On the State of the Blog-o-sphere

Taking a tip from Rober Scoble’s feed, I checked out Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion, where he blogged about the latest State of the News Media report. It’s interesting to see that, as Steve noted, by January 2005, some 10% of the online population was blogging. By December 2005 up until April 2006, that number had already reduced to a steady 8%.



2006 saw a more than two-fold increase in the number of people who reported having read blogs versus early 2004 numbers, from 17% to 39%.



One thing that Steve didn’t touch on however, was the state of public attitudes of young Americans towards online media:



45% of young Americans (high school students) say that television stations are the most accurate source of information they know, with only a meager 23% looking at newspapers for their daily news feed and a bit more surprising number, 10% saying they read Blogs for their accuracy in reporting.

For blogs, as a nascent form of distributed media content, 10% seems like a pretty good number, I’d love to find out what those numbers are now. Looking at things like BostonNOW and seeing these numbers, there might be a real future in this new newspaper/blog mash-up. But as always, I’ll wait to see how they play out their hands.