Teens and young adults find blogging sooo last decade
A new report by the Pew Research Center finds that it's not hip to blog anymore as social networking sites become the "in" place to hang out.
by Helen Leggat
In 2006, just over a quarter (28%) of young Internet users, aged 12 to 17, blogged. It was "the" thing to do and some blogs became communities in their own right. However, that figure, according to Pew, has dropped to just 14% as social networking sites become the soup de jour.
Nowadays nearly three quarters of online teens (73%) and young adults (72%) use social networking sites such Facebook which, incidently, is celebrating its sixth birthday today. Even the number of those commenting on friends' blogs within social networking sites has dropped.
So, what's putting the youngsters off blogging? Is it too much hassle to set up and maintain a stand-alone blog when you can simply update a one-line status on a social site to an entire network? Perhaps bite-sized blasts of info and images are more desirable to youngsters nowadays rather than having to read through several paragraphs of text? Or is it simply that blogging has fallen out of the "cool" category now that the early bloggers are all grown up?
If the latter is true, then watch out Facebook. The rise in the number of its mature users has been well documented over the last 12 months. What happens when the hip young things decide having their parents, and even grandparents, hanging on their every status update and checking out their uploaded mobile phone images isn't cool?
I would offer the same warning to MySpace but, on the whole, the site, that can appear quite chaotic to older Internet users, doesn't attract quite the same number of mature users as Facebook and, therefore, maintains a much younger demographic.Publicado por Bizreport em 05/02/2010
