AdAge reports that reading blogs is costing US businesses. Here are some of the highlights:

• 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.
• There is strong evidence of workday blogging. Server traffic for Blogads, a network of sites that take ads, spikes during business hours, reflecting page views on about 900 blogs. FeedBurner, a blog technology company, also sees a jump in work-time hits.

Blog breaks? What a great idea! The assumption of course is that reading non-work related blogs makes you unproductive. Sometimes unproductive acts – like taking a break – are the very acts that make us most productive and give us new insight.

I do think a huge amount of time gets wasted on the web every day – whether blogs or just mooching about. There are a great number of blogs that can help workers use their time better and become more mindful of what will make them more productive or not – even if that means taking a blog break.

What AdAge doesn’t touch on is for more training of workers on how to get the most out of the web and blogs. There are all kinds of techniques for catching yourself zoning on digital content and surfing about. Simple tools like a good RSS reader make the blogsphere a very productive place to be.

Ok, stop wasting time and get back to work.