that’s located here (how’s that for spreading link love?).

The Blogger Callback Survey, sponsored by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (PIAL), obtained telephone interviews with 233 self-identified bloggers from previous surveys conducted for PIAL. The interviews were conducted in English by Princeton Data Source, LLC from July 5, 2005 to February 17, 2006. Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ±6.7%.

I found these stats particularly interesting:

  • Percentage who don’t use traditional sources for news or information: newspaper 17%; television 14%; magazine 34%; radio 24%.

  • 62% didn’t have a web site before they started blogging.

  • The median amount of hours spent working on one’s blog was two hours per week. (It takes me five hours to write an entry like The Wrong Tale—and that’s not counting the time it took to read the book.)

  • 52% said they blog for themselves as opposed to for their audience.

  • 55% use a pseudonym for blogging. (So people are blogging for themselves but using a pseudonym to hide their identities from themselves?)

  • 59% don’t provide an RSS feed. (If you’re blogging for yourself, you don’t really need an RSS feed.)

  • 84% say that their blog is a hobby or something they don’t spend a lot of time on. (This is how I approach my day job now that I’ve started blogging.)

  • 65% don’t consider their blog a form of journalism. (I’d say this about my blog too.)

There’s lots of interesting info in this study, so check it out.