46% of online Asia has a blog, 8% of US do, what % of Canada?
Ian Delany in http://twopointouch.com/2006/12/07/blogging-asia/ offers this insight into the huge variation between adoption of blogging in Asia vs. the Western World:
Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report shows that blogging is already a significant force in Asia. [I] haven’t been able to find the original report online, but I’ve been able to piece together the following from here, here and here.
- 46% of the online population in Asia have a blog (compared to just 8% of US web users).
(Incidentally: Wikipedia’s Canadian Blogosphere page says:
Canada has one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world. Of Canadian internet users, a recent poll suggested that over 42% had read a blog in the previous three months.
But, after much searching, I have yet to find a statistic on the % of Canadians that blog. Please share if you have this to hand.)
Ian continues:
- Almost half of all Asian bloggers (56%) are under 25, while 35% are 25 to 34 years old, and 9% are 35 years old and over. 74% of bloggers in Malaysia are under 25. Compare this to the US, where there is a much wider age spread: 46% of bloggers in the US are aged 30 or over.
- […]
- Asian bloggers are unlikely to read or write about politics and business issues, with the report describing these uses as ‘nascent’.
- […]
- In Korea, blogging is huge, and their subject matter covers all walks of life.
- […]
The culture of blogging, personal and feminised for most of Asia, seems very different to the Western model where it appears to be very much a personal and professional public platform. Indian blogging, on the other hand, seems to be very much driven by entrepreneurial endeavor.
So there you have it. While us westerners are unlikely to blog openly about personal matters, most people in Asia are more than happy to.
Shel Israel wrote about the saturation across different fields of life:
What I do see and have written previously about is the normalization of blogging. Like movies, telephones, recorded music, television, PCs, trains and so on the real impact comes after the mania, when everyday people start adopt technology to do everyday things. Blogging will pass its peak only after it becomes an everyday tool worldwide and we have some road to travel before that happens.
And how far can ‘personal’ be interpreted? Does popular Canadian culture accept blogging about business (or blogging about blogging), but not about deeply personal issues? For instance, if leading bloggers blog about e.g. their medical concerns, will other parts (e.g. insurance companies) of our society take advantage of them?
My wife is a naturopath in training, so I hear a lot about medical symptoms and consequences that GPs can’t cure with drugs, that I’d have not realized were anything to think about, but can lead to serious consequences. Some people have multiple blogs, to keep their medical identities separate from their professional and friend based ones. One problem with this is we don’t trust, or get exposed to, the anonymous identities like we know and trust those of our friends and acquaintances.
So, I’m left pondering many questions, amongst which are: Do Canadians blog about personal issues, or are they consistent with the patterns of US web users? And to look at medical again, do Canadians search blogs for subtle symptoms capably handled by naturopaths, such as poor digestion, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, low energy or insomnia?
It would be interesting to correlate countries and what domains they blog about, and indeed, what they search about. Rich pickings for anthropologists, for sure.
