i'm reading this article about blogs wasting time during working hours and thought it would be appropriate to blog the article for those who don't regularly read adage. i've just taken out the more interesting excerpts.

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.

About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break. ...

Bosses accept some screwing off as a cost of doing business; it keeps employees happy and promotes camaraderie. Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, said blogs have become the favored diversion for “office goof-off time,” though he notes it’s hard to segregate blog time since blogs often bounce readers to professional media sites.

- Work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2% of U.S. labor force hours.

- Work time spent at blogs unrelated to work will eat up 1.65% of labor force hours.

- U.S. workers this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years (based on a 24-hour day) or 2.3 million work years (based on a typical nearly 40-hour work week) reading blogs unrelated to the job. ...

Workday traffic patterns
“Traffic rockets at 8 a.m. EST, peaks at 5 p.m. EST and then slides downward until L.A. leaves the office,” said Blogads founder Henry Copeland. “You see the same thing in the collapse of traffic on weekends. … Bottom line: At work, people can’t watch TV or prop up their feet and read a newspaper, but they sure do read blogs.”

And they create and post to them. Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009. Imagine the work that won’t get done then.

this last fact proves true in our own ra.com community. jeng checked the stats of the ra.com traffic during the day and found that it peaked during the midday hours. i know i find myself going to blogs first thing in the morning and then sometime during or after lunch. and i definitely waste tons of time reading blogs and posting blogs when i should be working.