Blogging: A new way of wasting work time?

An article by Advertising Age last week suggested that time spent in American offices on non-work blogs this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years or take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.

Despite acknowledging that hard data on the subject is limited, Advertising Age estimates:

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

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

3) 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

The article goes on to discuss the extent to which blogging at work should be seen as a problem, but the part I found interesting was how blog traffic clearly tails off at the weekend, i.e. could it be that office workers, finding it increasingly difficult to justify leaving their work stations, use blogs as the new way of breaking off for a chat with colleagues, or sloping off to read a newspaper, etc.? Make your own mind up by looking up What blogs cost American business - (Bradley Johnson, Advertising Age).