Blogs booming (teens' too)

A sure sign that blogging has arrived was the news that a blog called Tsunami Help was among the Top 10 most visited humanitarian sites by January 1. According to Web traffic monitor HitWise.com, it was No. 10 in a list that included RedCross.org, UNICEF.org, UN.org, and TheChildHealthSite.org. That's on top of news from the latest Pew Internet & American Life report that - even though 62% of US Net users don't know what a blog is - 27% (or 32 million Americans) read blogs, a 58% jump in less than a year, and 27% have created blogs (we suspect a lot of them are teenagers). Here's the BBC on this news, reported by all the tech news outlets. As for the Web as a whole, here's the New York Times on how Lisa Bauman, a nurse in Austin, Texas, used the Net to search for relatives traveling in Indonesia when the tsunami struck - a search that illustrated both the Net's "extraordinary reach" and its limitations ("Finally, on Thursday night, her mother reached Mr. Bauman by telephone and learned that all in the family were fine," the Times reports).

For insights into the teen version of the blog culture, see ""http://www.netfamilynews.org/nl040116.html#2">Teens' blog life," "Xanga & other teen hangouts," and a mom writing about her daughter's online journal, or blog.