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WHAT BLOGS COST AMERICAN BUSINESS

Have you noticed the amount of big-media-trashing-blogs activity lately? Take for example an article by Bradley Johnson in AdAge on October 24, 2005 [QwikFIND ID: AAR05Y] which begins with this startling assertion:
"...U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs."

So that's interesting! AdAge thinks they have proven that employees are "wasting" huge amounts of work time reading "non-work" blogs. What's the source of their evidence that non-work blog reading is a big time-wasting problem?

1. First, AdAge seems to have used ComScore's classification system to put all blogs into four categories; (1) business, (2) tech & media, (3) political/news and (4) everything else.

2. Second, admitting their lack of real data about whether the information in blogs in the ComScore categories are work-related or not, AdAge made a set of value judgments:

100% of business blogs are work related
50% of tech & media blogs are work-related
25% of political/news blogs are work-related
0% of all other blogs are work-related

3. Thirdly, AdAge did some kind of "analysis" based on [unidentified] "blog-related surveys and data" which suggests that about 25% [35 million] of all workers spend an average of 40 minutes per day reading blogs. That equals 2.91 million man-years spent on blog reading annually of which AdAge estimates with the scoring above that 0.551 million of those blog-reading man-years [~20%] were wasted.

4. Lastly, they threw in some semi-confirming comments from sources like a Nielsen/NetRatings research manager who says "blog time probably comes in addition to regular surfing -- meaning more time on the Web but less time on the job."

This whole line of reasoning suggests a bit of hypocrisy. In the first place their headline is wrong. By their own logic, 80% of blog reading is apparently a good thing [i.e. not a waste of work time]. AdAge also appears to be implying that, if we must read, employees like us would be more productive reading mainsteam media like AdAge rather than "wasting our time" on blogs. Could it be that AdAge has a little blog-envy?

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