The Roots Are Growing - PEW Says 50MM Americans Now

There’s quite a bit of noise out in the blogoshpere today regarding some new research done by the Pew Internet Group in their Home Broadband Adoption 2006 study. Here’s a quick snippet:

Forty-eight million American adults have contributed some form of user-generated content on the Internet, it found. That's 35 percent of Internet users. Of those adults who have posted content on the Web, 73 percent, or 31 million, have a broadband connection at home.

“[The Web is] shifting now to user-generated content; it shows people engaging with the Internet in a number of different ways in their lives,” said John Horrigan, associate director of research at Pew Internet & American Life Project. “It shows that people are pretty interested in using the technology to put something of themselves on the Internet, not just pull down information from the Internet.”

Source: Clickz News, “Pew: Nearly 50 MM Americans Create Web Content”

This paragraph was also interesting:

In looking across the different kinds of user-generated content that we probed, there is an element of the internet being the medium for creativity and the internet being an outlet for creativity people bring to worldwide web. Blogging and, perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent, maintaining one’s own web page, are creative undertakings that take place mainly at the keyboard. For the 36 million Americans who share their own creations online, several of the topics we queried, such as artwork, photos, or videos, start offline, and then people use the internet as a tool of distribution.

Source: Pew, “Home Broadband Adoption 2006”