Friday, May 14, 2004

TeenBlog Looks cool but no time to read the full thread now. I'll comeback with comments later. Teenage Bloggers. David Huffaker of Georgetown has done a pretty comprehensive study of teenage blogging habits that reveals some interesting results. The study is titled "Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use Among Teenage Bloggers." It's quite lengthy, but here are a couple of graphs that are particularly relevant. Overall, the results indicate that teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs, including name, age, and location, as well as contact information in the form of an email address, an instant messenger name or a link to personal homepage. The content of blogs typically reflects what is expected to impact a teenager’s life, such as school, intimate relationships, sexual identity and even music. While almost half of teenage blogs are abandoned, active blogs demonstrate high levels of loyalty in terms of frequency of posts (daily or weekly) and length of posts (which average 2000 words per page). Good stuff. It's great to see the research start to come forward on what exactly it is that students do and don't do in these spaces, and to think about the implications for our classroom. [Weblogg-ed News] 3:45:52 PM    comment []

Article from Boston Times about blogs in Politics. 1:35:10 PM    comment []