In the fall of 2006, 6.7% of US adults had (knowingly) visited a blog sometime in the previous 30 days. This represents a 163% increase over fall of the previous year.

I suspect the real figure to be quite a bit higher than that as many US adults wouldn’t be aware of the various forms a blog can take or perhaps remember having visited one. Heck, I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast today.

According to the report from Mediamark Research, other online activities experiencing substantial growth over Fall 2005 were Instant Messaging (up 20.6%), Music downloads (up 23.3%), Web based phone calls (up a whopping 197.7%), watching online video (up 123.7%).

In terms of ecommerce, the number of adults making personal purchases online grew to 34.2%, representing a 5.7% increase. 10.7% of adults made online purchases for business purposes – up 2.4%.

Areas experiencing a downturn included researching for new vehicles, looking for employment, searching for real estate information, visiting a TV network site, obtaining medical and financial information, and reading the news/current events.

Overall, the top 3 online activities were E-mail at 70.5% participation rate, reading news/current events (40.2%) and online purchasing for personal goods and services (34.2%)

The survey results were gained from interviews of around 26,000 USA adults

Read more of the MediaMark Survey of the American Consumer (PDF)