Zach's Blog

Totally agree, man.

keep writing about this topic. Here are some additional subjects:
- instant messenger use/what features and use of voice
- email/portal usage
- homework - how do we help
- what are teens tinkering with
- HTML/web page creation
- use of bookmarks

- what extensions for firefox for teens would be helpful

The worst part of it is that people are tied to the services they have accounts on. So a highschooler will either create stub accounts on all the services (LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, Blogger, deviantArt, etc.), which they’ll only use to comment on others profiles or blogs; or they’ll declare their allegiance to one service and try to “convert” their friends.

I noticed this my senior year, and the creation of Planet Mozilla gave me the idea of setting up a service-agnostic aggregator for my high school’s students: Planet Xavier (http://mxn.f2o.org/planet/xavier/ ). The reaction seems to be pretty good among people who discovered it: they won’t go back to manually checking their subscriptions on each service. So this creates the perfect opportunity for me to start “converting” people to personal aggregation tools like Bloglines or Thunderbird.

Before I started pX, probably ten people in my school knew about RSS or Atom. Hopefully that number has increased.

In my opinion, feedreading *should* be the “killer app” for Thunderbird, but my friends seem reluctant to leave the familiar world of (poorly designed) websites and start using what at first appears to be a hopelessly complex program.

By the way, Xanga’s feeds have always driven me up a wall. Although Planet can at least parse them, Xanga puts the date in a non-standard format… in the title field! (http://mxn.f2o.org/archives/2005/06/19/px_xanga_date.html ) It took me a whole lot of hairpulling to get that straightened out. MySpace’s feeds also had a similar problem (http://mxn.f2o.org/archives/2005/08/18/myspace_rss.html ) until I e-mailed them about it (http://mxn.f2o.org/archives/2005/08/21/myspace_rss.html ).

Can you believe that? As if they didn't spend every other waking moment trying to be social. Now the web does it for them with a click of a button.

Very interesting...The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. Compared to four years ago, teens’ use of the internet has intensified and broadened as they log on more often and do more things when they are online.

I personally have a myspace and a Xanga but i do not spend HOURS!!!!on it.....of course i check everyday it like an e-mail address but I'm not addicted to it......and also many teen just try to occupy their time with "HOBBIES".....

-PaTty

It's funny, because in my teens I quickly became disgusted with Yahoo. Search results in particular, just awful. And I hated the look of the homepage. I knew other people with Yahoo Messenger but I didn't see the point when AIM was just as good and more popular. I got a Hotmail webmail account (pre-Microsoft) and that was that.

Xanga rss feeds are good! there is nothing wrong with it!

By the way, harkey, the link that you gave is no longer necessary, because MySpace now has RSS feeds: there’s a link at the top-right corner of every blog’s front page.

I still would rather talk face to face rather than on myspace. but I am not a teen.

Well I am a teen and I do have a myspace and it is not what parents think that it is. Well it really depends on how gaulable your teen is because some teens will give out their buisness and then they will be the one talking to that sexual predator that all parents are worrried about. Myspace can be used for bad and good. For me I just use it to talk to my friends. You would have to put yourself in a teens shoes to understand where a teen is coming from.

[ed. Thanks for commenting. I am, in fact, a teen. I do use social networking sites, and nothing in my post was at all intended to deal with parent perceptions of such sites or the dangers of posting personal information online.]

I don't think that i am a teen and i don't use my space at all and i spend my time on doing important stuff like excrisesing and all i don't waste any of my time on stuff like that because it is a waste of my time that i could be doing something i love like jogging all day long or doing push ups and all that excresises. That is why not all the teens in the world have a my space at all.

UMMM ok...one comment for you people..and I'm not trying to be rude because, I myself am a teenager who knows for a fact that her friends are addicted to sights like myspace....how much time do you spend on the internet checking your e-mail and everything or...writing in your blog...technology isn't only affecting teenagers in a bad way...

just a thought....