The vast open blogsphere
Perseus Development has done a large survey of blogs, and to nobody's surprise found that two thirds of them are already abandoned. 2.72 million blogs have not been updated for the last two months, of which 1.09M blogs were abandoned after only one day.
Girls are more likely to start blogs than guys (56%) and also more likely to keep blogging once they start it
Blogs are famed for their linkages, and while 80.8% of active blogs linked to at least one external site from a post on their home page, these links were rarely to traditional news sources. Only 9.9% of active blogs had a current post that linked to one of 2,875 traditional news sites. So blogging in practice is not just about linking to news articles.
However, this supports the impression that there are essentially two types of blogs. One is people who write about themselves and their life, and those are likely (but not certain) to have a very limited audience, and are presumably satisfied with blogging as a sort of public diary for friends. And, to nobody's surprise, the typical author of a small personal log is a female teenager.
Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.
Maybe the typical blog, in sheer numbers, but probably not the typical blog that you are likely to read. What is great about blogs is that anyone who is on the Net can become an instant writer. But whether you actually keep going, and get an audience, depends on having something to say. In this, blogging is not radically different from any other form of authorship.
5:27:56 AM 
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