i think i'm a few days behind the curve, but i just read a white paper about the world of blogs and how they're mostly used by teenage girls for occasional communication and then quickly abandoned. it's called the blogging iceberg and is worth skimming, especially for the great term "nanoaudience." it's a word i haven't seen before but that i imagine will pick up quite a bit of steam in the next few months. the concept of the small audience of friends and family members for websites has been around for quite some time, but i've never heard it described so well. and i guess a nanoaudience is smaller than a microaudience? (in looking for an extra link or two about "nanoaudiences" i just realized that mark siegel is much funnier about playing with the concept of audience size (micro, mini, etc.) than i am). (link via reason's hit & run)
one other quick thing about the survey mentioned above - one caveat appears to have been left out, or should've been mentioned. i think i lot of people who have blogs or livejournals or diaryland pages have more than one. or started one then abandoned it for another one. it's possible that someone could have a blogspot blog for traditional blog type entries, a livejournal for private sharing of thoughts with friends and an old diaryland page that was abandoned for llivejournal. and over the course of a few years, it's possible that a person let these blogs build up, without deleting them. i guess trying to get those real numbers is where things get really tough.