HIghlights from New Pew Internet Blogger Survey

Pew Internet has just released Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers. The document reports the results of a national phone survey of bloggers.

Here's a sample of the findings:

• Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs – a significant increase since the fall of 2005.
• 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.
• 59% of bloggers spend just one or two hours per week tending their blog. One in ten bloggers spend ten or more hours per week on their blog.
• 52% of bloggers say they blog mostly for themselves, not for an audience. About one-third of bloggers (32%) say they blog mostly for their audience.
• More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30.
• Sixty percent of bloggers are white, 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race.
• 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either “sometimes” or “often.”
• 56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either “sometimes” or “often.”
• 95% of bloggers get news from the internet, compared with 73% of all internet users.
• 87% of bloggers allow comments on their blog.
• Only 18% of bloggers offer an RSS feed of their blog’s content.

[JH]