It’s a Bloggerful World

Some factoids I heard last week in D.C. at a Blogging 101 session hosted by the Ad Council and Google blew me away and some just make sense.

First, there are 1.5 million new blogs created every week and about one million posts per day. While close to half of the population is said to visit the same blogs regularly and a third reportedly reads one each day, only 8% of Americans have a blog. That makes me feel really special!

Also, about 95 % of the top U.S. newspapers have reporter blogs. With what’s happening to the newspaper industry today—losing print subscribers and advertisers—this seems an inevitable evolutionary shift. They are going to have to reinvent themselves, even those papers that continue being printed, in order to compete as news services.

As a small fish in a very large blogosphere, I have joined a purportedly male-dominated arena. That surprised me. Why should gender be a factor?

[The data sources cited by speaker Jenni Brand of Bastille Marketing in her introductory presentation included Technorati, Pew Internet and American Life Project, and Synovate.]