When You Compare Apples to Orange Jello...

This morning, I noticed quite a few provocative article titles showing up in my Google alerts and my RSS feeds. The article headlines all made the claim that a new report showed podcasts to be more popular than blogs. Obviously, that statement caught my attention as blogs are becoming pretty mainstream and podcasting is still just picking up speed. That's when I actually took the time to read an article and found out that the findings from this study were doing more than just a little bit of stretching to reach their conclusion.

The study finds that 6.6% of online adults in the U.S. have downloaded a podcast within the last month. It then states that just 4.8% of online adults in the U.S. have published a blog in the last month.

Wait a minute...go back and read that again. 6.6% have DOWNLOADED a podcast as compared to 4.8% who have PUBLISHED a blog. Wouldn't a more accurate comparison be to find out how many people had downloaded a podcast and how many people had READ a blog?

One of the offending articles is over at ClickZ and runs the title "Podcasts More Popular Than Blogging, Report Says. Now, to be totally fair...the headline *IS* accurate. Note that it says podcasts (not podcasting) and blogging (not blogs).

Either way, the whole thing just kinda sounds funny...makes me wonder who's out there trying so hard to push podcasting.