US teen blogging nosedives

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US teens are turning their backs on blogging just as they are more wirelessly connected than ever before, a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed Wednesday.

The report found that just 14 percent of teenagers said they blogged in 2009, down from 28 percent in 2006.

The number of teens who said they commented on blogs in online social networking communities sank to 52 percent from 76 percent three years earlier.

"Youth may be exchanging macro-blogging' for micro-blogging with status updates," the authors of the study said, referring to the popularity of sharing life updates in terse text messages.

Devotion to blogs has not faded among adults, with roughly one in ten grown-ups keeping online journals or blogs in a ratio that hasn't changed since 2005, according to the Pew report.

But the number of people ages 18 to 29 blogging dropped to 15 percent in 2009 from 24 percent two years earlier.

Meanwhile, 11 percent of people age 30 or older said they were blogging in 2009 as compared to seven percent in 2007.

Social networking gained popularity with teenagers, with 73 percent claiming to belong to online communities. However, teenagers said they were cutting back on sending daily messages to friends via social networks.

Music-oriented social-networking service MySpace attracted a younger crowd while Facebook was more popular with the older crowd, according to Pew.

Teenagers were also found to be major users of almost all online applications except for microblogging service Twitter.

Only eight percent of Internet users ages 12 to 17 said they used Twitter, but nearly two thirds used mobile phone text messages to communicate.

Young adults were the heaviest Twitter users, with a third of people ages 18 to 29 posting or reading "tweets," according to Pew.