Blogs

You. Yes you, the one reading this blog.

A study by Advertising Age [requires registration first. isn't the deep web wonderful), finds that

"About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them"

Some more stats:

• "Work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2% of U.S. labor force hours.
• Work time spent at blogs unrelated to work will eat up 1.65% of labor force hours.
• U.S. workers this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years (based on a 24-hour day) or 2.3 million work years (based on a typical nearly 40-hour work week) reading blogs unrelated to the job."

The article ends with an interesting extrapolation:

Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009. Imagine the work that wonÂ’t get done then.

:)