By John Johnston
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Kimberly Johnson, 16, files entries in her online diary, or blog, using her laptop computer in her bedroom in Blue Ash. (Brandi Stafford/The Cincinnati Enquirer)

BY THE NUMBERS

A look at LiveJournal, a Web log host (through Feb. 5): Number of users worldwide: 2,094,475 Number of active users: 1,081,734. Number who have updated their journal in the last 30 days: 887,135. Gender breakdown: 36 percent male; 64 percent female. Age with the most number of users: 18 (117,503).

BLOG SITES

A number of Web log hosting services make it easy to start and maintain an online journal. A sampling: New.Blogger.com. Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, was recently acquired by Google. A new version of Blogger is in the works. DiaryLand.com. Free like the other services, but a gold membership ($30.99 a year) comes with extra features. LiveJournal.com. Home to more than 2 million online journals. OpenDiary.com. Founded October 1998 and now home to nearly 260,000 online diaries. Xanga.com. Pronounced ZANG-uh, it offers many of the features of other hosts.

SAFETY TIPS

The following Internet safety tips for teens are from Lawrence J. Magid, host of www.safekids.com. He is the author of "Teen Safety on the Information Highway," a free brochure available from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (www.missingkids.com) . • Don't give out personal information about yourself or your family situation, such as school, telephone number or address. • Remember not everyone may be who they say they are. A person who says "she" is a 14-year-old girl might really be a 42-year-old man. • Remember that a friend you meet online may not be the best person to talk to if you are having problems at home, at school or with friends. • If you become aware of the sharing, use or viewing of child pornography online, report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, (800) 843-5678. • If someone harasses you online, says anything inappropriate or does anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, tell your parents and contact your Internet service provider. • Never arrange a face-to-face meeting with another computer user without parental permission. If a meeting is arranged, make the first one in a public place, and be sure a parent accompanies you.

BLOG UPDATE

Although the number of Web logs, or blogs, is rapidly increasing, many of them are "one-day wonders," a recent Web-based research survey shows. Perseus Development Corp. in October released results of a random survey of 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services, such as LiveJournal, Xanga and Weblogger. Perseus estimated the number of Web logs would increase from 4.1 million at the time of the survey to more than 10 million by the end of 2004. Among the findings: • More than 92 percent of blogs were created by people under age 30. Teens age 13 to 19 account for 51.5 percent of all blogs. • Sixty-six percent of surveyed blogs, representing 2.7 million blogs, had not been updated in two months. And 1.09 million blogs were "one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days," said Jeffrey Henning, the study's author. • Males were more likely than females to abandon blogs. • Active blogs were updated on average every 14 days. Fewer than 50,000 blogs were updated daily.

Kimberly Johnson's online journal opens a window into the workings of a teenage mind.

She's pondering whether to schedule a class in independent-study Italian next year. She's pleased with her performance at a music competition. She's peeved at people who brag how quickly they read Harry Potter books. And she's positive Pixel Perfect (a Disney Channel original movie) is the worst film she's ever, ever seen.

Almost every day - sometimes as often as half a dozen times - she pours out pieces of her adolescent existence. It all goes onto her Web log, or blog, an online diary that is accessible to anyone. In it, she weighs in on such vexing issues as what to do with the rest of her life.

• • • 

I want to teach little kids. I want to sing. I wanna teach little kids to sing. I want to teach big kids to sing! I don't want to go into music. I want to do math. I want to help people. I want to be a psychiatrist. (I want to be a sage.)

help!

 - Kimberly Johnson,

posted Jan. 16.

• • • 

Online diaries are skyrocketing in popularity, especially among teens. A recent survey by Perseus Development Corp. estimates that 10 million blogs will exist by the end of this year, up from 5 million at the close of 2003. Teens have created slightly more than half of all blogs, the survey says.

Anyone with Internet access can log on to a free blog-hosting service and start immediately. Kimberly uses LiveJournal (or LJ for short), which has more than 2 million accounts.

"I like it way too much," the 16-year-old from Blue Ash says. "We were talking in English (class) about hypergraphia (which refers to an overwhelming desire to write). I was like, yeah, I definitely have that for LiveJournal."

Kimberly, a junior, and four of her friends at Sycamore High School stayed after school recently to discuss blogs. They're a busy group, with schedules filled with Advanced Placement courses and extracurriculars that range from theater to Girl Scouts.

But everybody makes time for LJ.

"When I'm doing my homework, I just keep updating (entries)," says Sarah Imhoff, a 16-year-old junior. She reads other journals, posts comments, then checks to see if anyone has responded to her entries.

Says junior Leah Daniel, 17: "We're trying to get as many of our friends on there because we use it primarily as a way to keep in touch."

Which isn't surprising given that today's teens have grown up with the Internet, says Paul Boutin, contributing editor for Wired magazine. "Now you have people for whom it's completely normal to have a Web site and share - and perhaps over share - their experiences," he says.

Indeed, blogs have been known to put a crimp on conversations at school.

"There are people I can have incredibly deep conversations with online that I barely even talk to in the (school) halls," says Dara Lind, 15. "We don't know what to say to each other because we've already communicated so deeply (through blogs).

"LiveJournal is honestly my social life," Dara adds.

"I'm a compulsive communicator. If I don't communicate a thought, it just kind of rolls around and just gets bigger. So it's either going to get communicated in my private (written) journal ... or it's going to go on LJ."

• • • 

Feel free to ignore me if you find me to be as immature as "all" teenagers are. Nobody's forcing you to read about my oh-so-interesting life.

- from the user bio of a 15-year-old Cincinnati blogger.

• • • 

Back in the early days of blogs - say, two or three years ago - online diaries were seen as the domain of geeky guys, Gothic girls and the like. Today, blogs cut across all cliques. As a result, the content covers a lot of ground.

A blog can be a creative outlet, a sounding board, a form of group therapy or all of the above. A blog reveals anger and angst and every awesome moment as teens chronicle their lives, the mundane, the magnificent, and of course, all the things parents and teachers do that drive them mad.

"I love to rant. I need to," says Ruchi Asher, 15. (A glance at her LJ reveals her rants are relatively tame by most teenage standards)."Sometimes there are people I don't want reading it because I don't want them to form a lower opinion of me just because I was really angry one day."

LiveJournal has a filtering option that lets users specify who can read entries. Leah says she began filtering after a "crazy Russian chick" posted some bizarre comments. Dara is among those whose journal is open to anyone.

She explains: "I want to spend my life either being an actress or writer or both, and in either case you need to unveil your innermost emotions to whoever your audience happens to be."

Used to be, innermost emotions were hand-written into diaries that were carefully hidden from prying eyes. Blogs are a different animal. Secrets often are overexposed, the Sycamore students say.

"It's like, I can't talk to anybody about this, so I'm going to post," Leah says. "And I'm going to post it and post it and post it.

"It's the nature of the beast," she says. "You put it out there because you want somebody to read it, and you want the response."

Fellow bloggers have come through when she's needed encouraging comments, Leah says.

"I print out the ones I particularly like and thumb-tack 'em to the wall over my bed. It's a great help when I'm feeling down."

There are, of course, certain people teens don't want reading their online journals. At the top of that list: parents and teachers.

• • • 

I'm still not getting along with mom or dad and now on top of everything exam grades. I did really good on most of them, so I was happy about that for a while, but then I saw my science project grade...things are just so crazy and sometimes I feel like I can't control anything in my life.

- from a 14-year-old Cincinnatian's blog.

• • • 

When Sarah says her mother has read some of her LJ entries, the other teens respond in unison: "Really?" She explains that her mother became concerned because Sarah was upset by something another person had written.

Dara, whose LJ is accessible to anyone, says she'd have a problem with parental peeking.

"It's not that there's something I'm going to be keeping from them forever. It's a matter of, it's a lot easier for me to put this on LiveJournal than it is to bring it up in conversation. I know my parents' first reaction ... would be, 'Oh, you were feeling this way, why didn't you come to me?'

"There are certain things I want my friends to know that I don't want my parents to know, that's what it comes down to," she says.

Wired's Boutin may have it right: "I sense with a lot of these (bloggers) that there's a boundary that is either implicit or they presume that somehow obscurity will protect them."

Not that every journal entry brims with controversy. Far from it. After all, almost anything is worthy of comment.

Less than two hours after the interview ends at Sycamore High, Dara, the "compulsive communicator," posts this LJ entry: i'm famous now! or will be...interviewing was so very incredible. i've always wanted to make broad thematic statements about livejournal.

E-mail jjohnston@enquirer.com