Over the weekend I had dinner in the city with several friends. During our delicious meal, I was chatting with one of the friends about my recent blog post on Structured Blogging when something occurred to me. At the table was ten young 20-something successful professionals yet I was the only one there that had a blog. On the drive home, I realized that because I spend my days obsessing over the latest tech news/developments, my world is probably very skewed. In fact, a couple weeks ago at a poker game with some friends, I had a side conversation with a friend about Y!’s acquisiton of del.icio.us and nobody else in the room had heard of the news much less had even heard of a website called del.icio.us. When I get emails from friends sharing their recent photos, those emails are coming from old names like ImageStation and SnapFish not Flickr. Today, I had to spell out M-e-e-b-o several times to a friend who was looking for an IM solution to get around his company’s firewall. I could go on and on with examples…but you get my point.

Many of the techie bloggers in the blogosphere have a grossly skewed view of the world. We get so used to this community of early-adopters that focus is lost on the other 99% of the population. However, for a consumer application/service to achieve real success, it is crucial, of course, to capture the mainstream user which represents the overwhelming majority of the market. And, because “Web 2.0″ (I put that in quotes for a reason..heh) apps tend to be community-focused, attracting a wide audience of users is seemingly more important than ever.

One example of this skewed view is the recent talk about decentralized content and the power of self-publishing. The concept of Structured Blogging is built on this principle. As I mentioned in my post on the topic, if I’m going to write a movie review, I want to post it on my blog so I own it and it remains a part of my online identity. Similarly, posts like this predict the end of centralized sites (the author calls them “Walled Gardens”) like Craigslist and eBay because users will inevitably prefer to self-publish their classifieds ads on their own blogs.

The problem with these discussions is the reality that the number of Internet users who blog regularly is tiny. It’s hard to say exactly how many blogs there really are since I don’t trust most of the statistics on # of blogs because lots of people have blogs (sometimes several) but few actually post to it. According to this survey, only 7% of American adults read blogs regularly. If this is true, then Americans who actively publish via blogs has got to be no more than a couple %. Yet all this talk of self-publishing requires one fundamental thing: a place for the self to freely publish on the Web which for most people means having a blog. (Note: I say “freely” publish to exclude sites like MySpace which do limit the format of content that can be published by the user). And just a very small fraction of Americans blog.

From what I’m always reading about, the number of bloggers is rapidly rising so maybe, down the road, models involving decentralized content may become more and more of a reality. But, it does seem that we are not nearly as close as many tech bloggers make it seem.