MediaPost: Suppose You Hosted A Blog And Nobody Came

Perseus Development came out with unflattering research today on blogs, showing a litany of unattractive characteristics that makes the average blog seem to be a 126-day-stale, misspelled tract written by a girl on the topic of teenage angst. It has, on average, two readers, and shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given that this demographic is the most prevalent in diary writing as well. (Although, perhaps, the diaries have more readers.) This shows rather starkly how lumping blogs together as a segment has limited research usefulness. Undifferentiated research on web sites generally would surely show similar characteristics.

More useful research would concentrate on the demand side of blogging rather than the supply side. Looking at what gets read would be more useful in determining where blogs are going than what was once published and abandoned.