Monthly Archives: November 2005

Teens and Blogs: Huge Adoption

Notorious for small sample sizes, but interesting none the less, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has released another study. This one is about teens and online content creation/sharing. Based on 1,100 families, findings included:

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage;
create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation.
19% of online youth ages 12-17 have created their own blog. That is approximately four million people.
38% of all online teens, or about 8 million young people, say they read blogs.
7% of adult internet users say they have created their own blog and 27% of online adults say they read blogs. (Note: Data for adult blog readers comes from the May- June 2005 Pew Internet Project Tracking Survey.)

Say what you will about what most teenagers use their blogs for, but what this study says to me is this: blogs are going to only get bigger in the very near future. Young adults will increasingly demand communication that is open, frequent and two-way. What percentage of these young people will grow to read and write blogs about serious subjects as a primary means of communicating with the world around them? What’s your strategy for maximizing relevance?

Thanks to Ruby Sinreich for pointing to this Pew study.

Technorati Tags: blogs, teens, adoption, future, trends, media, Pew, studies

Adding “del.icio.us this” and “furl this” links to your blog

Tip of the day: you can add one click links to the end of each blog post for readers to archive that post in their del.icio.us or Furl archives. I think this makes it all the easier for people to save, return to and effectively promote your post and your site. If reading posts all in a row on the front page of a blog, you can bookmark a particular post without having to click through to it’s unique permalink pagel. Here’s how you add that option…

Inside your blog’s HTML template there should be a template for each post. In Blogger you can find the end of the post because that’s where the “leave a comment” link will be (you can add this code right after that link) and in WordPress you will have a post template file findable via presentation-template editor, or the post template will be in your main template.

In Blogger, you can add:

<em>Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a> or <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a>. (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br /></em>

In WordPress you can add:

Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<?php the_title(); ?>&u=<?php the_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a> or <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a><br/> (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br />

As you can see perhaps, the basic code here is the same for both, what differs is how your blogging software identifies the permalink of whatever post you are on. So if you are using something other than Blogger or WordPress, you can adjust that part accordingly. And of course you can remove, replace or tweak the link to my definition of social bookmarking however you like.

Please note that Furling links this way will not save you a cached copy of the post the way Furl likes to do (thus you will get an error-ish mssg) but don’t worry, the URL and all other info you enter into the Furl box will be saved!

Let me know if this doesn’t work for you and I’ll see if I can help. Adding things like this is an example of what I do as part of my blog optimization services. If you are interested in having me set your blog up with the best in new tools for maximum impact and awesomeness, let me know. I offer blog optimization services at a very reasonable cost – your increase in traffic and sophistication will be more than worth it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, tagging, Furl, Del.icio.us, blog_optimization, promotion

Spate of Key Items Found re RSS, Tagging, Blogs and Wikis

2 Replies

My web-friend Beth Kanter is on fire this week. She’s posted links to The World Information Society’s focus on blogs and wikis in the developing world, Alexandra Samuel’s very succinct Make Your Non-Profit More Effective with RSS and (perhaps most exciting) coverage of a recent talk by Joshua Schachter, the creator of Del.icio.us. All 3 are great resources worth checking out.

Technorati Tags: wikis, RSS, tagging, ICT, 3rdWorld, WISIS

Inequities in Web 2.0: Let’s Tag About It

The phenomena being called Web2.0 is disproportionately influenced by white men. Issues raised by anti-racist, anti-classist and disability and gender-rights activists in other contexts are just as relevant to this new technological and political development (Web2.0) as they are to any other.

There have been some very good articles written about this situation, including for example:

Anil Dash – What It’s Like at Web2.0
Danah Boyd – The Biases of Links
Halley Suitt – Blogher: He-Conferences and She-Conferences
Mary Hodder – Favorite and not so Favorite Things About Web 2.0

So those are just some of the posts about these issues that have been commented on a lot. But how can a person find old and new blog posts, photos, podcasts or events about these subjects? I searched inside my own Furl.net and Del.icio.us archives and in the general archive for Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+gender. Interestingly, there is really only one post referred to so far in Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+race.

These conversations would be easier to find and keep up with if there was a common tag used. I propose this: webjustice2.0. Feel free to come up with some thing else, of course. But if that sounds good to you, then the following options are available:

If you use the tag in any of the following:
del.icio.us (or any similar social bookmarking service that synchs with your del.icio.us account)
Furl.net Social Bookmarking
Technorati Blog Search
Flickr Photos
43Things Goal Making/Sharing
Upcoming.org Events, Owned by Yahoo!
Eventful.com Events not owned by Yahoo!
Then it will be delivered in this RSS feed: WebJustice2.0 RSS Feed
If you’d like to display the 10 most recent items in the feed on your website (duplicates not removed right now) then you can copy and paste the following code into your template. Feel free to change anything you like. To see a sample of what it will look like, you can look at my blog’s sidebar.

WebJustice2.0 Discussion<br /><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/SPQ1BO029H.js”><noscript><a href=”http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/SPQ1BO029H.html”>Click for "WebJustice2.0".</a> By <a href=”http://www.feeddigest.com/”>Feed Digest</a></noscript></script>

I am sending a link to this post to the authors of the above example articles and a few other people I think might be interested. This system should be easy to use, just subscribe to the RSS feed for tag and tag relevant items online. And of course if anyone wants to propose or use an alternate tag – there’s absolutely nothing stopping you. I hope this will help the discussion by enabling easier, more thorough participation.

Technorati Tags: webjustice2.0, attention_streams, gender, Web2.0, race, disability, tagging, nptech, net2