The Pew Internet & American Life Project survey on blogging, published July 19, 2006 contains lots of good data on who all of those bloggers are. The survey contains lots of statistics, charts and commentary. Here’s the summary.
The Pew Internet Project blogger survey finds that the American blogosphere is dominated by those who use their blogs as personal journals. Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism.
Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.
Entertainment-related topics were the next most popular blog-type, with 7% of bloggers, followed by sports (6%), general news and current events (5%), business (5%), technology (4%), religion, spirituality or faith (2%), a specific hobby or a health problem or illness (each comprising 1% of bloggers). Other topics mentioned include opinions, volunteering, education, photography, causes and passions, and organizations.
I found this part interesting:
"The most distinguishing characteristic of bloggers is their youth. More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30. Like the internet population in general, however, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women…
Another distinguishing characteristic is that bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population. Sixty percent of bloggers are white, 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race. By contrast, 74% of internet users are white, 9% are African American, 11% are English-speaking Hispanic and 6% identify as some other race."
So blogs really do give us access to a wider range of thought than we probably would have ever encountered otherwise. Plus, since younger, unpublished writers dominate the "blogosphere", blogs give those people experience in fine-tuning their work and even give some of them a chance to launch a career. Several bloggers have found themselves signing book deals thanks entirely to their online work- Postsecret's Frank Warren, for instance.