Jennifer Rice first pointed to these stats on blogging a few days ago. Jennifer and I were chatting about them on the phone yesterday, and Robert Paterson highlights the same story with the heading Blogging – Tipped? The stats are interesting.
As a professional researcher I take all of these numbers with a pinch of salt. So there may be 2.5 million U.S. bloggers or there may be 8.8 million. The real question such numbers help answer is, “Is it bigger than a bread box? Are we talking small, medium or large?”
Remarkably, when the Pew study first came out, AP spun the story as 2 percent being a surprisingly small number of bloggers (CNN.com attached the headline to that story: “Study: Very few bloggers on Net”.) Yet, blogger Rogers Cadenhead notes that Pew’s low-end estimate of the number of blogs is more than the 2.2 million copies that USA Today prints on regular weekdays, the country’s biggest newspaper.
I think something pretty cool is starting to happen here. Jennifer has asked me to support her on an international branding project – and we only know each other through trading our thoughts and ideas in blogs. I didn’t expect that to happen… and it’s really interesting to reflect on the impact on this work of us both being out here in public blogging. I realise that it creates a working relationship in which openness becomes especially important and valued.
That feels pretty significant. We’re creating a working relationship where there is multiplier for openness. And handling a branding project that – a few years ago – could really only have been done by a conventional agency. If this sort of thing becomes more established, that must have interesting implications for these businesses.
