Teens ‘ditching blogs for Twitter’
- Added:
- Feb 05, 2010
U.S. teens are turning their backs on blogging just as they are more wirelessly connected than ever before, according to a new study.
The research, conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that just 14% of teenagers said they blogged in 2009, down from 28% in 2006.
The number of teens who said they commented on blogs in online social networking communities sank to 52% from 76% three years earlier.
“Youth may be exchanging macro-blogging for micro-blogging with status updates," the authors of the study said, referring to the popularity of sharing life updates in terse text messages.
Devotion to blogs hasn't faded among adults, with roughly one in 10 keeping online journals or blogs in a ratio that hasn't changed since 2005, according to the Pew report.
But the number of people ages 18 to 29 blogging dropped to 15% in 2009 from 24% two years earlier.
Meanwhile, 11% of people age 30 or older said they were blogging in 2009 as compared to 7% in 2007.
Social networking gained popularity with teenagers, with 73% claiming to belong to online communities. However, teenagers said they were cutting back on sending daily messages to friends via social networks.
Music-oriented social-networking service MySpace attracted a younger crowd, while Facebook was more popular with the older crowd, according to Pew.
Teenagers were also found to be major users of almost all online applications except for microblogging service Twitter.
Only 8% of Internet users ages 12 to 17 said they used Twitter, but nearly two-thirds used mobile telephone text messages to communicate.
Young adults were the heaviest Twitter users, with a third of people ages 18 to 29 posting or reading "tweets," according to Pew.
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