Right now, it looks as if the only thing that can kill the blogging phenomenon would be the death of the net itself. Blogs are a big part of the current online culture. Blogs are easy to build, easy to visit and search engines love them. There are blogs that cover every possible subject of interest to humans. Blogs are stronger than ever and they’re giving a good scare to established media such as print and television.

"Blogs are a big part of the current online culture. There are blogs that cover every possible subject of interest to humans."

Statistics show that people are spending more and more time surfing the Information Highway. Other statistics claim that people are turning to the Internet for their news and entertainment as often - if not more often - as TV and magazines.

Many people are veering towards blogs because blogs offer information quickly, in a communal environment. With print and televised media, one has little chance to voice his/her opinion on a subject covered.

With blogs, visitors can leave real-time comments in a public format. In addition, surfers like blogs because blogs aren’t bound by corporate sponsorship or any rules, for that matter.

As a webmaster, you can design and upload whatever blog you want. You can’t break the law naturally, but you get the idea. The templated/auto-updating features of blog software make it possible for novices to create good pages and designers to create great ones. At this time, there are numerous free blog hosts who aren’t yet exploiting page space with Header and Footer ads. If you wanted to get into blogging but you were afraid you were too late…you’ve still got time because blogs aren’t going anywhere.

For the past couple of years, BlogAds has been in the business of helping bloggers make money and garner traffic through their wonderful program. If you are a busy webmaster, you can receive money by hosting ads from bloggers and other advertisers through BlogAds payment system. If you want to promote your blog you can advertise on Blogs featured in BlogAds searchable database. You can search for blogs by category. You can analyze ad value with the traffic stats provided by BlogAds. You can buy ad space for as little as $25.00 for a week or as much as $5000.00 a month. BlogAds appear on most of the web’s most sought after blogs. For the past couple of years BlogAds has also conducted a Blog-Reader Survey.

While the 2006 survey breaks the blogging audience down by interest group, the results for the 2005 survey have a higher overview of blog fans in general. I imagine that the good people at BlogAds will condense all of 2006 into an overview in time for 2007’s survey.

In the meantime, I’ll examine one category from 2006 to show you the gold hiding in this fantastic resource for blogging webmasters. The Political category is BlogAd’s most popular. This year, there were more participants in the political survey than there were overall, for 2005. In 2005, roughly 30,000 people participated in the BlogAds reader survey. In 2006, more than 36,000 participated in the political category alone.

In that category we discover that these blogs have a shared audience age spread between 31-60. But we notice that the biggest percentage of readers are between the ages 41-50. We also discover that men outnumber women in political blog readership by 72.42% to 27.58%. We find that the majority annual income for political blog readers is $60,000 to $90,000. Thirty-seven percent live in two-person households. A majority of respondents claim to have graduate and post-graduate degrees.

But wait, it gets better.

This survey asks about online purchasing, real-life political activities, readership of magazines and newspapers, broadcast, print and internet news choices, blog commenting practices as well as time spent online and on blogs.

The 2005 survey is just as fascinating and informative, as is the 2004 survey.

Whether you’re a newbie blogger or you’ve been doing the blog thing since before whatever, you’d be a fool to ignore this amazing look into the minds of your audience. I can’t recall ever reading such a rich resource of user data. If you want to study the state of blogging in 2006, go read these BlogAds surveys!