Instead of sharing your ideas at your local pub with a few buddies, it has become pretty easy to share your ideas with thousands, or millions of people thanks to blogs, but also forums and all kinds of websites.
According to Technorati, they are now more than 35 millions of blogs, who are most of the time targetting small audiences but also some that are read by thousands or millions of people.

China Daily today published an article called “Study: Bloggers punch way above their wieght” in which they comment a recent research from Jupiter Research.

From the article:

Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the Internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23 per cent only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net through messageboards, websites and blogs are helping change national conversations, say researchers.

From, this research and this article, we understand that bloggers and web users are becoming really influential and are often the subject of “public conversations” and “are creating business trends”.

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed.”

The article notes that thanks to search engines like Google, everyone can easily spread his ideas online.

Companies like McDonald’s, lock manufacturer Kryptonite and computer firm Dell have all fallen foul of Internet buzz in recent years. Because search engines like Google can allow grassroots campaigns to become highly visible, industry insiders agree decisions can be shaped by a small number of activists.