Michelle:

First off, thanks for the smile today. A welcome chuckle…

During my recent research I came across this:

“According to Forrester Research, both younger and older consumers are paying attention to their online peers: 75% of online adult consumers and 92% of online youth use one or more forms of user-generated online content, including blogs, wikis, message boards…”

And in a 2004 study Forrester Research found that over 60% of consumers trust product recommendations found in online sources like discussion boards while ads in the most trusted medium, newspapers, earned the trust of just over 50% of respondents. (I’ll put money on those numbers wider apart in 2006 studies.)

Now I know the research above is talking ‘products’ but we as bloggers – given that so much weight is put upon our words by our peers – have a huge social responsibilty when we put our fingers to the keyboard.

Even though we’re not journalists.
Nor aspire to be.

Ben did a great thing telling the world he was human.

Might be the determining factor why our peers are listening so intently…

haha I think that’s the reason many people (especially the younger generation) like blogs over traditional news sources.

They are just so much more personal and lively, they are supposed to have bias, that’s what keeps people coming back