The Guardian reports of internet users in Britain that despite recent hype about blogs, relatively few people publish or read them compared to other types of internet sites. The newspaper concludes that this new media may influence decision-makers, but has yet to have a direct impact on general public opinion.
I think that is about right. The 1,500 or so daily readers of Blue Mass Group, for example — sparkling with intelligence, brimming with trenchant analysis and incisive commentary — are a tiny fraction of the Commonwealth. History shows, however, that this kind of group of committed activists often produce change. On this day in 1775, for example, an even smaller collection of Massachusetts residents made history at Lexington and Concord. Citizens: to your electronic muskets!
The Guardian continued, “The findings of the British Market Research Bureau’s quarterly survey led senior associate director Trevor Vagg to conclude that blogging has received disproportionate media coverage and the whole idea of citizen journalism is overhyped.
Awareness of blogs dramatically increased in the three months to the end of February, with the proportion of internet users in Britain who have never heard of a blog, or blogging, falling from 45% in the previous quarter three to 30%, according to the BMRB survey.
But despite this there has been no significant change in the number of people who publish blogs, which remains at just 2% of UK internet users. Furthermore, only 10% – around 2.8 million people – of internet users view a weblog once a month or more.
“There has been disproportionate coverage of blogging, still only a minority ever read blogs and a tiny proportion publish them,” said Mr Vagg. “This suggests there is an over-hyping about how big the idea of people’s journalism is through using technology like camera phones and weblogs.”
But Mr Vagg recognised that the relatively small number of bloggers potentially wielded a hugely disproportionate influence in setting trends and opinion-leading.
“It may well be that those who do publish weblogs are more likely to be opinion formers and therefore have a larger influence than their numbers would suggest,” he said.
Blogging has received a lot of publicity in recent months with many media owners attempting to tap into the phenomenon.
Well, not really, but it seemed catchy.
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I read different blogs for very different reasons. I think that’s an important consideration: some are substitutes for reading the news, others are more for columns and opinions, and others are for community discussion.
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The ones I read:
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p> * DailyKos allows comments, but I never comment due to the propensity for off-topic rants, the lack of a good (/.-esque) rating system to only read interesting comments, and the generally bad signal to noise ratio (as well as redundancy).
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However, it is great at news and data aggregating, and I check it on my RSS feed multiple times a day.
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p> * Slashdot is techie news; I read it close to daily, but certainly not every article. I browse the comments at 4, so comments moderated as interesting, funny, insightful, etc. bubble to the top. I post rarely.
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p> * Boing Boing is just plain funny, albeit sometimes not worksafe and crude more than occassionally. Still, Cory Doctorow is a bit of a hero to me, and there’s some funny stuff there.
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p> * BlueMassGroup is different from all of the above. While the comment system sucks, the number of commenters is so small that it doesn’t really matter. I read BMG because it covers issues that don’t show up so well in the Globe, CNN, etc. I don’t use it as a news aggregator; instead, I use it as a news, information, and commentary source. This is a big difference. I also comment here often, because the signal to noise ratio is quite good (often the result of being a relatively unpopular blog).
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p> * Connecticut Local Politics: same as BMG, different state. Less technical/political-sciency stuff, but good nonetheless.
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p> * Green Car Congress is what it sounds like, and I read about 20% of the posts there; lots of scientific/technical cutting edge stuff, some policy, some data, some commercial information.
Let us know what “sucks” about the comment system here, and we’ll see what we can do to change it. (No promises…)
In the “old days” before mass media, a minority of Americans actually read the daily newspaper. But they were exactly the folks friends and family would to go for information and advice. I think today’s bloggers and blog readers are “opinion leaders” in a similar sense.
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Next, blogs drive participation. When you read about people doing political stuff all the time, you’re more likely to do something yourself. And some blogs actively organize, to write letters to the editor or donate to candidates or go to your party caucuses.
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Think about this: What portion of our population run for office? What portion even ever work for or volunteer on campaigns? Pretty damn small, unfortunately. But they (we) have almost all the political influence.
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The Guardian isn’t focusing on politics, and a lot of what I’m saying is specific to politics. But there are parallels in other domains. Think about how much media time is spent on a relatively small number of books which happen to be very good or noteworthy – and what percentage of the population has actually read those books? There are plenty of reasons other than “everyone read it” why something may be worthy of notice and coverage.