OOooo, the blogosphere is having a field day over a recent NYT article that depicts blogs as seldom-read, masturbatory diatribes written by pathetic, addicted people who live in bathrobes all day.
What's most amusing to me is that the NYT article itself demonstrates why it has a lot to fear from blogs, and why people are more and more often turning to blogs for hard news:
The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.
Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.
Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs
Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves..
Oh, really? Given that the NYT provided no context for the "4%" figure, I'd say they aren't having much of a conversation with their readers, who are apparently supposed to think, "Hmph, four percent. That's a tiny number" and move on. But Bill Quick did the research and crunched the numbers to uncover the real picture:
Here's a few more numbers the fishwrapped fumblers at the Old Gray Hag can contemplate:
World Internet Usage Statistics and Population Stats - Top 10
Total number of internet users: 785,710,022. Four percent of that number: 31,428,400.
Total number of NYT readers: Hard to estimate. Print circulation varies from about 1.16 million daily to 1.8 million on Sunday, website page count 1-2 million per day, total readership somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5 million.
Blogs as a whole are more widely read than the New York Times by a factor of seven plus.
Those who live by the statistics, die by the statistics. The NYT might have hoped that bloggers would feel embarassed by this negative article; instead, it's more grist for the why-blogs-are-better-than-newspaper mill. As A Small Victory put it:
I do have a question for the people over at the paper of record: If blogs are so damn boring and unimportant, why do you keep printing stories about them?
Me, I'm just eagerly anticipating the day when the NYT publishes an article (probably by Michael Winerip) in which the idea that people might actually get information about testing and education reform from blogs is met with derision and disbelief.
Posted by kswygert at May 28, 2004 12:31 PM