As reported recently by the ever insightful  Pew Internet & American Life Project who are constantly doing studies and surveys on the online activity of all age, economic, and societal groups - an estimated 64% of those ages 12 to 17 have created some form of online content - which is much more than adults have.  For example when it comes to creating a blog, only an estimated 8% of adults have created one while 28% of teens have created a blog. 

And as more and more individuals, especially younger, get wired in 2008 this figure will undoubtedly go up. And regarding the gender breakdown of this teen online activity the Pew Project has determined that teenage girls are much more likely than boys to create blogs, post items online,  or to have joined a social networking group like Facebook.

Speaking of Facebook the word "facebook" (as a verb) came in second place in 2007, behind the online gaming word "w00t" as examples of  technology-based words that have been appearing quite often in Merriam-Webster's annual "word of the year" list (see Whitmore's AMOEBLOG from recently for more on this topic) in which "blog" was the word of the year in 2004 while "google" (as in the verb to google) came in second place in 2006. 

And speaking of  "to google" in the Pew Internet Project's recent "Digital Footprints"  report they have determined that people searching for information about themselves online (googling their own name) has increased dramatically over the past five years from 22% to 47%. The same study also reports that  74% of those who google themselves have only checked their search results once or twice.

And as far as methods of how people communicate with one another? Among teens E-mail usage is down while text messaging and the chat features of social networking groups are up. Meanwhile adults favor Email over text messaging but these figures are constantly changing as the technological world around us changes.