the blog

High school students are migrating to the online world. A whopping 93% of teenagers now use the internet, a new study shows — up from just 73% seven years ago. (And 61% now say they use it every day!)

But it doesn't end there. Teenagers are also creating more content online. Between the ages of 12 and 17, nearly two-thirds have now created some kind of online content — a full 64%, versus just 57% in 2004.

Here's where it gets interesting. The total percentage of teenagers blogging now is 28% — up from a mere 19% in 2004. But according to the study, "virtually all of that growth...is due to the increased activity of the girls." In fact, teenaged girls are ahead of the boys in creating nearly all kinds of online content.

			Girls	Boys
Blogging		35%	20%
Sharing photos		54%	40%
Creating profiles	70%	57%
Sharing video		10%	19%				

One 17-year-old girl told the New York Times proudly that "I'm not surprised because girls are very creative, sometimes more creative than men. We're spunky!" (And another 13-year-old had a different perspective. "Most guys don't have patience for this kind of thing...")

It's already creating a stir in the blogosphere. The webmaster at "TechMamas" wrote that she'd decided to link the article "as a way to inspire parents to tell their girls to go geek..." (She also complained that the New York Times illustrated their article with Grace Hopper — the female developer of the first computer programming language compiler — and then a picture of Velma from Scooby Doo.) But it could be worse — C|Net apparently felt they couldn't make a list of the top ten girl geeks without including Paris Hilton.

Is society movie towards a big change? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men still outnumber women by nearly 3:1 in computer and math-related jobs, the New York Times reports. But with more teenage girls active online, those statistics could change for the next generation.

"I think there might be a story in this," says Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi. After reading the article, he did his own assessment of the patterns he'd seen for Xerpi's ad campaigns. "I've also noticed that females are three times more likely to respond to our ads than males!"

It can't be because there's more women using the internet. (It's almost an even split, according to a poll in March.) And I don't think it's because women respond to Xerpi's ads just because they identify with that woman on the sign-on page who truly loves her favorites...

But maybe some of the extra females are those pioneering teenaged bloggers that the New York Times identified, coming up through the next generation to take the 21st century by storm.

And while they're sizing up the world — they're using Xerpi!