A Consuming Experience: Teenage bloggers, copyright etc

Thursday, 10 November 2005

Teenage bloggers, copyright etc

There have been many mentions of the Pew Internet and America Life report on "Teen Content Creators and Consumers" (in the USA only, of course). Not surprisingly, there's a lot about blogging.

It's interesting that half of all American teens create content for the Net, with 19% of online teenagers writing blogs and 38% reading them (in contrast 7% of adult internet users in the USA blog and 27% read blogs). But 62% of blog reading teens read only blogs of peole they know. "Older girls ages 15-17 are the most likely to blog; 25% of online girls in this age group keep a blog, compared with 15% of older boys who are online. About 18% of younger teens of both sexes blog."

Some other points of interest:

"Bloggers are tech-savvy and intrepid internet explorers" - yeah, we knew that! Ahem.
"Bloggers care more about copyright than non-bloggers do." - 52% of the bloggers surveyed say they care about copyright. As the report says, perhaps this is in keeping with their status as content creators.
"Bloggers engage in content-creating, -sharing, and remixing activities more than their non-blogging counterparts".

The Creative Commons blog post on this report points out that the report oddly enough didn't mention Creative Commons, which is a way for copyright holders to allow others to use their content in a way which to me seems much more in keeping with the Internet age - I use a Creative Commons licence on my blog, myself, see the bottom of the page (and plan to explain more about it in a future post).

The Creative Commons post also says that the Creative Commons implications "are apparently obvious to our correspondents and many in the media, for example this BBC article on the study, which lists Creative Commons as one of two related links (the other being the study itself)". I'm a bit more pessimistic - I don't think the media are as aware as they could be. The fact that Creative Commons was listed as a related link on that BBC news page is, I suspect, sadly not very significant, because I believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong - Ian Forresterwill know I'm sure!) that those related links on the BBC site are unfortunately not consciously added by the BBC, but are automatically inserted by search software such as Autonomy.

I wonder what the figures would be like if a similar survey was carried out in the UK, not just of teens but of adults generally?