Just got my hands on the quite fas­ci­nat­ing “Social Techno­graph­ics” study from For­rester Research. They take a close look at the social and demo­graphic struc­ture of the social web pop­u­la­tion — unlike Technorati’s sta­tis­tics which mostly focus on raw blog growth num­bers and struc­tural fea­tures of the blo­gos­phere. The study is based on two sur­veys includ­ing includ­ing close to 5000 North-American indi­vid­u­als each.

Inter­est­ing facts:

22% of adults now read blogs at least monthly, and 19% are mem­bers of a social net­work­ing site. Even more amaz­ingly, almost one–third of all youth pub­lish a blog at least weekly, and 41% of youth visit a social net­work­ing site daily.

Based on an analy­sis of online par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­sump­tion prac­tices, the authors iden­tify six seg­ments of users, ordered by degree of participation:

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