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From Advertising Age today:

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 — bloggers [sic; we assume they mean "blog readers"] essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

You already knew that we keep you moderately entertained during the day and help you waste time — apparently 40 minutes each day — at work. But what you didn't realize — and neither did we — is how important that wasted time is. If we weren't writing this, and you weren't reading it, 2.3 million people would have to be laid off. Together, dear readers, we're protecting the American workingman.

Now, to try to eliminate unemployment, we must ask that you spend even more time each day reading blogs. It's not for us. It's for the children.

In 2005, Americans Will Spend 551,000 Work Years Reading Blogs [Ad Age]