The Guardian today tells us that media coverage of blogging in the UK has led to increased awareness of it among internet users, however, it hasn’t led to more people writing or reading blogs. They say:

The findings of the British Market Research Bureau’s quarterly survey led senior associate director Trevor Vagg to conclude that blogging has received disproportionate media coverage and the whole idea of citizen journalism is overhyped.

Awareness of blogs dramatically increased in the three months to the end of February, with the proportion of internet users in Britain who have never heard of a blog, or blogging, falling from 45% in the previous quarter three to 30%, according to the BMRB survey.

But despite this there has been no significant change in the number of people who publish blogs, which remains at just 2% of UK internet users. Furthermore, only 10% - around 2.8 million people - of internet users view a weblog once a month or more.

“There has been disproportionate coverage of blogging, still only a minority ever read blogs and a tiny proportion publish them,” said Mr Vagg. “This suggests there is an over-hyping about how big the idea of people’s journalism is through using technology like camera phones and weblogs.”

But Mr Vagg recognised that the relatively small number of bloggers potentially wielded a hugely disproportionate influence in setting trends and opinion-leading.

“It may well be that those who do publish weblogs are more likely to be opinion formers and therefore have a larger influence than their numbers would suggest,” he said.

Y’know, I think I have a pretty good handle on what the real issue is - at least here in the UK.

Maybe if blogs had never been called ‘blogs’ in the first place (and were actually called something like ‘online magazines’, for example) then there would probably be much more of an uptake in terms of readership and writing.

To most people, the word ‘blog’ is just a bit too geeky and not really cool enough, and that’s what turns many people off. Plus, I’m guessing that most of the people who have heard of the term ‘blog’ still think of them as being nothing but personal online diaries or journals that are - let’s be honest here - full of noting but self-indulgent crap about cats.

But anyway, being geeky is OK if your audience is mainly other bloggers and geeks (which is part of the reason why gadget blogs are often more successful than other topics). But if you’re trying to tap into a more mainstream audience (such as the average person in the street where I live) and you’re also trying to cover ‘offline’ topics like crafts or sports, then I think you’re going to run into problems with building an audience - simply because a blog is called a blog.

I’ll tell you what, though, that damn article doesn’t help matters much.