Jeff Jarvis was at Ad:Tech (I should have been there instead of Bloggercon, I guess) and reports on a new study about blogging:

Jeff Jarvis

[from BuzzMachine]

: Rick Bruner, now of DoubleClick, honchoed a study of blog audience sponsored by Gawker Media and SixApart and done by ComScore. He presented the first preliminary results for the first time today. This really was an outcome of Bloggercon II. Some big news here.
ComScore looked at 15,000 blogs and their audiences.

35 million Americans, more than 20 percent of U.S. Intrernet users, read from 250 blog domains (that is, some large domains such as blogger.com and large individual sites; that mix does skew things a bit among big and small blogs; the numbers will be massaged, Rick said). That's up 10 perecent over the proir [sic] quarter.

Blog readers are more likely to be broadband users (index of 113 vs total population), college educated (index 114), higher income (index 116 at 100k household income), Asian (index 136... go figger).

Anyway, I am looking forward to the fully massaged numbers, but I don't expect any real surprises in those dimensions. I am interested in other factors. Does blog participation have a real impact on life? Does it change the way you make sense of the world? Or even -- at a more mundane level -- the way you approach buying goods and services, picking a restaurant, or selecting music or movies?

I anticipate a continuing shift away from the influence of broadcast media toward social media, and I hope that studies like this can be structured to see how fast the change is coming, and where.