Blogging -- It's all about me: survey

AFP, July, 2006

NEW YORK (AFP) — Once hailed as the pioneers of citizen journalism, Internet bloggers are, according to a new survey, mostly self-indulgent diarists interested in one topic above all others: themselves.

The survey from the Pew Research Center estimates that there are currently around 12 million adult bloggers in the United States, while the number of blog readers stands at 57 million, or 39 percent of the online population.

Although the best-publicised blogs deal with political issues, the vast majority have no journalistic pretensions at all and are simply content to share personal information with a tiny audience.

In the Pew survey, 37 percent of respondents cited "my life and experiences" as the primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a distant second, with 11 percent.

The profile that emerged from the survey was of a blogging population that is young -- 54 percent are under ...