2-7% of Americans blog, 11% visit blogs

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that somewhere between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs. Of those, only about 10% update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often.

The study was largely based on random telephone surveys of 1,555 Internet users taken from March 12 to May 20, 2003. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3%. That survey found only 2% of users keeping blogs, although a preliminary analysis of follow-up surveys from early 2004 showed the figure increasing to about 7%.

About 11% of Internet users report visiting blogs written by others. Most often, they were for blogs written by friends. But blog readers are more likely to go to journals kept by strangers rather than by family members. Among other findings: 21% of Internet users have posted photos on Web sites, and 20% say they have allowed others to download video or music files from their computers. 7% have webcams that let others see live pictures of them over the Net.