As constructed, the statement is an enormously misleading characterization of the influence blogs (as opposed to particular bloggers) can have.

It’s like saying people don’t count as people unless they have a certain number of friends. You could conclude, for example, that because ‘nobody’ in America has 20,000 friends, there’s nobody in America except for a few celebrities, and a bunch of tumbleweeds in between.

More importantly, the view misses the forest for the trees, in that it ignores the cumulative audience for content that moves from blog to blog. As a producer, commentator, or author, I don’t care if my message reaches 1,000,000 million people via 1,000 sites each read by 1,000 people, or 100,000 sites each read by 10 people.

Actually, on second thought, I’d prefer the latter course, as each audience member in this scenario is likely to have richer connections with other audience members, and will therefor have more engagement with the material via discussion. And given deeper involvement, they’re more likely to share the content with other people they know who, though also members of narrow audiences, are members of different audiences.

Jeff Cole may want to take a look at his USC colleague Jon Taplin’s blog, to see exactly how this narrow-but-deep principle works in practice.

I was also at Jeff’s presentation today. I did not think that Jeff said that almost no one reads blogs but instead the latter part of your quote was more consistent with Jeff’s comments…that the audience for MOST blogs is tiny. Those very few bloggers that gain a substantial audience and reputation tend to move into more traditional media (I know, there are exceptions and one person we know that did the reverse ). Jeff’s point was that most bloggers do not write blogs for others to read but write them for self expression. Publishing content is the end goal not necessarily readership.