A glimpse of “bloggers” was put together by Associated Press and reported in

The study was done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project - based on a sample of 4,573 Internet users with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points and a sample from a separate survey of 233 bloggers with a margin of error of plus or minus 7 percentage points.

The survey found that almost one in 10 Internet users are bloggers and the audience for this group of on-line diarists is growing. Almost four in 10 of the approximately 147-million adult Internet users in this country say they read blogs. Bloggers are a rather young group of Internet users who are novice storytellers, enjoy describing their own experiences and have a growing audience in the on-line world.

“The people they are reading on the on-line blogs are a young, ethnically diverse group. They are mostly newcomers to writing - often writing about their own experiences. More than half of bloggers are under age 30. They were most likely to list their life and events as the most popular topic, followed by politics and entertainment.”

What this tells us is that active bloggers are mainly young people that react to events with their feelings that are still basically untainted by hardships that come from experiences in real life. They are perhaps still idealistic, and though probably influenced by their education history and background are still ready to give life a chance. An interesting finding is that they are an ethnically diverse group, and thus much more independent then the old press. This also explains why readership of blogs is increasing to the point that it is impossible now for the political interests to ignore them. We bet that the readership of these blogs is much higher then the 10% mentioned here who are the active users of the blogs - those that write and react. SustainabiliTank.info is not set up as a blog. We want to be viewed rather as a media think-tank on which contributions are posted by those that wish to contribute; but what we try to absorb from the spirit of the blogs is the freedom to write things in an honest way, unrestricted in any way by commercial needs and the tyranny of sponsors and advertisers. This and the bloggers are the future of journalism in the non-paper age. From my vantage seat at the UN I learned how restrictive it can be when one is on the payroll of some large well known media outlet that requires its representative here to score points on one or three topics. The best reporting by the conventional press here is thus done by the non-direct outlets - Reuters, AP, Bloomberg - that have the freedom to collect all sorts of information and let the users pick what they want to use. When I research sometimes websites connected to some of the media represented at the UN, I find astonishingly that their supposed employers use reporting by above mentioned three outlets rather then material by those that have stated, for accreditation purpose, that they represent those papers. This in itself makes it pretty convincing that there may be indeed serious problems with the way the media is set up - and misused by some outside interests. Bloggers have thus a vast field open to them.