Blogging for apples.

Today's Slate has Jack Shafer summing up a recent Pew report on the blogging world. The stats that Shafer focuses on: 12 million adult American bloggers, most of whom report that their readers include mostly family and friends--it seems that 100 unique hits daily counts as a large readership for Joe Average Blogger. Nine percent of the survey respondents (that's 1 million) said that some news outlet has taken note of their blog, though Shafer wonders if that stat might not be padded by at least a few respondents stretching the truth. Besides, the margin of error on the report is plus/minus seven points. This is all grist for the mill of one of Shafer's earlier claims, that maybe we have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves in thinking that blogs are transforming the media.