I'm in ur RSS, feedin ur habitz

A study coming out of UC Irvine at a CHI conference in Italy talks about the participatory culture that the practice of blogging not only illustrates, but enables for those online who do not necessarily blog themselves.

Here's to enabling the continuance of yer blog readin wayz.

Reading a blog can become as much of a habit as checking e-mail, a new study looking at readers, rather than bloggers, suggests.

Researchers from the University of California-Irvine presented their study, which they said was the first to look in depth at the readers of blogs, on Wednesday at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Florence, Italy.

In a release, they said that previous studies about blogs have typically focused on the writers, "largely overlooking those who go online to read, comment and participate."

With an estimated 57 million adults in the United States reading blogs in July 2006, doctoral candidate Eric Baumer, undergraduate student Mark Sueyoshi and informatics professor Bill Tomlinson decided to look at the relationship between blogs and their readers.

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