Last week, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study on blogging. The findings describe the characteristics of the blogging community. The ways blogging as a communication tool supports public speech are gaining clarity and support through this study. It estimates that 12 million people in the US are blogging. Bloggers, as compared to internet users, are more ethnically diverse, younger and highly wired. Further, an important aspect is that the majority of bloggers (54%) has never published media before they started blogging. 37% of bloggers report that they post about personal experiences, the largest response for that question. Not surprisingly, bloggers read blogs, and there is a direct correlation between the frequency of a blogger’s posting and how often she read blogs. The growth of blogging will become more important as it is encouraging the roles of reader and writer to merge. We’ve discussed this merger before, but it is great to have numbers to support the discussion.
As internet users are becoming authors and publishers, I am curious to watch the future development of bloggers as a community and the possible impact they can have on policy issues. Is there the opportunity for bloggers to become a vehicle for social change, especially on Internet issues? 12 million bloggers could demand the attention of legislators and courts on the issues of net neutrality, copyright, privacy and open access. Although, as we have discussed in the past, the blogosphere is often a partisan space. The Pew study also confirms its diversity. Therefore, mobilizing this community is a challenging task. However, the sheer number of bloggers foretells that some of them are bound to find themselves dealing with these issues, especially with copyright and intellectual property. My hope then would be that these inevitable frictions would bring further into the mainstream these issues and broaden the discussion by the often one-sided debates of the telecommunications industry and media conglomerates.