One of my AvantGo subscriptions is the NY Times technology page. I usually sync up on Sunday nights so I get some stuff from their Sunday journal (like Parade). This week they had an article about web logs (or online journals) and how high school kids use them. You can read the original but I’ll post the rest later.
Highlights:
“Ninety percent of those with blogs are between 13 and 29 years old; a full 51 percent are between 13 and 19”.
After the writer posts a comment to one kid’s journal a kid writes a new entry titled “i like how older people have grammar online”
The people who write them like expressing themselves publicly, but live in fear that someone they know will find out too much. At least one person asked that their name not be used so their parents wouldn’t find out about their blog, even though it’s available to everyone in the world (solution: geeky dad creates Movable Type site so that his kids can have their own web logs).
There are many different sites out there. The article starts with one called Blurty, then LiveJournal, and finally Xanga. The writer asks some high school girls (randomly I guess) if they have LiveJournals. “No” one said “we have Xangas.”
That’s about it. One thing I thought of while I was reading the article was that what is really needed is editors. There are tons of blogs out there and some deserve attention, but you have to have some way of going through all of it. Not randomly, probably not even by popularity since you’ll just get the most incendiary or lurid content that way. There doesn’t seem to be any lack of source material, it just needs to be culled.
Article text follows . . .