I frequently drop by Rick Bruner's ExecutiveSummary.com, but also tend to run into him in other places as well. His piece, "Blogging is Booming", for iMedia Connection is one of the better round ups of stats (as varied and unreliable as they may be) related to the size of the blogging phenomenon.

The Tech-Web story makes it sound like an online threat to traditional DVD models, and the study the story is based on ($2,999, be my guest and let me know what the detail numbers look like, or enjoy the abstract) makes it sound more like a win for big media companies. But underneath are some more numbers pointing to a trend that I think is a real opportunity: online burn-it-yourself DVD distribution.

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Everyone complains about spam, but the data also shows that spam is now up to 62% of all email messages on the Internet. Personally, I'm up to 6,000 spams on a typical day, a nearly crippling level even with multiple filters and scanners dealing with 70% of it. That's why claims of 99%+ accuracy from the new open source solutions has us experimenting with a new potential solution for our own servers.

The Associated Press story focuses on blogging ("Study: Blogging Still Infrequent") and reports that between 2% and 7% of U.S. Internet users keep a blog (and 11% have read a blog.) But the story touches on only part of the big study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on content creation online (download the full report in PDF format.) The headline that Pew was pushing (and that seems far more interesting) is that 44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed content of some type to the Internet.

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