The Machinery of Night

Over 4 Million Served

Natalie Solent points to this blog survey, which reports:

The most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months...

...

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...

You sometimes find Big Media types dismissing blogs on this basis---"Blogs? Yeah, I've heard of them. My 15-year-old niece has one. So do all her friends. I hardly think they are a source for informed commentary on current events, heh heh heh."

One might as well note that: "The typical newspaper supports a small community. Often it is distributed free, supported solely by advertising. Its chief features are birth, death, and wedding announcements; notices of upcoming community events, and, occasionally, news articles of purely local interest." This is true of many places I've lived, from the Rocket (of Jefferson County, Missouri) to the Eastern Suburbs (of Sydney) Courier.

Obviously they are not a source for informed commentary on national or international events. Heh heh heh.

(I wrote this, then shelved it, thinking I was behind the curve. Big Media may not like or respect blogs, but at least they know that not all blogs are teen angst billboards, right? Well, maybe not.)