Now, doesn’t that make this seem all the more worthwhile?

This is done even though “most” people think it means “the overwhelming majority.” Notice in contrast that a media journalist would not say “most people don’t watch TV show X” if 48 million people tuned in regularly. It’s a vague term, and it’s used inconsistently. The unnoticed fact of the matter here is that when speaking of the American public’s behavior, it may be true that “most don’t….” while at the same time it is also just as true that “many do… .”

If journalists took a little bit more time to try to be objective on such matters, they’d seek to contextualize such numbers by comparing them to other known data about leisure-time activities, and especially internet activity. But many journalists are hostile to blogging, so there you go.

In the last few decades, our society has changed so that the mainstream is both narrower and less powerful in its flow. There’s way more choice than there was when we had 3 TV networks and no internet.

22 percent is what it is. Most Americans don’t blog or read blogs frequently, but many do. There really aren’t that many things that “most” Americans do which are worth remarking on… various individual and collective bodily functions(eating, excreting, screwing, drinking, smoking, sleeping) going to work or school, watching TV or movies, gabbing in person or via technology (blogging is part of the gabbing category, BTW), spending money, praying, family get-togethers, looking away from the void… .

I’m sure I missed a bunch, but the point is that the vast majority of the rest of specific activities fall under the 50% participation rate.

Although, this only represents one program, and not an entire medium.

I wouldn’t place too much stock in these surveys. Polls that ask people to self-report media consumption tend to vastly overestimate actual activity. People naturally want to appear smarter and/or relevant answers, so if they ever visited a blog once, they are now a hardened blog reader.

I don’t think the actual traffic numbers to the main center-right and center-left blogs can possibly justify a monthly readership of more than 5 million. I’m sure many others read news blogs like AOL’s (which gets an insane number of comments, like 10x Kos) or the AC360 “blog” but are these really participants in the blogosphere in the active sense?

Instead of trying to prove how large the blogosphere is, why not focus on how influential? There we have a case.