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Teens active in creating online content, including blogs

Nearly three in five school-age teens with Internet access have created online content, including Web pages with artwork, photos and stories, and about a fifth have their own blogs, which also allow friends and other readers to create feedback postings.

Those are some of the findings from a survey of 12- to 17-year-olds conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The survey also found that older school-age girls with online access were most likely to keep a blog. About a quarter of girls ages 15 to 17 did so, compared with 15 percent of boys in that age group.

Among adults, Pew says, about 7 percent of Internet users have created their own blogs, or online diaries. And while 26 percent of adults say they read blogs, 38 percent of young people with online access said they do so.

Researchers note that the main reason teens are drawn to blogs is a wish to keep in touch with one another.

"Blogging for teens is about staying tuned into their friendship networks, not about politics or people getting in trouble at school, which are two of the main narratives that journalists have covered in recent months," says Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew who helped compile the report.

Consumers spent nearly $1-billion for online content during the first six months of the year, according to the Online Publishers Association, a New York trade group. Almost a quarter of the dollars went for what the association described as entertainment and lifestyle material, such as digital music.

Michael Zimbalist, the OPA's president, said online spending for content will continue to grow, fueled by the availability of broadband Internet connections. The downside to his report was its finding that nearly nine in 10 Web users didn't pay for any content.

Web sites offering research services, games and online dating showed gains, but general news sites - such as NYTimes.com and Washingtonpost.com - experienced a 14 percent decline in consumer spending.

"Although revenue for general news is down, compared to spending in the second half of 2004, showings by business content/investment content (the third-largest revenue producer) indicate that consumers readily turn to the Internet for information," the report said.

Sprint Nextel Corp. has launched a downloadable music service, the first to deliver songs over a U.S. cellular network, as it tries to keep pace in a wireless arms race increasingly dominated by mobile Internet services.

The Sprint Music Store is being launched in tandem with the rollout of a speedier wireless technology that Sprint is rushing to deploy in competition with broadband offerings from Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless. The new service is not available to the company's Nextel subscribers, who are served by a slower network.

Sprint is charging $2.50 per song for two copies of each track: one to play on a phone and one for a personal computer. That's much pricier than the typical 99 cents charged by Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes and other music stores, though none of those feature the potential convenience and spontaneity of not needing a computer to buy music and download it to a mobile device.

The cell phone industry is looking at mobile music as a new source of revenue, although it is unclear whether users will want to buy music through their wireless operators.

Sprint Nextel's announcement comes more than a month after Cingular Wireless LLC introduced the ROKR, the first cell phone that can play music downloaded to a computer from iTunes. So far, sales of the Motorola Inc. phone have been disappointing.

The Sprint music store initially is accessible on two new handsets made by Samsung and Sanyo. The phones can each hold up to 1,000 songs with an optional 1-gigabyte memory card, 10 times the capacity of the ROKR.

However, Sprint's selection of songs is somewhat limited, offering about 250,000 titles from EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, while iTunes offers 2-million tracks. A Sprint Nextel spokeswoman said the number of songs will continue to increase.

Volkswagen of America has produced 120 short films to promote its Passat automobiles, and all of them will be on the company's Web site. The VW effort is thought to be the largest use of online films ever in a single branded entertainment effort, according to Advertising Age.

Each 15-second film was produced to promote a facet of the car. About 40 of the shorts are on a mini site (www.vw.com/passat) The rest will be released during the month.

The films were produced by production companies in New York, Boston and London, according to Advertising Age. "We contacted companies that are sort of known for doing interesting videos and films," said Alan Pafenbach, the managing partner of Havas' Arnold Worldwide Boston office, which handles VW's online marketing. "We harnessed hundreds of creative people," he told the trade magazine.

St. Petersburg College has opened the Online Career Development Services site. The MySPC portal, accessible to students at www.spcollege.edu offers career advice, information on specific occupations, articles, a job bank and other information. Employers can post help-wanted ads through the college's main site by clicking on Job Bank.

Join Times personal technology editor Dave Gussow throughout the week for news, links and comments about tech issues at the Tech Times blog (www.sptimes.com/blogs/tech) We invite you to post your comments and questions.

[Last modified November 4, 2005, 12:23:05]