Pew Internet has a new report on a national survey of bloggers. It’s the usual great stuff from Pew.

Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs – a significant increase since the fall of 2005.

37% say their favorite topic is their life and experiences. 55% blog under a pseudonym. 52% blog to express themselves creatively. Only 27% say they blog to influence how other people think. 87% allow comments. Only 18% say they have an RSS feed.

Bloggers are racially and genderly diverse.

34% consider their blog to be a form of journalism. 56% spend time fact checking. (Let’s assume that the 56% includes the 34%, or else much merriment shall ensue.)

Lots and lots in the survey…

[Tags: blogging blogosphere pew]

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Paul Gillin is writing a book called The New Influencers about blogging — the book seems to be about marketing in the blogofied world — and has posted a pretty painless 25-question survey. (Here’s a column by Paul on the virtue of welcoming your critics.) [Tags: paul_gillin blogs marketing]

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Robert Scoble has announced he’s leaving Microsoft. On the heels of the promotion of blogger Jonathan Schwartz to the position of CEO of Sun, the Blogosphere has lost its only two examples of corporations productively allowing non-CEO employees to blog.

Pundit Doc Searls commented, “Now we’re down to three CEO bloggers and like a gazillion teenagers writing how much they hate their English teacher.”

In a note pinned to its site, the Blogosphere said it was going to “shut up about itself” for a while until it had time to come up with some new examples. [Tags: scoble humor blogging blogosphere]

PS: The Boston Globe illustrated its AP story about Scoble with a photo of Shel Israel, Robert’s co-author. You can see just a bit of Robert’s ear and eye where he’s been carefully cropped out of the photo.

PPS: Best of luck, Robert.

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Denise weighs in on the NYT story on blogs being held against job applicants. (She points to the Slashdotting of the story.)

Jeez, do we need a norm of understanding, which isn’t possible without a norm of forgiveness. And we’ll have ’em. It’ll just take time. [Tags: denise_howell blogs media]

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Paul Gillin is preparing a survey of bloggers for a book he’s working on about social media. He’s looking for comments on a draft of the survey… [Tags: paul_gillin]

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BusinessWeek Online has a two-parter on business blogging that’s smart enough to cite Jeneane Sessum, among others. (Part 1 Part 2) [Tags: blogging jeneane_sessum]

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Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted part two of his April “State of the Blogosphere” report. [ [Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s board of advisors and Dave is a friend.]

Part One said (as per Dave’s summary):

Technorati now tracks over 37.3 million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

Part Two dives into the internationality of blogging. Dave writes:

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn’t even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

It also finds that 47% of posts have an author-generated tag or category associated with it — the blogosphere is a nation of metadata monkeys! (And Lor’ bless ’em, every one.)19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

[Tags: blogosphere tagging david_sifry technorati]

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John Kruper of Cardean moderates. (I’m live blogging while I’m on the panel.)

Will Richardson, who teaches in the K-12 system, thinks blogs provide a powerful opportunity for students to make connections to other people, ideas…”I cringe when I hear people say blogs are online journals. They’re learning places.” His 6 and 8 yr old children have blogs and engage with other kids their age.

Liz Lawley says she uses blogs to get info out to her classes. She also sets up a class blog where students can talk about the assignments, comment on each other’s activities, post results of research and other projects. They look at one another’s posts and comment on them. “It encourages a kind of thoughtful ongoing dialogue that you simply can’t do when you only have four hours a week in class.” She also invites authors to engage in a dialogue with the class. This teaches them that there are long term consequences to what they say.

George Siemens explains his term “connectivism.” The half-life of knowledge is diminishing, he says: it’s becoming obsolete faster than ever. Courses can’t keep up. Connectivism says that the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty. Now the system has to be able to adapt quickly. The network persists longer than traditional relationships with teachers.

Adrian Chan says that different social software apps are organized to support different themes: Dating, career networking, etc. He looks at the social practices in the use of the software, including in the educational environment. What matters is how technology is embedded in the process. In the case of edu, many of the students already have practices set up: They already IM, chat, etc. How do these technologies change conversation? Is there a type we can identify as learning? If you integrate technologies, would you lose some of those learning opportunites.

I talk about lessons from Wikipedia ,but I can’t blog and talk at the same time.

Doug Thomas, who has an article with John Seely Brown in Wired this month, says he’s concerned that we’re training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they’re not on the test. “Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum.” MMORPGs are one way to do that. They’re not just games; they’re synthetic worlds. (He says the average age of WOW players is 28.) Because you can imagine liberating things in the game, you imagine liberating things outside the game. E.g., a mgr at Yahoo approaches every task as if setting out on a quest. Doug shows the famous video of the Star War Galaxies emergent party – 100 players learning choreography, etc. He taught a course with a heavy mmorpg component and learned he had to get himself out of the way. They learned from experience. E.g., it’s hard to lecture about ethics, but if you can put them into a situation where they have to make a choice…

Q: It’s all so basically new. Are people basically good or bad in this environment?
George: Content is useless. The instructor provides guidance, not content, and isn’t the center of the experience.

Liz: Content isn’t irrelevant. If we’re going to turn out people with the credentials employers want, we have to be sure they have the content required. But it’s not a matter of pouring content into people.

Q: Companies access MySpace of potential employees. Should your 6 and 8 year olds be worried?
Liz: This is a huge issue. We can’t tell our kids not to blog. We have to teach them to think about what will happen in 5 or 10 yrs.
George: We have to teach them how to handle the freedom.
Will: This is a literacy we’re not teaching our kids. And enabling kids in MySpace to link to Old Spice is what’s really bad.
Me: And we need a culture of forgiveness. Maybe our kids will figure it out.

Q: You’re creating a generation of Borgs that play games.
(We didn’t really answer this.)

Q: We get it. How do we get there? E.g., not everyone can afford a laptop.
Liz: You have to start with the teachers. The technology has to be part of the day to day environment.

George: The problem is a lack of will, not of resources.

Q: With 50,000 blog posts an hour, the problem is one of discovery. How do we know whom to trust?
Doug: Scale counts. E.g., at Second Life a group looks for copyright infringement. When it gets really big, they can’t police it. Community governance arises.

Me: These are issues we can only solve by working through them. The change is too deep.

Q: In Shanghai, you can go into a Net cafe where people are playing mmorpgs that put them into medieval China. And I blog and get hate mail. What about the dystopian aspects?
Doug: It’s both/and. People probably said about the first cave paintings: “Oh no, the kids will spend all day on line and won’t hunt.” People miss the subtleties of what’s going on.

Liz: In part it’s because you’re writing for Huffington Post.

Q: We still have the old leadership style.
Liz: People react by banning laptops. It puts a burden on the professors when they have to actually hold students’ attention. We’re performers at heart but that’s not what professors will need to be.

Will: The control issue is at every level. There’s a district in Texas that’s banned the word “MySpace” — not the site but the word.George: Same issues for corporate education.

Doug: Scaffolding knowledge is different than experiential knowledge. Some ways are not taught well in an exploratory fashion. [Tags: milken education blogs]

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Akismet’s spam fighting power has been getting raves from WordPress users, including the tuneful BradSucks and searchalicious John Battelle. Now it’s available to us Movable Type users. As soon as I get off this train, I’m going to give it a try… [Tags: akismet spam blogs]

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AdAge has run a guest column of mine trying to explain to marketers why they shouldn’t look at the blogosphere as a good place to “message” people. [Tags: marketing blogs]

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