Adults ruined blogs for kids, study shows

A new report from the Pew's Internet and American Life Project reveals a decline in blogging among teens.

You know what they say – as soon as the adults show up, the party's over.

A study released this week by the the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project shows that teens have pulled back on their blog use in the past couple of years, while use by adults has remained steady. The numbers break down like this: In 2006, 28 percent of teens said they blogged regularly. In 2009, by comparison, that number dropped to 18 percent.

Meanwhile, adult blogging has remained at a steady 10 percent.

So what are those crazy kids up to these days? Well, they're not using Twitter. The same Pew Research Center says only 8 percent of teens – of a sample of 800 US teens – have signed on to the Twitter craze in recent years. "Most teens are not interested in being truly public," Danah Boyd, a researcher with Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told the Washington Post.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real growth in the teen market is in social networking. By September of last year, almost three quarters of teens in the US used one social network regularly – a major leap from the 55 percent in November of 2006. "Even with teens' continued enthusiasm for social networking, recent changes in their communication patterns on the sites suggest they are somewhat less tethered to their profiles," Pew researchers noted.

To reiterate: teens don't like blogging as much; they're lukewarm about Twitter; and they're very fickle when it comes to updating their Facebook feed.

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