Gallup’s half-empty blog glass

I’m a long-term believer in blogs; three years ago, I wrote, “Weblogs expand the media universe. They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn’t have existed before the Web.” That column was written three years after my first column on blogs, back when you had to call them “Web logs” and explain what they were to everyone each time you used the term. (Just as those of use who were writing about the Web for mainstream publications in 1994 had always to append some boilerplate phrase every time we mentioned “The World Wide Web,” like “…the popular, graphical network of Internet sites…”)

So blogs are having their moment in the media sun today, and that’s just fine. But Gallup now has a poll out that tells us that “relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon of blogging.” Gallup wants us to stop and realize that blogs aren’t so big after all. Its headline is dripping with contempt: “Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues: Very few Americans read them with any frequency.” But really, this is a glass half-empty or half-full kind of thing. And the glass is filling up awfully quickly.

You can tell Gallup is a little uneasy from the phrase “relatively few”; since it appears that we are talking about nearly half of Americans, I’d like to know, relative to exactly what? Gallup’s numbers say that one out of four Americans are “very or somewhat” familiar with blogs. I think that’s extraordinary, but Gallup seems to thinks it’s some kind of weak showing.

Gallup tells us the following: “Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original ‘Web logs’). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.”

I think what we’re supposed to be hearing here is, “Forget all the hype about blogs, this isn’t a big deal, the majority of Americans don’t even know what the hell they are.” But you could take these exact same numbers and present them in the inverse light if you wanted: “Though the Internet has been around for almost forty years, only 3/4 of Americans use it. Yet blogs — which have only been around 6-7 years, and have been popularized under that name for half that time — are already a phenomenon recognized by nearly half of the U.S. population. And fully one-third of Americans who use the Internet, or one quarter of the entire U.S. population, say they are very or somewhat familiar with blogs — an impressively high number, given their novelty.”

The interpretation of polls, in other words, is really a matter of the assumptions you bring to them. The Gallup write-up starts with a chip on its shoulder; it sets out to prove that blogs aren’t as big as the hype, though if the hype were as big as all that, you’d think there’d be a much bigger group of “heard of ’em but don’t read ’em” respondents (i.e., there’d be more people who’d at least have heard of the phenomenon thanks to the hype, without having spent time actually reading blogs).

At some point over the last couple of years blogs crossed the threshold from niche to mainstream. Gallup’s numbers confirm that. The bias in the company’s article is like what you could find in a music industry trade publication of the 1980s that might have said, “Though CDs are growing in popularity, our survey shows that less than half of Americans actually own a CD player, and most still purchase their music in the form of records.” The trend line had already crossed the point of no return, but the statistical snapshot made it look like the LP was king.

Of course blogs won’t replace the old media with anything like the thoroughness that CDs drove out vinyl (new media channels of communication don’t kill their predecessors the way new physical delivery formats often do). But the news from Gallup is clear: Blogs have now become part of the mass culture. Too bad the company chose the wrong headline.