hyku | blog - AOL's Teenager Blogging Tool - by business blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett

AOL has launched a new blogging service aimed at teenagers. The service, called 'RED blog', attempts to differentiate itself from other tools by making it easier to protect the contents of the blog. The article has some interesting tibdits:

when teens are asked to choose whether they prefer to share their innermost feelings with their parents or a blog, they are split with roughly half (51%) selecting their parents and 49% choosing a blog. But they also understand the need for privacy. Eighty four percent of teens said they would not be willing to share their blog with just anyone on the open web.

This reminds me of a seminar I gave where one attendee who was the mother of a teenage daughter said she knew everything that was going on in her daughter's life because she was able to read her daughter's friends blogs. All her daughter's friends used AOL's journal tool to keep a pseudo-blog. All she would have to do was read the journals and find out where her daughter 'actually' wend on Friday night and who she was 'really' dating.

The article also cites data from an AOL / Digital Marketing Services survey. One item that stands out to me is this:

– Approximately three out of five (58%) teens who read blogs do so because they are typically more entertaining and humorous than traditional web sites.

See a relationship with the explosion of reality TV? What are teens more interested in, the marketing heavy web site for their favorite products/bands OR the actualy thoughts and feelings of their peers?