Steve Rubel (a PR guy who works for Edelman, another PR guy doing, presumably, PR) shares the following regarding the Pew Internet Project study released today:

As Reuters correctly notes, the research demonstrates that blogging is moving more mainstream, thanks to the surging interest in social network/blog hybrid sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal (MySpace is an Edelman client).

My question is, when is disclosure appropriate, and when is it mere self aggrandizement and name placement? I think the latter obtains in this case, since (first) a careful reading of the Reuters piece does not show them saying anything like what Steve says they said, and (second) neither Reuters nor the Pew study characterize MySpace and LiveJournal as social network/blog hybrid sites. These are Steve Rubel’s words. So it looks like Steve took this opportunity to flog his client’s brand, which would make disclosure appropriate, but the inherent dishonesty in implying that there is movement represented by these static data and the movement is toward Steve’s client should be an embarrassment to everyone. If I managed MySpace I’d pull the account. Who needs that kind of gratuitous misrepresentation?

Update: It has been pointed out to me that this would be a lot clearer if I just said Steve Rubel is full of hooie. Actually, “hooie” was not the word.

Update-update: It has been further pointed out to me that disclosure is not really what I am on about. Rather, it is the relentless floggery.

There are now about twelve million American bloggers, ninety percent of whom read other people’s blogs and forty-nine percent of whom have been blogging for more than a year. There are also fifty-seven million blog readers (including over ten million bloggers) according to a Pew report released today.

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project writes:

I thought you’d be interested to know that we are releasing today a report built around a national survey of bloggers. It covers things like: who bloggers are, why they got into blogging, the subjects they blog about, the features they use on their blogs, their sense of their audience, the time they spend on their blogs, and their sense of the impact of their blogs.

The survey methodology¹ is described and the results, while generally unsurprising, seem valid because they are not biased by the louder voices in the blogosphere.

PDF versions of the report and the survey are available from the Pew site.

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¹ The Blogger Callback Survey, sponsored by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (PIALP), conducted telephone interviews with 233 self-identified bloggers from previous surveys conducted for PIALP. The interviews were conducted in English by Princeton Data Source, LLC, from July 5, 2024 to February 17, 2024. Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ±6.7%.