Mmmmmm deli.cio.us

Yet more evidence that young people (in this case students at the University of Illinois, Chicago) are still turning to established sources for their news even when they're using the web as their medium of choice (slide 22). (Sorry, if you've already cottoned onto this fact, I'll stop posting on this subject from now, promise!) The Chicago papers come out as the most popular, only 1% claim to have ever visited Daily Kos or Instapundit and only 1.5% Boing Boing, three of the most visited blogs out there. But blogs are being used for more specific interest, albeit still only regularly by a minority (slide 17). Why are people visiting them? Seems to be more for the purpose or either communication or entertainment than anything else. 'Politics, economics, policy and law' blogs are by far the least popular. Maybe young people ajust aren't interested in these matters.Perhaps more likely is that they expect to read about these things from what they would consider an authoritative source, not an online journal. MySpace and Facebook along with eBay are the social sites that come out as the most popular, perhaps unsurprisingly (slide 20). Seems that the internet is being used by young people for what they've always done best - shopping & socialising (I suspect with people they already know offline or at least connected to people they know offline). Connected to that is music with 78.2% using the web for 'Downloading or listening to music'. Seems like the recent news of forthcoming free & legal music download service Spiralfrog could pay dividends then, because with 57% confessing to use Limewire, seems there's still a lot of P2P going on despite the RIAA's effort to crack down. What seems a crime to me is that only 1.6% are using Digg and only 0.7% deli.cio.us. Since I've discovered this service, I can't imagine surfing the web without it (for instance I would have had to search for ages to refind that link to news of Spiralfrog if I hadn't previously tagged it with deli.cio.us). Seeing as 90.7% of respondents are using the web for 'Getting information for school work' I can imagine this being a really useful tool, even if just for keeping track of one's own surfing. I suspect the problem here is awareness and inertia more than anything. So if you're not using it already and you use the web for research of any kind - then follow the link and downlaod it!