What is the value of blogging, in economic terms? The simplest way to attack this question might be to consider what economists call "opportunity cost." That is, the cost of blogging is a matter of what opportunities one foregoes while blogging.
So, given the adage "time is money," one might coclude that it is individuals with the lowest value of time (VOT) who are the most inclined to blog. One might even say that the marginal propensity to blog (MPB) is inversely proportional to an individual's VOT.
The web is filled with blogs; surely it is more common to find individuals with lower VOT blogging about random and varied topics--even if we control for population.
On the contrary, the value of blogging (VOB) is likely as an important (if not a MORE important) metric for understanding blogonomics than the VOT. That is, we should not avoid the fact that people are willing to endure the costs of blogging when analyzing blogonomics. What's left is to determine which force is stronger; VOT or VOB.
Though we seem to be creating new terms (VOB, VOT, MPB), all of these ideas have parallel economic terms. For instance, instead of thinking about VOB we might consider the theory of Utility. The VOT is a way of approaching the concept of opportunity cost (as already noted above). And, lastly, the MPB is analogous to Keynes' Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC)--specifically in that it can be thought of as an empirically derived ratio of time spent blogging versus time spent on other tasks.
The remaining question, then, is not one of justifying these terms as economic. The main concern here is, "How do we measure these metrics?"
More on that later...
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