Blogging in 2005 : Shocking growth in many respects

Blogs bigger than sex? That’s what the CEO of Blogpulse found when he typed the words blog and sex into the Google search engine. This from an article on blogs in the Contra Costa Times by Daniel Rubin of Knight Rider.

Blog highlights from 2005 from the article:

• Nine percent of American adults who surf the Web write blogs, according to Pew’s Internet and American Life Project — that’s 13 million people. And 27 percent of Internet users read them — 39 million Americans.
• Newspapers launched blogs. The Washington Post began to include links to blogger reactions next to stories displayed online. MSNBC and other broadcasters began programs celebrating bloggers’ work.
• Lee Rainie, director of Pew project, said technological innovations in blogging software accelerated growth and changed the way people viewed the world.
• Video blogs, or vlogs, surfaced a year ago when a tsunami devastated parts of Southeast Asia and grew in popularity during the Gulf Coast hurricanes.
• People learned the ease of posting images onto blogs from mobile phones — called mobloggings.
• Corporate America recognized the power of blogs to spread buzz, from advertisements on sites that run Blogads to the proliferation of the medium as a marketing tool.
• Blogs continued their explosive growth — with 30,000 to 70,000 new ones each day, and 20 million to 23 million total worldwide, depending on whether Blogpulse or Technorati is counting. The sphere has been doubling in size every five months for three years now.
• People are spending more time reading them. A recent survey by Advertising Age found about 35 million workers in the United States visit blogs and spend an average of 40 minutes a day reading them.
• One out of four blog visits could be considered job-related.

According to Raine, “The mainstream media opened its arms to bloggers. We have entered this melding stage of thinking. … We’ve been through anger and fighting. Now we are in the wary-embrace stage. At some point, it will be wholesale endorsement.”

Reading stuff like this and it’s to hard believe many law firms and marketing professionals believe blogs are over-hyped and of questionable value.