I am pretty sure it matters.  I think it means how fast people leave right??  Mine is the worst when people find me in a  search and I wasn't what they were looking for.  I have noticed mine have slowly decreased but are still really high.  I haven't checked the past two weeks because I was getting too caught up in my numbers but I know it was higher than 50.  Oh well.....

Mine was hovering around 50% - but then I was featured on a few big blogs and my traffic jumped 75%... but my bounce rate is now 66% - yikes! 

My bounce rate is 37%....have you made sure to put links in your current post to another popular past post?

Linked in doesn't work in my theme... bummer... or it probably could but I haven't sat down to tweak the code.  It might be worth it if this traffic spurt keeps up along with my bounce rate!  I am hoping it is just a fluke.

Mine is too high...

What are the best strategies to bring that number down?

haha, for starters guest posting in a place within your niche would probably be a good bet :)  I blame that with my spike in both traffic (whoohoo) and bounce (urgh!).

Other than that, linked in is supposed to help, limiting outgoing links so that people don't browse them and instead browse your site, writing good content - the "relevant in three months" type of content... hmmm... any others?

Well, just read this:  Bounce is super important!  Hadn't realized how much!  Gotta work on lowering mine!

Interesting reading this. At the recent Blissdom conference, one of the speakers (and I can't remember who) said a bounce rate below 80 percent was fine. But I think when you look at bounce rate you also have to look at time on site.

I'm envious of Kelly's 37% - mine's around 65%. My average time on site is around 3.5 minutes.

37 - 50% is actually EXTREMELY good for a blog.  People usually just visit to read the post of the day.  It's tricky to get them to stick around and read more. 

Okay, I am starting to feel like I am a bit abnormal.  My bounce rate for the past month is 1.09%