Red Rag

Via Jill Walker, I came across this article about blogging and advertising. I found it interesting because while I’ve read about surveys of bloggers, I haven’t before come across any such study of blog readers:

[A] Pew study, fielded a year ago, found that 11 percent of respondents read Weblogs with some regularity. Last summer, I conducted a survey for the email services agency Quris, in which we included a question about blog readership, which similarly found 10 percent of the 1,691 respondents regularly read Weblogs. Bearing in mind that those numbers have doubtless grown in the year since those two surveys, that is still 13 to 14 million Weblog readers. Furthermore, I would venture a lot more people are reading Weblogs without realizing those sites are called Weblogs.

[…]

The Quris research shows that blog readers skew somewhat younger than average Web surfers, are power-users of the Net and media junkies in general, spend more money online, and consume a disproportionate amount of literature, pop culture and electronics.

There’s an interesting table at the bottom of the article that gives comparisons between blog readers and the general population.

The downside of this research is that it was conducted to help spammers. So I guess we need to be extra careful about how commenters’ email addresses might be displayed: preferably, not at all.

If you’re using Movable Type to power your blog, that’s relatively simple. In every template that displays comments — probably just the “Individual Entry Archive” and the “Comment Listing Template”, but you might have others — you’ll need to check every reference to <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> and make sure its default setting has been overridden. Here’s what the manual says:

You can override these rules by using the show_email and show_url attributes to the tag. For example, if you use

<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email=”0″$>

then the email address of the author will never be displayed. The logic then becomes: if the author has entered a URL, the author name will be a link to that URL; if no URL, display the author name without a link.

This is useful when you want to force your visitors to leave their email addresses — that is, you have not checked the Allow anonymous comments checkbox in your weblog configuration — but you do not want to display these email addresses on your weblog.

Spammers want to flog things to your readers: make sure they’re protected.