Results From The Pew Internet Project Study

The Read/Write Web recently posted an article about the diminishing number of young adults who blog:  ”Kids Don’t Blog Anymore? Maybe They Never Did“. Published on the heels of  research results from the Pew Internet Project, the RW article was just one of many that claimed kids were more likely to use social networking sites rather then a blog. I don’t question the validity of the *Pew study and don’t doubt for a moment that the appeal of the web for many is to stay in contact with friends and family. The problem though is that you cannot compare a platform intended for publishing with a platform that was built on social ties and social connections. Blogs weren’t meant as a place to hang, as Sarah Perez concludes:

If Facebook had a similar “blogs” feature as MySpace, the study may have read quite differently: “teen blogging soars!” To really determine how popular blogging is as an online activity, it may have been better to differentiate between the standalone sites and the long-form updates found within a social network. Failure to do so confuses the issue and leaves us without the answers a detailed study like this aims to deliver.

It seems pretty obvious to those who spend time using both, doesn’t it.

* though the sample size is a bit small – 800 adolescents between ages 12 and 17 were surveyed between June 26th and September 24th 2009.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under information, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.