Blogging:death knell for diarists

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LONDON, Mar 5 (Reuters) Anne Frank, Samuel Pepys and Arctic explorer Captain Scott all lived on through their diaries, but new research suggests the art of diary-keeping is a dying art due to the power of Internet blogging.

A survey released today of 1,000 British teenagers shows that fewer than one in 10 young people take the time to write a traditional diary, compared with 47 per cent who share their innermost thoughts by blogging online.

Blogs -- short for Web Logs -- are personal Web sites where people publish their diaries or thoughts, talk about current affairs or link to other stories or pictures on the Internet.

The poll found that the average teenager spends 4.5 hours a week blogging online or visiting social-sharing sites on the Internet such as MySpace and YouTube, with 22 per cent of teenagers blogging five times a week or more.

While adolescent bloggers were happy to reveal their deepest selves to the world, they were less keen on their parents reading their Internet diairies -- 46 per cent of respondents said their parents were unaware they were blogging.

Just over 1,000 teenagers completed the online questionnaire for the poll, commissioned for the launch of the 2007 Sky Young Journalist Awards.