Kids trust news blogs, but most don't read 'em

That's one of the findings from a very impressive survey carried out among almost 1,800 secondary school students by student blogger Tommy Collison. Tommy, a 2nd year student in Castletroy College, Limerick, entered the survey as part of this year's Young Scientist competition. The importance of this survey is that very little such research has been done in this area before.

Many digirati will know Tommy as the young brother of previous Young Scientist winner, Patrick Collision. He's also a farily prolific Tweeter (@trusttommy) in his own right.

I caught up with Tommy to hear him explain the conclusions of his survey.

Comments

[Chrisjhorn]

Great project. Only 34% read blogs; 7% wrote them. I suspect one issue - which Tommy didn't seem to discuss - is the attention span needed to read a blog. Most blog posts (especially mine :-( ) require reading several paragraphs, and are not the instant gratification of a tweet or a facebook/bebo posting.

Attention deficit in general is not an issue online if there is a good engagement model -- online gaming speaks to that. So the issue is how to make blog posts - and indeed other online articles - sufficiently interesting, engaging, and absorbing that you get immersed in them and want to read them. Until we can achieve this, scanning tweets and short social network postings is just more effective.

I wonder did Tommy look at attention span/deficit for blogs.... ?

My 2c
Chris

[Adrian Weckler]

Sorry Chris, you lost me after sentence 2... Kidding. Great point.

I think that goes to the heart of the challenge facing blogs. My own two cents is that we've seen a dropoff in the number of casual bloggers in the last 12 months, mainly, I suspect, because of Twitter and Facebook.

On the other hand, doesn't that re-establish the blog format as a vehicle for experts and the truly dedicated (eg www.irisheconomy.ie)? They tell us something new or compelling or interesting or entertaining. People need a reason to stay on the page after paragraph one (first rule of old-school journalism!).

I'm sure Tommy has some views from his findings...