Numbers of bloggers: beware stats tracking when results are within the margin of error
I thought I would look up the stats on weblog production in the US to see whether they appear to justify the conventional wisdom that blogging continues to increase in popularity. Well it turns out that the picture according to Pew Internet’s longitudinal data don’t appear to back that point of view - in fact, the graph of American Internet users having ‘ever created a weblog or ‘blog’” appears to peak in Jan 05 at 10% and decline to between 7 and 9% since. In principle of course the number who have ever created a blog can only rise. But the survey has a precision of +-3% so almost all of the variation is within that range. The best we can therefore say is that in January 2005 between 7 and 13% of Americans had created a weblog and by April 2006 that number had likely not changed much (the range being between 5 and 11% at that point - though the question asked had slightly changed).