facebook

The New York Times is reporting this week that blog use is waning among teens and that teens are instead favoring services like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe that’s a good thing.

“Blog” wasn’t even a word until I was 20 but that doesn’t mean that as a teen I wasn’t using websites and services like Livejournal in ways that would be called blogs today.

I look back at my Livejournal that I wrote in my late high school and early college years (I can’t bring myself to delete it but it’s private so that only I can read it) and now I think it’s all pointless, snippet-y drivel that’s not drastically different than what the average person posts on Twitter or Facebook today (those services didn’t exist then).

Blogs are the perfect platform for meaty content that you want indexed by search engines but I don’t think the average (or above average like I always thought of myself) teenager is out there to create meaty content. I can go back and look at a good chunk of what I was posting online in my teens and, I’m a little bit shocked to see, none of it is anything that I’d want showing up in Google so it’s probably a good thing that Twitter and Facebook posts start to fade away after a few days.

On one hand we’re telling teens to be careful what they post on Facebook because it might come back to bite them when they look for a job later and on the other we’re worried they’re not blogging when blogs get scrapped and would be even harder to scrub out of Google’s search results.

It’s fine with me that teens aren’t blogging because my experience tells me that teens aren’t blogging anything they’d want out there in a couple years anyway.

{ 5 comments }