Welcome to the state of blogging, as determined by the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project which conducted two surveys in November that returned some startling results.

In short, the survey results further underline that blogs and bloggers are impacting Internet usage, ad space and readership on a very persuasive level. The surveys found that over 8 million Americans say they’ve created blogs, and blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now represents 27% of Internet users. 5% of those users employ RSS aggregators or XML readers to get their news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites. The surveys also found that 12% of Internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.

Although the survey found that 62% of Internet users do not know what a blog is, the study also showed visible and rapid growth in blog awareness, which will most assuredly continue. In November, 27% of Internet users said they read blogs, which means by the end of 2004, 32 million Americans were blog readers.

In commenting on the latest numbers, Henry Copeland, an early innovator in blog ad space and founder of Blogads.com said the percentages will continue to exceed expectations in regard to blog usage. “These latest statistics should serve as a wake-up call to traditional medium marketers. Many to many (M2M) media communication is not going away. This is becoming a horizontal market. Readers love blogs and more importantly trust the content. Blogs are magnets for readers.”

With the interactive features of blogs spreading and users becoming more interested in posting to blogs, marketers must focus on how to best present their products to blog viewers. Copeland notes, “The challenge for advertisers is that you cannot take an ad you’ve run on MSNBC and tack it up on a blog. You have to advertise in a new style. This is non-corporate media; this kind of advertising really needs a human voice, and it has to be an empathetic voice. By that I mean it has to show the readership that you know them and why they are using a specific blog.”

And Copeland says for marketers, the power of blogs also means moving out of traditional ideas about online ads and the big company model. “The bigger agencies are having a hard time dealing with this because they’re used to playing it safe. The challenge is to be daring. The smaller advertisers have much more luck because they’re willing to play in this arena and understand that it’s different than any other ad space. You cannot get the power of clicks with a bad ad, that doesn’t take into account the actual readers on the blogs. So you have to really understand blogs and what readers are using them for.”

To understand the readers, one can look at the study’s profile results, which found that those who were familiar with blogs are well-educated, Internet veterans (about half those with at least six years of experience knew what a blog was) and heavy users of the Internet. In contrast, the study showed that Internet users who did not know about blogs were relative newbies to the Internet, less frequent users, with less educational background.

For now, assignment 101 to marketers will surely be to catch up on your blog reading.