Martha Irvine (Extracted from " One in five US teens has a blog", Globe and Mail, 4 November 2005)

"Nearly three in five school-age teens with Internet access have created on-line 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."

[Ed: This is fascinating. It is significant also because it is the teenager years that set the cultural pattern that dominates the next generation when some of them are old enough to become influential in business and politics. The Internet and its unforeseeable byproduct, blogs, will only augment the number of ideas being created and accelerate incipient fashions and trends. Despite the patronising label we give to it, "teenagerhood" is the supremely important period of life when the frontal lobes of the brain are still growing and developing and when new ideas have a chance of becoming implanted. Almost all the great ideas and discoveries of mankind -- scientific and otherwise -- occur to individuals before their 30s, not very often afterwards. Will the blogs of American teenagers and millions of others around the world be important in tomorrow's world? Almost certainly.]