The Boston Herald, In The Study, With the Candlestick

This study, conducted by Forrester Research and reported by the Boston Herald, seems to indicate that very few Americans read blogs. In fact, out of the over 68,000 households responding to a questionnaire, fewer than 2% claimed to read blogs more than once a week.

Even more surprising, if you only include households with up-to-date computing technology, homes with Wireless Internet, for example, or where several people own laptops, the number only jumps to 4% who read blogs.

This could explain why I get around 100 hits a day, despite my obvious genius and readability. Or it could be a silly statistic that means nothing. My bet's on the latter.

Because, you see, most people who read "blogs" don't make a conscious decision to sit down at the computer and browse a few blogs. I mean, I browse other blogs, particularly those listed right there on the side of your screen, but I run a blog so that should be obvious.

Lots of people, though, they just do a Yahoo or a Google search about whatever topic interests them, and then they read the one or two or three most compelling results. And sometimes those results are major corporate websites and sometimes they are established "Old Media" sites like MSNBC or something, but sometimes they are blogs.

And these people may not considering that time "reading blogs." They might not even know those sites they are visiting are blogs. So when surveyed, they might respond "oh, no, I never sit around and read a bunch of blogs." Yet they nonetheless do read blogs on occasion.

For example, just today, people have come to my blog after completing the following Google searches:

"Garden State really sucked" (NOTE: I'm the only result of this search!)

Colin McCoy Decemberists (NOTE: The name is actually Colin Meloy)

How did Kate Bosworth feel about kissing Kevin Spacey (NOTE: This person obviously doesn't have a good handle on using search engines...Still, I'm proud that this query will send a person to my blog)

Those people probably didn't intend to sit down and read "blogs." In fact, I bet if you asked all three of them, 2/3 probably couldn't define the word "blog" for you. But they read blogs! I know for a fact, because they just came to mine!

Once again, we see that the old established methods of measuring Internet usage utterly fail to grasp the day-to-day reality of the Internet. Nice job, useless Forrester Research survey!

Actually, I don't understand the point of measuring overall blog readership anyway. If you're curious about how many people read a particular site, you can just ask or check yourself - nearly every blog has traffic counters, and most of them are accessible just by clicking on the little "counter" symbol - you don't even need to be the blogger responsible for the site.

Beyond that, what's the point of making grand statements about the number of overall Americans who "read blogs"? It could only be used to try and strip blogs of legitimacy, which clearly would be in the interest of the publishing industry and the party in power.