Reprieve for the blog bleary: If you are like me, you are probably sick to death of blogging.
Some of you may not even know precisely what it is, and you are already sick of the media saturation on the subject. [...]
With blogs, I was just wasting time.
Lest you dismiss me as some newspaperman with a bias against the Internet, know that I have written online for over a decade. [...]
I am not saying that there is nothing of value in blogs. There are many excellent ones, even though I often wish the writers would spend more than a paragraph on a subject.
I am just saying that blogging really is no different than any other medium, and I am sick of hearing people try to claim otherwise. [...]
There is much talk of the potential for bloggers to report news that the mainstream media misses.
Judging from the content on most blogs as well as the obligatory blogroll of links on each, most bloggers seem too busy writing about each other to report actual news.
[act.: Bloggy, we hardly knew ye: A new report from Gallup pollsters, "Blog Readership Bogged Down," cautions that "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year."
Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs. Those numbers, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, put blog-reading dead last among Gallup's measures of 13 common Internet activities. E-mailing ranks first (with 87 percent of users doing so frequently or occasionally), followed by checking news and weather (72), shopping (52) and making travel plans (also 52). Gallup concludes that while the amount of time people spend online has risen, "it appears the online public is simply doing more of the same activities, rather than branching out and trying different Internet offerings."]
