http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/
This one is quickly making the rounds. It would be easy to criticize this survey (only focuses on hosted services, and even then excludes, for instance, the radio.weblogs.com sites) but I actually think their findings would be generally supported if you widened the set of sites and software you looked at. It is entirely unsurprising to me that there is a huge abadonment rate with new blogs – how many times have you downloaded a piece of software simply to check it out, especially ones that are free or have free trials? Same goes for the finding that ‘active’ blogs are on avergae not that active. Creating a blog site’s not hard – regularly maintaining an interesting blog, now that’s a bit more of a challenge!
Nothing in this study ‘invalidates’ blogs for me. I’m glad that some of the hype is being simmered down. I think one thing that’s being missed in these surveys is that not all blogs are alike, and though we call them all by the same name, treating them all as the same phenomenom is not that helpful for our understanding. There is a marked difference between a site that a teen sets up to communicate with a smal set of friends vs. a site set up to reach a general audience vs. blogs used in an educational context or knowledge management blogs. – SWL