Fri 7 Oct 2005
More from The Guardian: in the UK, an entire third of the 14-21 age group have started their own blog.
However, what that doesn’t say is that most of these blogs aren’t very interesting to outsiders; just pages of teenage gossip and bitching.* The Guardian has been over-hyping blogs for a while now, and “look, they’ve all got them!” really isn’t the important part of this story.
You’ll pick up on the important aspect of this, though, if you read the whole thing. It’s communication. The blogs the article mentions aren’t the big new revolution in publishing - they’re the big new revolution in Keeping In Touch. Most of the blogs on the internet now aren’t the sort of thing that the general public want to read. They’re online diaries to keep in touch with your friends, to tell them what you’ve been doing. The general public don’t read them, either - only the blogger’s friends do. In fact, they’re just the same as the traditional Personal Home Page of 1994 - the only difference is that they’re much easier to create.
* As opposed to this site, which is pages and pages of twentysomething gossip and bitching.
Keyword Noise: The Guardian, communication
October 9th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
The Guardian also got its statistics wrong: First it says “Poll shows a third of 14- to 21-year-olds now have their own online content” but then in the article it says that “**among those with a web connection at home**, 31% said that they had launched their own personal site or blog.” But as only “six in 10 young people have internet access at home” we end up with 31% * (6/10) = 18.6% of the young people the article talks about - just close to a fifth, but definately not “a third”.
October 9th, 2005 at 8:23 pm
Good point. I’m sure there are people who have a blog despite not having a net connection at home - I did myself for a while - but I bet the proportion is much lower.
October 10th, 2005 at 7:59 pm
[...] “It’s about communication, not publishing” sagt (ungefähr) Forest Pines über Blogs und eine Studie zur Internetnutzung britischer Jugendlicher. (viaMartin Röll) [...]