kagablog

When did you start up the kagablog and why?

November 2005. I was interested in creating a forum for writers, poets, artists, academics, digital explorers of all persuasions to present work. this forum would, unlike the mass media as we know it, NOT be market driven, not be dictated to by the market. either in the sense of its content always relating to new product, or in the sense of having to pander to the consideration of what the “readership” wants.

i invited contributors whose work i admired, respected, believed in and or loved. once in as a contributor there is no editorial censorship. in this way too, the blog works very differently from market driven mass media.

What are your average number of hits per month? How many regular readers do you have? What percentage of your hits are from SA?

it varies quite dramatically. in the months nov 2007 through to feb 2008 the blog was getting over 250 000 hits per month. it’s dropped off considerably since then because i am living in sweden at the moment and not able to give the blog as much attention as it needs.

about half the readership is located in geographical south africa. the blog gets a lot of hits from the usa, a lot from the netherlands.

The kagablog covers a wide range of disciplines – music, art, photography, poetry, fiction, film etc. We don’t see any print publications like this around in SA, hence the nonprint distribution of the net obviously helps in this and gives you a wider readership. Any comment on this?

like i said in the answer to your first quesiton, i started the blog because ALL mass media is market driven. which is a huge problem. it means that “freedom of speech” has come to mean “freedom to promote what is available in the shops”. the blog steps out of that paradigm and presents are broad set of interests and obsessions of the various contributors (there are over 90 of them).

While the blog has a number of local contributors, they are a number of contributors from overseas, particularly Europe. Some posts are even in French, Dutch or German. I also feel at times that there is a distinct “European” flavour to the blog, references to debord etc. Do you feel that this “Eurocentric” aspect places the blog outside of the South African cultural context?

the point is that the kagablog does not exist in geographical south africa. it exists in the world of the web, and is thus global and local at once. because many of the contributors do live in geographical south africa i would say that the kagablog has a lot of relevance to those only interested in arts and opinions from the region. but in 2008 i don’t think it is really all that interesting to get hung up on regional locality. the work that i try to promote on the kagablog is work that i consider excellent, that i consider challenging - these are qualities that i consider far more important than where the contributor lives physically.

and its good that you mention Debord, because the Maponya Mall in Soweto is more “spectacular” in the Debordian sense, than any building in Paris. which says it all really. i believe that the kagablog reflects an entirely new, and medium specific, attitude to media and how it has changed our lives. thinking of art, of poetry, of critical discourse, in terms of national and regional boundaries only takes us back to what we already know, it does not take us forward. in other words, not only am i not interested in colonial regionalities of the mind, i am also not interested in post-colonial regions: the kagablog is a space in the collective mind that is outside of the colonial mind market’s agenda altogether.

Does the blog receive any sponsorship at all?

none whatsoever. it is a labour of love, on my part and the part of all the wonderful contributors.

In view of the low level of internet penetration in SA – about 7% - how feasible do think online publications are for reaching local audiences?

7% is better than 6%. and it is growing all the time, geometrically. in a decade’s time those figures will be radically different.

Do you think that online publishing vehicles such as blogs are taken seriously in SA? Do you think that they are regarded by SA audiences as legitimate publishing mediums? There are, after all, now awards given for blogs, so there must be some degree of acceptance.

Gary the only things taken seriously in SA are drinking and soccer and rugby and cricket. I cannot allow myself to be contained by the mediocre opinions of the market. What matters is that I take blogs seriously, that you take them seriously, that the contributors and the readership takes them seriously.

Starting up a blog is relatively easy and cheap, compared to print publishing. Some print publishers worldwide feel threatened by online publishing, since it does sort of inroad on their business territory and could impact on their survival from a financial aspect. But do you think this threat is only financial, or is there a threat to a perceived cultural territory as well?

Look, the crisis in the publishing industry isn’t because of blogs, it is because too many books are published, too many books are thrown out into the marketplace in the hope that something sticks. It’s just a huge jumble sale out there, and it is exhausting for people, for readers, to keep up with it all. And that’s why people retreat, they turn inwards, they find refuge in the classics, in what they already know, in genre fiction, because it is just impossible to read through all the books that are thrown at one.

In fact blogs don’t impinge on the territory of physical publishing at all . The blogging phenomenon is something entirely different, it’s a distinct medium of its own. If anything, I think that blogs stimulate people to buy books because of giving readers access to so many fresh critical voices, who are writing from a position of passion rather than the established critical voices who write from jaded positions of power and assumed authority.

When the internet first came out, some people foresaw the end of print books – this clearly hasn’t happened. In what do you see the relationship, if any, between online publications and print books?

Online publications encourage people to buy print books. The same phenomenon happens in the music industry. The “end” of print books has already happened in a sense, with the demise of the specialist bookstores and the usurpation of bookselling as a craft and a trade by the ubiquitous supermarket chains that “wholesale” books to the public, two for the price of one, just like baked beans.

Chicago – Could it be that blogs have become online fodder for the more mature reader?

A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail – still useful, just not sexy.

“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things”,

Those channels might include anything from social networking sites to others that feature games or video.

Older users

The study, released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that 14 percent of Internet youths, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with just over a quarter who did so in 2006. And only about half in that age group say they comment on friends’ blogs, down from three-quarters who did so four years ago.

Pew found a similar drop in blogging among 18- to 29-year-olds.

Overall, Pew estimates that roughly one in 10 online adults maintain a blog – a number that has remained consistent since 2005, when blogs became a more mainstream activity. In the US, that would mean there are more than 30 million adults who blog.

“That’s a pretty remarkable thing to have gone from zero to 30 million in the last 10 years,” says David Sifry, founder of blog search site Technorati.

But according to the data, that population is aging.

The Pew study found, for instance, that the percentage of internet users age 30 and older who maintain a blog increased from seven percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2009.

Pew’s over-18 data, collected in the last half of last year, were based on interviews with 2 253 adults and have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. The under-18 data came from phone interviews with 800 12- to 17-year-olds and their parents. The margin of error for that data was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

Social networking

So why are young people less interested in blogging?

The explosion of social networking is one obvious answer. The Pew survey found that nearly three-quarters of 12- to 17-year-olds who have access to the internet use social networking sites, such as Facebook. That compares with 55 percent four years ago.

With social networking has come the ability to do a quick status update and that has “kind of sucked the life out of long-form blogging,” says Amanda Lenhart, a Pew senior researcher and lead author of the latest study.

More young people are also accessing the internet from their cellphones, only increasing the need for brevity. The survey found, for instance, that half of 18- to 29-year-olds had done so.

All of that rings true to Sarah Rondeau, a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

“It’s a matter of typing quickly. People these days don’t find reading that fun,” the 18-year-old student says. She loves Facebook and has recently started using Twitter to share pictures of her dorm room and blurbs about campus life, which are, in turn, shared on the Holy Cross web site for prospective students.

Meanwhile, New Yorker Jackie Huang hasn’t made a posting on her long-form blog in two years, and she now uses Facebook and Twitter because her friends do – though she’s still not too hot on tweeting.

Now 25, she started blogging when she was in her first year at university, using Xanga and then Wordpress to tell friends, family and a few strangers about anything from travel experiences to pop culture to politics.

“My blog was my own little soapbox,” says Huang, who now works for a communications agency. “Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m interesting enough for my followers to want to know where I am every hour of the day and what I’m thinking.”

Blogging won’t die

Few doubt that blogging will die. Lenhart suspects that those who blog for personal reasons may focus more on events – a wedding, a trip, a baby’s birth.

Arax-Rae Van Buren, who writes about trends, travel and food on her Kiss and Type blog, is relaunching her site with a mobile audience in mind. “It is imperative that the site design is translatable to a phone,” says the 24-year-old New Yorker.

There also are early signs that “microblogging” on sites such as Twitter might actually create long-form bloggers out of people who get frustrated by the constraints of the 140-word limit. Already, sites such as Tumblr and FriendFeed have emerged to allow for expansion of thought and content, though it remains to be seen whether those services will catch on with younger people.

“Blogging is actually a quite involved form of self-expression. It takes a lot of time and effort,” says Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communications studies at Northwestern University.

She and other tech experts also suspect that fewer young people have an interest in sharing their every thought with the whole world.

“Five years ago blogging was a club,” says Sifry of Technorati. “There was this wonderful, delicious feeling of being able to talk privately or semi-privately with people who shared your interests. And there were few consequences of being able to share with your friends on a blog.

“I think we’re seeing a deeper awareness of the perception of privacy and how that can affect your life if it’s violated.”

this article first appeared on news24.com

mary corrigall has started her own blog

read her opinions and insights into the south african art condition here: http://corrigall.blogspot.com/

About MEANWHILE8

The theme behind this edition is “Living in a dream world”, and will be presented in the format of a blog.

The whole edition will run along a time line of 64 days, with a new submission being added every 3 days. Any additional work will also be added as it is a blog after all.

After the 64 days lines will be closed to signal the end of MEANWHILE8. MEANWHILE8 will therefore be frozen in time between 2009-08-01 and 2009-10-03.

Submissions are welcome……

send to henkesterhuizen@gmail.com

nikhil singh’s new artblog is here

an interesting blog worth watching

http://gogolscoat.blogspot.com/

CUBAN dissidents have found a brave new figurehead in Yoani Sanchez, a blogger whose observations about life in one of the world’s last communist bastions have angered the state and made her a global celebrity.

Sanchez, a 33-year-old philologist, has attracted a loyal fan base with her gentle mockery of the regime in Havana, which seems to be at a loss over how to rein in “cyber-space rebels”.

“They regard me as an enemy of the state,” said Sanchez last week in a telephone interview. “That is because the blogging phenomenon has opened up a crack in government control which is almost impossible to repair.”

Although it is read all over the world, Sanchez’s blog, Generation Y, is blocked in Cuba. However, like Soviet-era homemade samizdat copies of censored books, it circulates on computer memory sticks and CDs as well as on paper.

“I know that I am being read because people recognise me in the street,” said Sanchez, who sometimes has had to pose as a Swiss tourist so as to be able to post her blog on the internet from a Havana hotel. “People come up to me all the time to wish me luck.”

The government of Raul Castro, 77-year-old brother of the retired Fidel, accuses her of being part of a “counter-revolutionary” conspiracy. Elsewhere she is regarded as a hero: Time magazine recently named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.

Last year Spain awarded her one of its most prestigious journalism prizes.

She was not allowed out of the country to collect it - nor to attend the party held yesterday in Italy for the publication of Cuba Libre, a collection of her blogs - but her prominent international profile protects her in a country where dissidents routinely end up in jail.

Besides being denied an exit visa, she has found her freedom to travel inside Cuba restricted. “We’re treated like schoolchildren: we need permission to go anywhere,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been misbehaving so I’m not allowed.”

She believes that the election of President Barack Obama in the United States will put pressure on the government to allow more political openings. In the end, though, change will be imposed by the Cubans themselves, she predicted.

“People are waking up from a long cycle of silence,” she said, adding that technology such as digital video and the internet was making it much more difficult for the government to maintain its control.

“My philosophy,” said Sanchez, who is under constant surveillance by the state security apparatus, “is that if they watch me, I’ll watch them. I make videos of things all the time, which I put on the internet.”

Her blog last week featured a visit to one of Havana’s hotels by Sanchez and her husband. Sanchez filmed while he asked a receptionist if he could buy an hour’s internet access. The woman explained to him that new rules forbid Cubans from logging onto the internet from hotels.

Sanchez said this would not affect her blog, however. “We’re slippery people,” she laughed. “If they want to restrict us, we’ll always find other ways.”

Necessity has prompted extraordinary creativity among Cubans, she says, adding that homemade computers built from black-market parts have proliferated in recent years.

In a posting on Friday, she highlighted the case of an “alternative technician” friend who had bartered his watch for a microprocessor to make his computer.

He dreams of leaving the country and marrying a foreigner who would give hima new computer on his wedding day “to which he would not have to add any bolts”.

Other recent postings include film of Sanchez speaking out against censorship at an arts performance in Havana. She has also encouraged people to bang their pots and pans at night in protest. Film of these cacerolazos, as they are known, has appeared on the internet.

The government has branded her antics “a provocation against the Cuban revolution” but Sanchez puts a brave face on harassment by the state.

“They’re trying to make mea radioactive person,” she said. “But I don’t like the role of victim. I try to respond with a smile.”

As for the Castro “dynasty”, she believes that it has run out of steam. “The Cuban system is like one of those gravity-defying houses in Old Havana,” she said. “How does it stay up? Maybe one day they pull a small nail from the door and the house comes tumbling down. In today’s Cuba, that small nail could be anything.”

Perhaps it will be her.

this article originally published here

Diary of a Star is a critical take on blogging that appropriates selections from the Andy Warhol Diaries.

This project started on 2/28/2004 and ended on 12/31/2007. Originally, I expected to finish it in one year (thirty selected diary entries per year blogged per month), but in the end it took me three years; and this is the only thing that changed from the critical outline that follows below. When necessary, I planned to take no more than a month off from the diaries because of other commitments, but as it turned out at times I took several months off. This could not be helped. What should matter is the integrity of the accounts currently present in this blog. You will find many voices on both sides of the blog, simply because that’s life: people live, and die. If after browsing through the entries you feel like dropping me a line for critical feedback or just a question, please don’t hesitate to do so: eduardo_at_navasse_dot_net

Eduardo Navas
12/31/2007

more here

Hello Artists and Friends

The organising page for the special project on Internet Art for the 2009 Joburg Art Fair is complete and live.

http://jafnetart.digitalarts.wits.ac.za/

Enjoy.

Tegan Bristow

Interactive Digital Media Lecturer
Digital Arts Division
Wits School of Arts
084 206 0625
011 717 4604
tegan.bristow@wits.ac.za

About Traceblog

Traceblog is a daily ghost log of Eduardo Navas’s online searches, created with TrackMeNot (TMN). While Navas surfs the web, TrackMeNot is activated with the aim to cover his online surfing. TrackMeNot is a browser extension designed for search engine obfuscation. The developers define the Firefox plug-in as follows:

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

Keeping track of people’s surfing activity has become an essential element for data-mining, which is often used by private and public as well as state entities to better understand people’s trends. Traceblog is developed to reflect on a new stage that global culture is entering, which follows a recent period when millions of people around the world willingly shared information about themselves online, via social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace, as well as Youtube, not to mention thousands of blogs. This sharing is still at play, and is becoming ubiquitous. The argument behind Traceblog is that social networking and online transparency encompass the solidification of Web 2.0. The result is that everyone is encouraged to be more social under the subtext of constant exposure, at times indirectly and others directly informed by the concept of the celebrity. Everyone can be star in Youtube, if an uploaded video becomes viral, or everyone can feel extremely popular when amassing thousands of friends and “fans” in Myspace and Facebook.

Navas’s logs of pseudo surfing are published on Traceblog to reflect on the archiving of daily activities of any individual who surfs the web. And to ask online surfers to reflect on the real implications of the current state of online tracking. The project in many ways is the opposite of Diary of a Star, in which Navas commented on the Andy Warhol Diaries, while often sharing some personal information of his own. Traceblog, does the opposite: It shows Navas’s unwillingness to share information, while exposing how information can be taken from him. Traceblog also presents the surfing-logs in a way that is unappealing and hard to read by the online user, something blogs are usually designed to avoid. This is done to reference the actual form in which the logs would be stored in a database.

TrackMeNot has received some criticism on its effectiveness, as can be attested by selected links provided on the blog’s top right handside of the front page. Traceblog is not primarily concerned with how well TrackMeNot performs; instead it utilizes the Firefox extension for critical commentary on the preoccupation of losing one’s privacy.

the blog has indeed functioned as muse or a museum for many of its contributors simply because it is actively requiring you to put something there of worth, from your life’s diary words images music or thoughts poetic or herectic and without prejudice, whilst galleries in their literal sense functions from a place of pre-judging what is quality or what isnt.. making it impossible to see reach and be inspired by other things about art or artists
the blog interfaces with its audiences and creates a kind of episodic visceral saga.. an ongoing dialogue with its self and with others who follow.

the art that is shown on it can be made with all kinds of things and from all kinds of things.. digital posting with cellphones pee holes and whatever have you..
as for making a buck euro or a yen, it enables others to freely roam through the reaches of your innerself, where as in a gallery its price sheet and alot of blah blah from the blahicans with their expensive post post words of advise or malice.
their beguiling effects of having both is that one is active seeking and the other is meditatingly being there for others to log on in their time and see..

dunno, this blog has a kind of charisma that at times can be overwhelming. it functions more as a springboard for ideas and passions and all that is associated with common community goals..healthy community..that is
far more reaching than galleries can do or be..still it is also a place where people come to see enlist explore and know.. someone or something new.

I know I might not be able to offer an academic view on this, I am simple minded and my logic has a simple quality. For me, art on screen is mentally and aesthetically very real and very valuable. It is priceless when it comes to critique, feedback, praise and insult, exposure and creation. Sometimes I create pieces especially for the kagablog. When my muses party too hard and they all lie with hangovers, the blog serves as perfect inspiration to create something. Blogs are muses, critics, art communities…but it’s not exactly putting bread on the table. Is the only way to survive as a fine artist to make a name for yourself by hanging work in a gallery, where people actually enter to potentially go an buy something? If your work has previously been posted on the internet, are your works still ‘ exclusive’ to the ones who roam the galleries? Is it like a photograph or a print with one print made instead of 1000? Is posting on the net not like making a 1000 prints and exclusively exhibiting in a gallery like making one print? work has more commercial value in a gallery. I think. The tangible still has the biggest impact on the eye.

I don’t know, I just want to know.
??

marmite and cecilia, some questions: i’m genuinely curious as to why both of you express the assumption that the work posted on a blog such as this one somehow has questionable intrinsic value.
why do you perceive this online curated space to be qualitatively different to any other curated space?
how is the experience different?
what is the nature of a blog, as a chronological, dialogical document? a record of ephemera? a photo album? a chronicle of interaction? an elaborate ego-trip?
why is there a problem to you if it shares some characteristics with a diary - isn’t that the original point of a weblog?
what is “less” real about it than art displayed anywhere else?
what is less substantial, less transcendent, “boemelaar”ish about art published online?
how does commercial value come into this?
what is wrong with developing a supportive online community to offer critique?

these are not rhetorical questions. i would really be interested to hear peoples’ views.

Linking to flagged sites will cost you

The Australian communications regulator has issued a stark warning that websites who link out to ‘banned’ hyperlinks are liable to fine of up to Aus $11,000 a day.

The news comes after web forum Whirlpool was threatened with the fine for posting a hyperlink to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.

Wikileaks blacklisted

One of the newest additions to Australia’s ‘blacklisted hyperlinks’ list is Wikileaks; the website that publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive info on everything from corporations, religion and governments.

The blacklisting of certain pages of the site has come about after Wikileaks posted a list of websites at the tail end of 2008 that comprised the ’secret internet censorship’ list for Denmark. On this list were over 3,500 sites that were censored or banned in the country.

Disturbing picture

While Australia’s list of blacklisted sites currently stands at 1,370, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that that list could increase to around 10,000 sites – most of which are of illegal pornographic content, but could also includes sites that house incendiary political discussions.

“The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet,” said communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam of Australian opposition party Greens.

“If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia’s anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed.”

On its website, Wikileaks, which leaked the news that the government had banned it for leaking information, simply said: “The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.”

Currently, it is not illegal for internet users in Australia to click on the sites found on the web blacklist. The people targeted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are webmasters linking out to the sites that the government have flagged up as inappropriate.

This could all change, however, if a mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented – something that is being debated at the moment.

Via Sydney Morning Herald

first published on techradar.com

as of now the tearoom books blog is here

The kagablog is a medium specific use of the internet to collapse the distinction made, in the analogue domain, between the work of art and the place where the work of art is exhibited. The gallery and the artwork have fused.

the kagablog has come to represent a unique theatre of consciousness where one can be absolutely contemporary without any excuses. and not to be taken lightly is the fact that the blog is informed by the alchemy of your awareness and insights which you outline so perceptively above.

it is no mean feat to be contemporary in the truest sense of the word and many do not understand (as with common sense) how important this is as an artist.

for myself, and i know for many others, the kagablog represents a light that keeps one abreast of current ideas and trends in virtually every field - music, film, theatre, crime, art………………….. that is intelligent, challenging. needless to say this does not mean that one has to agree with everything on it - it is that kind of blog - and one doesn’t have to.

it is thus that you have created a very special platform that has an inclusive exclusivity in the blogosphere that i have not found anywhere else on the net.

helgé janssen

there is an instant attachement to the blog(and its ecosystem) for good or bad or for what it is.
this internal policing is not to be there because that appeals to good taste and moral opinions from which its contributors and viewers are moving away from.. i for one is one of these said contributors (594 entries and counting )

dunno.. i believe as mista k. about its internaleffects on the systems of my belief.. my sense of revealing showing and becoming.
the openness to say when im falling
and when i have fallen..i words image or audio or all ..

if that be art to read or view then so be it..
i do this everyday public or private. cus wickedness is soluable in my art..

ps.1.the kagablog.. has become an outlet for my outpourings.. my innervoicing rage passion love.the heavyness of being.. darkness and light.. ugliness and beauty..(for all i beleive)
trust and more trust in that my voice isn’t muffled or muzzled
isnt bullied or pushed into a corner of good or bad taste but rather a strong as hell voice in a dark world.. of conservative and wicked
silence
and finger pointing.

one’s own aesthetic, one’s own sense of what is morally right, what is beautiful, is what is most difficult to transgress. of course i read this in john cage’s silence when i was a teenager, but i never really understood what he meant until now. when you hit your forties there is a strange kind of sediment that builds up. one’s sense that one now really does know something. that one’s life experience justifies one’s narrow-sightedness. that one’s own foolish limitations are now acceptable precisely because one has become old enough to see that one’s earlier, youthful opinions were mostly, indeed, foolish. it is so difficult to stretch out and stand on one’s toes and see that one’s own taste and opinions and morals are in fact, still merely transient moments, still mainly foolish and limited. and thus we are perennially stuck in this cage of our own sense of the rightness, the correctness of our perception, of our taste.

the kagablog is a rigorous exercise for me in breaking down the prison of my own taste, in rupturing the confines of what i personally hold to be “good art” or “bad art” or “beautiful” or “correct”. through the kagablog i have been able to interrogate my own aesthetic principles, my own thinking about what i like and why i like it. working on the blog has had a huge impact on my own filming practice, my way of editing, my writing. blogging has broken down my very stiff, very strict ideals in writing and framing, loosened me up as it were. and this process is never finished. it is in this sense that i call the kagablog an artwork, in this sense that i describe blogging as an artistic practice

aryan kaganof

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey.
Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives

There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay

* comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
o Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
o Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
o Total internet audience 188.9 million
* eMarketer (May 2008)
o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
* Universal McCann (March 2008)
o 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
o 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
o 77% of active Internet users read blogs

keep reading here

check out holli’s blog here