More interesting research on blogs, this time showing how often the media talks about blogs, with the frequency of articles on blogging skyrocketing in the spring of 2004 (follow the link and check out the nifty graph).

71% of blog readers are over 30.
79% of blog readers are men.
21% of blog readers are bloggers themselves.
82% of blog readers say TV is worthless or only somewhat useful as a source of news and opinion (55% say the same about newspapers, 54% about magazines).
50% of blog readers have spent more than $50 on books online in the past six months.

All of this comes from a Blog Ads survey of questionable scientific merit (an online survey advertised through select blogs; even the numbers seem questionable: their site said 61% of blog readers were over the age of 30, but when I added the numbers up they totaled 71%.)

A Brittish school has started an after-school blogging club with children as young as seven. The results are amazing: kids doing unassigned homework and performing as well as 14- or 15-year-olds are expected to when it comes to computer skills.

In what will surely be a much-maligned and often-linked article, Time reports on the blogging craze. The piece gives a good overview and history of blogging, though it does give the impression that amateur blogs are replacing professional news outlets, which is hardly the case. Most blogs have more of a mutualistic, if not parasitic, relationship with pro news outlets, and rarely do blog readers get their news solely from blogs.

You may notice a new look around the blog. I’m trying something a bit different, hopefully making things fit in a bit more with my main blog.

You’ll also notice that those lovely snapshot images at the top are changing now. My long-term vision has finally been realized, thanks to the techno wiz that is Josh Lewis!. Hopefully I can add some more of those images as the days go on. If you like the images you can either keep hitting reload to see more, or just go look at the fancy new art page.

As a minor consequence to all my fiddling, all my pages are now php files instead of html. To most of you that means nothing, but basically you might experience some funkiness when I link to past entries in this blog. I’ve fixed all the entries in 2004, but stuff farther back isn’t fixed. You should still get to the file, but it won’t have all the new glory of those little black and white snapshots loading at random. And I’ll eventually delete those old html files.

I’ve been thinking about changing how I blog. These Thoughts have been a random mess of all sorts of junk, from creative writing exercises to random diatribes to links, quotes, and interesting news tidbits. While that’s been all well and good, it’s certainly gotten away from my original intent. It’s not like that’s a big deal, this is a morphing, changing thing, and I like it that way. I’m just contemplating another morph.

In the last few days I’ve toyed with posting a few different things on my main Monkey Outta Nowhere blog that I normally wouldn’t blog about or would post here. It’s more the links, quotes, news, and kind of throw away, pop culture type stuff. I think it’ll be a nice way to keep my Monkey Outta Nowhere blog updated with stuff that showcases some of my writing. After all, Monkey Outta Nowhere income doesn’t exactly come from my diatribes, creative writing, and other such stuff.

And it’s a shorter url.

So looking back on what I’ve blogged about lately, some stuff would show up on Monkey Outta Nowhere (like this, this, this, and this). Most of the other personal junk would stay here. Which has the potential for making this blog really boring. Then again, maybe that’s what some of you like. Those that do can find that here. Those that like the other stuff can head over to Monkey Outta Nowhere. Update your bookmarks accordingly. I’m feeding each blog to the other in the sidebar, so you can certainly stay up to snuff that way.

It’s all more exciting experiments for my world of blogging. We’ll see how long it lasts. Though I have to say, I love doing stuff like this. I hope to do more of this on the Monkey blog.