- "8 million American adults say they have created blogs.
- Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users.
- 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online.
- 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.
- Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is."
Few of my friends are web professionals and fewer still visit, let alone write, blogs. For them the web is a ubiquitous, taken-forgranted medium of communication (email), information (research and news), and function (eBay). So the "reality check" for me isn't the last statistic (that 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is) but the second (27% of internet users do read blogs).
The greatest pleasures I derive from reading blogs are discovering interesting articles online (other peoples' links) and new things to do (other peoples' recipes or music, and visits to galleries, movies, plays, cities).
The reasons why I blog include: the need to document my life but avoid navel-gazing (the public arena of blogging discourages me from dwelling too much on myself, which was the reason I gave up writing a journal); the discipline of writing (words have been my preferred medium of expression since I was a child and blogging keeps me in my writing habit, because no matter how busy I get I always try and write something); and engaging with life (quite simply, writing about the things I see and do forces me to pay attention to them more keenly).
Related link:
+Why do you blog?
Other links today:
+ 100 years of Einstein. A century after Einstein's miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did. The Economist attempts to elucidate.
+ The erotic works of Turner not burned by Ruskin afterall.
+ Margaret Cho's blog
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