Bloggers on MSN Spaces
According to IT Facts, MSN has 4.5 million blogs, but only 170k are really active. "Once a day" is quite a lot (this blog is not updated once a day). Still, the point remains, which should not be a surprise to anyone, that it would be a big mistake (huge) to equate the number of blogs that exist, with the number of active blogs, which is what we should really look at. I have to say, it's nice that MSN report both numbers rather than the more traditional obfuscation of counting all accounts, even down to the ones that existed for two minutes before the (now dead) user expressly asked for his account to be deleted and never counted.
Update: On a related topic, IT Facts also reports that 7% of Americans are very familiar with blogs. In itself, this data point does not mean anything. You can twist it to say "wow, 20 million Americans are VERY familiar with blogs" or "only 7%.....". What would be interesting to know is how many actually publish blogs, since it is supposed to be a participatory activity. And that would be a real measure of mass adoption (rather than mass audience, like newspapers have) - take email, for example, most people who are "very familiar" with email also have email.
It is interesting that 47% of blog readers are aged 30-49. One could speculate (but I do so from a knowingly biased point of view) that this is because readers are still mainly IT professionals. More usefully, it means that blogging is not a teen phenomenon, and neither does it belong to the traditionally core 18-30 demographic.
What about Livejournal.com and Myspace.com?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livejournal
Counting people not blogs
http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2005/03/counting_people.html
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | April 11, 2005 at 20:40