Monday, January 03, 2005

Blah blah blog

Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 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; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is. --Pew Internet and American Life Project


The unreported figures:

--Percentage of unreadable blogs written in text-messaging lingo by teenage girls in Hong Kong: 92%
--Percentage of those unreadable blogs written in text-messaging lingo by teenage girls in Hong Kong that have pink backgrounds: 100%
--Percentage of blogs abandoned after three postings along the lines of "Well, I've got one of those blog thingees everyone's talking about! I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but you'll be granted a peek inside my mind and be treated with rants about my ex!": 78%
--Percentage of useful blogs: 0.1%
--Percentage of useful material found on this blog: 0.01%

4 comments:

Ron Southern said...

I know those Hong Kong girls and my best advice to you is: Avoid Pink! I will try to take my own advice. Uh, except the pink backgrounds for my own "reminiscence" posts on The Rat Squeaks. That's different. I'm turning into a psycho color-coded maniac, though, and that may be worse than living in a universe of Hentai (spelling?) art!

Ron Southern said...

Actually, I guess Hentai is something else, but that artwork the young girls use is the same style except Hentai has enormous body parts instead of flower-covered teddy bears. Both are liable to cause brain damage.

Jim Donahue said...

>>Hentai has enormous body parts

Hmmmmm.

Peter said...

I was blogless while on vacation - I picked up the newspaper for Portland, ME, and there was an article about a university in Michigan I have never heard of that puts an annual list of words that should be banned for the following year. This is the only story I can find online:

NPR : Banned Word List Is Blog-TasticSo is it that blogs are no longer hot, or just the word "blog"?