What Brings Users to Blogs?

Billosaur writes "The Center for Citizen Media Blog has an interesting overview of the Collaborative News Survey 'Hype versus Reality', detailing the results of a study done by Hsing Wei from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on why users are attracted to collaborative news, commenting and blogging sites. Among the conclusions of the study are that people who use these sites are 'mostly young and male, especially those who visit technology-related sites, looking for 'a fix of unique, informative fun,' and 'filling in the blanks' left by traditional news sources. Or is it just because it beats working?"

Daily Kos statistics

[coyote-san]

I don't recall the exact details, but Daily Kos has been fighting that "young and male [and uninformed]" meme for some time. In the last survey the age profile was fairly flat, with a modest peak in the 40s (iirc), but with strong response well into the 60s and 70s. Young males, ironically, were underrepresented given their relative abundance and their prime candidacy for bearing the weight of current GOP misadventures on their draft-age shoulders.

The other political blogs I'm on seem to have the same skew, if they report it at all. Technical blogs skew younger, but IIRC even slashdot has a sizeable over-30 and over-40 crowd.