Gallup on Blogs

The Gallup group have just released a poll on blogging (http://poll.gallup.com/content/?ci=21397) and it is being interpreted by some as a swipe at the hype. In a survey of just over 1000 adult respondents they report that 60% of users never read a blog. This is a classic case of needing to read the full data to get at the story. A reporter from our local student paper rang me to ask if this showed that blogs were just a fad. Hum… 40% of the adults in this poll did read blogs, and we know that the biggest users are teenagers. Add to the mix the comparative recency of blogging and one might think these data make a pretty compelling case for its sustainability and long-term health.

Of course, the real story, as always with technology, is people, and homo sapiens really does like to talk and share ideas. Like everything involving our words and voices, not all of it is worth reading or hearing, but blogging gives you the chance to make that call for yourself. I suspect the bigger worry of journalists is the extent to which news and political blogs might gain credibility over established outlets. There is also very real concern these days about threats to academic peer review which should make us think of blogs less as a vehicle for spouting opinions than as one more example of communication tools by passing the established structures for sharing and informing. There is good and bad here.

The earliest web pages contained lots of pretty useless personal information and pictures of people’s pets. There are still sites like this but the medium was adapted and shaped by users into the current web that you can no longer imagine living without. Now there is still lots of garbage out there but there is also remarkable information to be had. It will be the same for blogging – the best uses are yet to be imagined.