Who's blogging these days?

How about female teens?

According to Nielsen/NetRatings traffic to image hosting Web sites has skyrocketed due to the massive rise in blogging activity seen since the beginning of this year. As a category, image hosting sites have grown 406 percent to more than 14.7 million unique users since January 2005, accounting for nearly 10 percent of active U.S. Internet users.

In July 2005, 20 percent of active Web users, or 29.3 million people, accessed blogging or blog-related Web sites, growing 31 percent since the beginning of the year.

Female teens between the ages of 12 to 17 years indexed the highest out of the age groups broken down by gender. Females between 12 to 17 years were two and a half times more likely to visit an image hosting site than the average site audience, followed by males in the same age group. Why? Web journals or blogs are a great way to get to know people.

It probably does not hurt that this year major sites like Google launched free picture-sharing. I think teens are the best demo for this technology since they have more time to experiment with it and are more open to new technology options.

What do you think?