IS THE BLOGOSPHERE HALF EMPTY

IS THE BLOGOSPHERE HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL? A friend sent me a CNN article with the depressing headline, “Study: Very few bloggers on Net“:

Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularity, a new study finds.

Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it’s clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.

But let’s look at a few more numbers, shall we?

According to these fellows, the number of adult Internet users in the US is 146 million people. And if we average the CNN figures to five percent of those users, that means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that’s a lot of Weblogs!

I can see how CNN wouldn’t like the idea of Weblogs to become any more popular than they already are–since the very best of them have beaten the pants off of CNN when it comes to accurately and fairly editorializing and explaining the news. And unlike CNN, most Weblogs haven’t admitted to being in bed with Saddam Hussein.

This article sounds a bit like the way CNN reports the same unemployment figures depending upon which party is in the White House–something that was noticed by an Australian blogger.

UPDATE: Scott Ott puts it all into perspective.