Last week, Steve and Allison sent me links to the latest Pew study before I had a chance to pop in my contacts. (Thanks, guys) I looked things over, but didn’t comment on it, because we’ve got a few papers on blogging that need to be published first. I’ve been gagged.
Good thing that Dan Drezner trashed it for me. Dan writes,
The survey found that the overwhelming majority of people who blog do so for non-political reasons — they function primarily as online personal diaries.
This would certainly be earth-shattering news — if it was four years ago.
Heh. Dan’s got all the links. He also points out that this finding was waved around by journalists to show that bloggers aren’t to be taken seriously by political and media elites. Dan has an excellent response.
I also have to wonder if these Pew researchers really read the blogs. One of the appeals of blogging is the mixture of the personal and the political. Blog readers like to know the people that they turn to for political commentary. Bloggers like the freedom to write about a wide range of topics. Most bloggers aren’t entirely political or personal. They fall somewhere on a range between those two variables. Pew should have asked bloggers what percentage of their blog posts were political.
Apt. 11d 
It’d be interesting to know if they even TRIED blogging themselves. Doubtful. That would “ruin their objectivity”.
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I bet you can study blogs without actually doing it, but you have really do some extra footwork. An American can study French culture, but at least has to be fluent in French first.
These Pew people are very, very well funded. And this report reads likes it just discovered this new fangled thing called a “weblog.”
Yeah, so there are a lot of personal blogs. There are also 1.3 million political blogs out there. That’s a lot, as Dan points out. Go study them.
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Yup. Snore.
The primary consumer for this study, though, has to be someone who doesn’t blog or read blogs, though. The conclusions are for the most part completely and totally obvious to anyone who has ever read a blog. Except that people of color are over-represented in the blogosphere compared to the general population. That wasn’t obvious to me, and is kind of interesting.
What strikes *me* as insanely totally, completely, and utterly stupid about reactions this study is that the fact that most blogs are personal has *NO BEARING* on whether blogging is or is not an important political force or whether blogging can constitute a form of journalism. The existence of personal newsletter blogs says nothing about the importance of samizdat blogs.
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