The Media Spot

I've always been resistant to the "blog" and "blogosphere" buzzwords. (I'd always say a blog is just a tool that makes it easier to post content to the Net, and the blogosphere is just a subset of content posted to the Net.) But I suppose I'm somewhat of a convert as I've started to rely on these tools myself for work and play (as evidenced by this post itself), and The Media Spot has used blogs to great effect in the classroom.

So it's interesting to see some recent statistics about how the blogging phenomenon is catching on. A post at tech.blorge.com last week gives a roundup of the results from a recent "Synovate/Marketing Daily" survey of 1000 adults in the US.

The numbers indicate that blogs are becoming more "mainstream", are more often owned by women than men, are better recognized and utilized by younger generations, and are looked to for "opinions" more than "news" or "entertainment".

Stats like these can help inform our integration of blogs into school curricula, and place into a larger context the perceptions and attitudes towards these technologies of both the educators we work with, and their intended blog readership.