Ok, so I have been pushing our Realtors to begin Blogging. Many have started and I hope to have many more. Blogging is an excellent way to promote yourself and your business. Here is another example of why Blogging is important.
B.C. big on blogs, more likely to believe them
Jonathan Fowlie
The Vancouver SunSaturday, July 09, 2005
British Columbians who use the Internet are more likely to read online blogs than Internet users anywhere else in Canada, a new poll by Ipsos-Reid has shown.
Fifty per cent of all online British Columbians said they have read a blog – more than in any other province and eight percentage points above the national average, the poll shows.
Vancouver-based technology writer and consultant Darren Barefoot said Friday he is not at all surprised by the results.
“Vancouver, for reasons I’ve never entirely understood, is a real blogging hotbed,” said Barefoot, himself a blogger.
“It seems to me there are more bloggers in Vancouver than anywhere else in the country,” he said, explaining that the high number of local bloggers is likely to translate into a higher level of awareness and readership.
For the purposes of the poll, blogs were defined as Web pages with minimal to no external editing that could function as personal diaries, technical advice columns, sports chat, celebrity gossip, political commentary, or all of the above.
The national poll, which queried 3,378 online Canadians, also found that 41 per cent of them believe blogs influence public opinion, and that 33 per cent believe they influence mainstream media.Twenty-five per cent of online Canadians said they would describe content found on blogs as being accurate. That number rose to 30 per cent among those people questioned in B.C.
“They [blogs] have moved from being literally a virtual postcard or virtual diary to being something that advocates and often informs people, and that is something that is a relatively new phenomena, said John Wright, senior vice-president of Ipsos-Reid.
Wright added that, given the rise in popularity and influence of blogs, people will likely be faced more frequently with questions about the credibility of information they are getting from some of these sites.
“It [the information published on blogs] may influence news, but you are going to have to have consumers and journalists really be vigilant to understand that what is being put up there may not all be true,” he added.
The national poll was conducted by Ipsos-Reid between June 2 to June 12 and is considered to be accurate 95 per cent of the time with a margin of error of 1.7 percentage points.
jfowlie@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2005