Pew Report on Bloggers

Just released yesterday, this new report from Pew is entitled “Bloggers – A portrait of the Internet’s new storytellers.” I’ve only been able to scan through it so far, but here’s a good summary of it on BloggersBlog.com.

A few items that caught my eye:

More than half those surveyed feel the need to blog under a pseudonym. As I mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of this, especially if it’s just being used to rant and whine.

It’s good to see that 87% allow comments on their blog. I’m glad only 13% of bloggers have decided to make this a one-way conversation.

How about this: Only 18% have an RSS feed and 23% don’t know if they have one or not. RSS is a mystery indeed.

Only 7% blog to make money, which is good since so few bloggers are actually making any! The BloggersBlog.com summary might have misinterpreted one point from the report though. They said “20% of ‘blogging for money’ bloggers claimed to sell premium blog content…that seems awfully high.” Since only 7% are blogging to make money, per the report, that means that only 20% of the 7%, or about 1.4% of all those surveyed are selling premium content. At least that’s the way I interpret it.

Comments

[Andrew]

"Only 18% have an RSS feed and 23% don’t know if they have one or not." I've gone on record, or at least on blog, as saying that I don't believe this. I strongly suspect that the 18% is exaggerated at the expense of the 23%. LiveJournal, the most popular blogging tool according to the survey, probably has a lot of members that don't realize that each blog has a feed by default.